Say the word ‘terrorism’ today and the first image that will pop up in the minds of many is the Islamic extremist. This association is not baseless, of course, considering the numerous and tragic attacks that have been carried out by groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and others. Their activities are sometimes widespread, frequently reported on in the media, and tend to dwarf the number of lives taken by a lot of other terrorist organizations...

Did Christ leave behind physical evidence of his existence? Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery is a television series that started airing on CNN in 2015, inspired by the book of the same name written by David Gibson. The show presents itself as an investigation of various artifacts allegedly connected with the historical Jesus, such as the Shroud of Turin, the Gospel of Judas, and the James Ossuary. Along the way, scholars, historians, experts, and ministers are interviewed about questions and ideas surrounding the figure of Jesus and the artifacts under study...

Leaving religion behind can have real life consequences for many people, some of them frustrating or even traumatic in nature. When one first walks away from a religious tradition, or stands up to the dominant tradition within their own community, a variety of challenges and questions may present themselves...

Is there evidence of life of death? What should we make of claims about near-death experiences, apparitions, and psychic encounters? For this episode of the show, I talk with Keith Augustine about these questions and more. Mr. Augustine is the Executive Director and Scholarly Paper Editor at Internet Infidels. He holds a Master’s in Philosophy from the University of Maryland, and recently co-edited a book with Michael Martin entitled The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case Against Life After Death. Keith has published articles in the Journal of Near Death Studies, Skeptic magazine, and at infidels...

For some religious believers, faith is one of the most important things a person can have in their life. But what is faith? Common theistic definitions say that faith is belief or trust, while a number of atheists argue that faith is an irrational claim to knowledge. In this episode of the show, I talk with Professor John Bishop about some of these issues, as well as the different models of faith. Dr. Bishop is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He has a BA from the Australian National University and a PhD from Cambridge...

The Big Questions, as their name implies, are questions about who we are, about the universe we live in, about our place in the universe, and more along these lines. Theistic religions, especially those that proselytize, have constructed cases for their beliefs that tend to pay a great deal of attention to these Big Questions. Sometimes widespread and culturally dominant religions even succeed in defining the terms of the questions, so as to give themselves greater assurance of their influence on the lives of their adherents and the societies in which they thrive. So far, we have considered w...

When The Passion of the Christ was released to movie theaters in 2004, it erupted into a storm of excitement and controversy. Many believers used the film as a witnessing tool, inviting friends, coworkers, and family with the intent of eliciting conversation. Others found themselves convicted by the story, and took its message as a call to change, including a Texas man who felt inspired to confess to the murder of his girlfriend.¹ Documentaries such as Changed Lives: Miracles of the Passion and Impact: Passion of the Christ have chronicled the enormous popular response to the movie around the...

In his dialogue with Euthyphro, Socrates asks, “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” To put the dilemma in more modern terms: does God command an action because it is good, or is an action good because God commands it? If the former is true, then the good exists independently of God. If the latter is true, then a question arises concerning the arbitrariness of moral obligations...

What does it mean to be a spiritual person? According to some, spirituality is about identifying with certain otherworldly beliefs. Others consider it to indicate faith in a deity or in supernatural beings. Recently, in Waking Up, Sam Harris has suggested that religious traditions have too often imposed their restrictive ideas onto spirituality. A spiritual person is not necessarily a religious person, and may only be spiritual in the sense of having a particular disposition towards life, the world, and the universe.

Robert Solomon, who was Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Business and Phil...

How long has atheism been around? In this seventh episode of the show, I talk with Tim Whitmarsh, the A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge, about atheism in ancient history. Professor Whitmarsh works on all areas of Greek literature and culture, specializing particularly in the world of Greeks under the Roman Empire. Professor Whitmarsh has published several books, including Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel, and his most recent, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World.

Armchair Atheism is the of...