This February 12 marks the 200th Birth Anniversary
of Charles Darwin
This February 12 marks the 200th Birth Anniversary of Charles Darwin. With his Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, introduced a 150 years ago in his revolutionary work On the Origin of Species, he deflated established religious world views and opened our eyes to reality. He liberated our mind and changed forever the way we view the world and ourselves. His ingenious idea, hardened by an overwhelming multitude of proofs, gave us the key to understand all life on earth in its complexity and diversity - and all possible life on any planet.
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Saint Exportable - By Sanal Edamaruku
There is far more behind the canonization of an unknown village girl from Kerala than meets the eye. Saint Alphonsa may be the Vatican's last hope to escape a great financial crunch. To continue running the large multi national network of its institutions profitably, the Roman Catholic Church needs God's slaves, the nuns. But their numbers are world wide dramatically declining. The Vatican hopes, the canonization of Alphonsa could turn the tide.
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Atheism goes mainstream – by bus
Ariane Sherine
Come January, and London buses will carry a comforting message all across the city: “There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Atheists have decided to counter Christian slogans with reassuring atheist adverts. The idea came up in June, proposed by TV comedy writer Ariane Sherine in her blog. After a slow start, the atheist ad campaign caught enormous wind, when Prof. Richard Dawkins, Britain’s most prominent rationalist, announced his personal financial support. He pledged to match incoming donations up to £5,500 – that is the charge for running the ad for one whole month on 30 of London’s extra long “bendy buses”. Since then, the funding Web site http://www.justgiving.com/atheistbus is swamped with donors. Donations pouring in have long crossed £140,000. The British Humanists, who are organizing the ad campaign, are overwhelmed about its unexpected success and plan to extend it to other cities like Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh.
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Science : When people feel helpless, superstition flourishes
If people feel that they lost control they become desperate to make sense of the situation. They perceive patterns that don’t exist and rather grab for any fast and simple explanation - however absurd - than considering that there could be none. This is the result of a study, published in the latest issue of the magazine Science, that sheds new light on the psychology of superstition, urban legends and conspiracy theories.
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