With the religious making inroads in popular culture and politics, nonbelievers yearn for higher power in Washington.

It's been years, decades even, since the Almighty was so hot.

The evidence is everywhere. President Bush rallied the faithful to hold on to the White House. A book by an Orange County preacher extolling God's purpose in our lives stays a bestseller for more than two years. And Hollywood, frequently seen as a den of iniquity, is courting a more spiritual audience in movies and TV.

Faith is the new must-have, evident when a major leaguer points skyward after his base hit, when a movie star credits the Big Guy for his Oscar, when the Justice Department backs the display of the Ten Commandments at two state capitols, and when it defends the Salvation Army's requirement that employees embrace Jesus Christ.

So where does that leave the fraction of Americans who define themselves as godless? Although the percentage of Americans who claim no religion is about 14%, less than a quarter of them identify themselves as atheists, according to recent polls.

Some are using humor to cope, such as actress Julia Sweeney in her one-woman play "Letting Go of God," which ran in Los Angeles for several months this year. "It's really because I take you so seriously," she tells an imaginary God, "that I can't believe in you."

Men can live without air a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months - and without a new thought for years on end.
- Kent Ruth

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Fossil bones record the history of the human form but they say little about behavior. A richer source on the way human social behavior evolved may come from chimpanzees, with whom people shared a common ancestor as recently as five or six million years ago.

Despite the massive costs religion has imposed on human society, it persists because children do not question their parents’ beliefs, renowned Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins argued in a fiery lecture last night at Lowell Lecture Hall.
Before a packed house of 450 community members, faculty and students, Dawkins argued that the widespread presence of religion —despite its lack of obvious benefits—suggests that it was not an evolutionary adaptation.

Suicide terrorism seems to many to defy logic. Economists find the idea particularly hard to understand in the context of economic theories that are usually based on ideas of self interest: surely self interest must preclude self killing? But now a new research paper by Professor Mark Harrison an economist at the University of Warwick says that the value placed on personal identity by suicide terrorists provides some of the answers.

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
- Alfred Adler

Science is developing ways to boost intelligence, expand memory, and more. But will you be allowed to change your own mind?

"We're on the verge of profound changes in our ability to manipulate the brain," says Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. He isn't kidding. The dawning age of neuroscience promises not just new treatments for Alzheimer's and other brain diseases but enhancements to improve memory, boost intellectual acumen, and fine-tune our emotional responses. "The next two decades will be the golden age of neuroscience," declares Jonathan Moreno, a bioethicist at the University of Virginia. "We're on the threshold of the kind of rapid growth of information in neuroscience that was true of genetics 15 years ago."

The Bush team is going to great lengths to vet members of scientific panels. Credentials, not ideology, should be the focus, critics say.

When psychologist William R. Miller was asked to join a panel that advises the National Institute on Drug Abuse, he thought he had been selected for his expertise in addiction. Then a Bush administration staff member called with some unexpected questions.
Did Miller support abortion rights? What about the death penalty for drug kingpins? And had he voted for President Bush?

Ever wonder what your children might be learning when they hit the books in the New York City public schools?
A kinder, gentler definition of jihad. It really means "to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil."

An error-filled version of global geography. The equator actually passes through Florida, Texas and Arizona.

A saga of a swashbuckling hero of today who can be compared to ancient historical heroes dating to the Trojan War: Indiana Jones.

Examples and discussion of peer pressure.

advertising, fads, body piercing, "keeping up with the joneses", risk taking...

Evolutionary ties
Military benefits

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions which move with him like flies on a summer day.
- Bertrand Russell