• DAWKINS: Yes. For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection. Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.
• DAWKINS: I think that's a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

• Richard Dawkins, perhaps its foremost polemicist, has just come out with The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin), the rare volume whose position is so clear it forgoes a subtitle. The five-week New York Times best seller (now at No. 8) attacks faith philosophically and historically as well as scientifically, but leans heavily on Darwinian theory
• Dawkins is riding the crest of an atheist literary wave. In 2004, The End of Faith, a multipronged indictment by neuroscience grad student Sam Harris, was published (over 400,000 copies in print). Harris has written a 96-page follow-up, Letter to a Christian Nation, which is now No. 14 on the Times list. Last February, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett produced Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which has sold fewer copies but has helped usher the discussion into the public arena.
• Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden has just come out with Evolution and Christian Faith, which provides what she calls a "strong Christian defense" of evolutionary biology, illustrating the discipline's major concepts with biblical passages. Entomologist Edward O. Wilson, a famous skeptic of standard faith, has written The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, urging believers and non-believers to unite over conservation

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• Urukagina (reigned ca. 2380 BC–2360 BC, short chronology), alternately rendered as Uruinimgina or Irikagina, was a ruler (énsi) of the city-state Lagash in Mesopotamia. He is best known for his reforms to combat corruption, which are sometimes cited as the first example of a legal code in recorded history. Although the actual text has not been discovered yet, much of its content may be surmised from other references to it that have been found. In it, he exempted widows and orphans from taxes; compelled the city to pay funeral expenses (including the ritual food and drink libations for the journey of the dead into the lower world); and decreed that the rich must use silver when purchasing from the poor, and if the poor does not wish to sell, the powerful man (the rich man or the priest) cannot force him to do so.^[1]

• J.L.
   Arsuaga et al, "Three New Human Skulls from the Sima de los Huesos Middle
   Pleistocene site in Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain," Nature April 8, 1993, p 534.

• Major Religions of the World
  Ranked by Number of Adherents

    
     <form id="cse-search-box" action="http://www.google.com/cse"> 
           
   </form>  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&lang=en"></script>  
      (Sizes shown are approximate estimates, and are here mainly for the purpose of ordering the groups, not providing a definitive number. This list is sociological/statistical in perspective.) 
   
  1. Christianity: 2.1 billion
      
  2. Islam: 1.5 billion
      
  3. Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
      
  4. Hinduism: 900 million
      
  5. Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
      
  6. Buddhism: 376 million
      
  7. primal-indigenous: 300 million
      
  8. African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million
      
  9. Sikhism: 23 million
      
  10. Juche: 19 million
       
  11. Spiritism: 15 million
       
  12. Judaism: 14 million
       
  13. Baha'i: 7 million
       
  14. Jainism: 4.2 million
       
  15. Shinto: 4 million
       
  16. Cao Dai: 4 million
       
  17. Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million
       
  18. Tenrikyo: 2 million
       
  19. Neo-Paganism: 1 million
       
  20. Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand
       
  21. Rastafarianism: 600 thousand
       
  22. Scientology: 500 thousand
• United States (13.2% nonreligious according to ARIS study of 2001) and Australia (15% nonreligious).
• The highest figure we have for "Nonreligious" is 20% of the world population, or about 1.2 billion: "Over 20 percent of the world's population does not claim any allegiance to a religion. Most are agnostics. Others are atheists, who deny the existence of God." (O'Brien, Joanne & Martin Palmer. The State of Religion Atlas. Simon & Schuster: New York (1993). Pg 41.) But such a high figure is difficult to support with current country-by-country statistics, and perhaps reflects Communist-era official government statistics. Most current estimates of the world number of secular/nonreligious/agnostic/atheist/etc. are between 800 and 1 billion.
• Zuckerman concluded, "the grand total worldwide number of atheists, agnostics, and non-believers in God is somewhere between 504,962,830 and 749,247,571. These minimum/maximum numbers are conservative estimates; were one to factor in a mere .25% of such highly populated countries as Egypt, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, Burma, Tanzania, and Iran, as non-believers in God, estimates would be significantly larger. Also, these numbers are only for non-believers of God, specifically. Were one to include all 'non-religious' people in general, the numbers would nearly double... nonbelievers in God as a group come in fourth place after Christianity (2 billion), Islam (1.2 billion), and Hinduism (900 million) in terms of global ranking of commonly-held belief systems."
• For the year 2000, David B. Barrett (Encyclopedia Britannica and World Christian Encyclopedia, 2001) classified 150,089,508 (2.5% of world's population) as atheists, and 768,158,954 people as "Nonreligious" (12.7% of the world) for a total of 918,248,462 (15.2% of the world). These calculations by Barrett include all agnostics and others in our "Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist" category. Our figure of 1.1 billion in this category is considerably higher, and takes into consideration Zuckerman's analysis as well. Of the people in this grouping, it is estimated that 40 to 50% have a stated traditionally "theistic" belief in God, deities or a Higher Power. 
  

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• t was borne out this week by an Australian Bureau of Statistics collation of data from censuses on religious belief.

   

  The “No Religion” box was first proffered in the 1971 census and was selected by 6.7 per cent of people. In 2006 that had shot to nearly 20 per cent. It had overtaken all other categories except “Catholic”. But its trajectory is up and “Catholic” is down.
• The 19.1 per cent who ticked “No Religion” probably under-states the number of the people who are agnostic, atheist or apathetic.
• That overt atheism, exemplified by Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is not Great and others, is probably persuading people, directly or indirectly. These writers among others are providing the tools of persuasion.
• The next census will most likely reveal the trends continuing. Among 25-year-olds now, more than a third say they have no religion or do not state a religion.

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• No company was rich enough, no industry large enough, to carry off such an enterprise. The great telecom companies, which were supposed to wire up the digital revolution, were paralyzed by the uncertainties of funding the Net.
• The immense sums of money supposedly required to fill the Net with content sent many technocritics into a tizzy.
• They saw the Internet as an open commons, not to be undone by greed or commercialization. It's hard to believe now, but until 1991, commercial enterprise on the Internet was strictly prohibited
• Netscape's stock peaked at $75 on its first day of trading, and the world gasped in awe. Was this insanity, or the start of something new?
• The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100�pages per person alive.
• In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population.
• at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works.

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