Recommended.

Recommended.

Salon is running an interview with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein that fairly crackles with tonic intellectual rigor.

The Economist:

That machine has put Republicans in the White House in seven of the past ten contests. At times it has seemed as if the Democrats (oddly, given their status as the less Godly party) have had to rely on divine intervention to get elected.

Reviewers of recent books on atheism at The New Yorker and the Philadelphia Inquirer miss the point entirely.

From the former:

Since all the arguments against belief have been widely publicized for a long time, today’s militant atheists must sometimes wonder why religion persists.

and the latter:

The Atheist’s Bible, compiled by former Columbia School of Journalism dean Joan Konner, gains its more-than-tchotchke credibility from the authority of its creator - an odd standard to apply to a pro-atheism book, but there you are.

National Public Radio’s Web site covers a series of Oxford-style debates called Intelligence Squared U.S.

Recommended with reservations.