Разлюбить Таро, усомниться в целителях, увлечься научным методом и стать заядлым скептиком — это путь Алисы Кузнецовой, бывшей гадалки, которая теперь работает на Премию имени Гудини, организацию, готовую щедро наградить любого обладателя настоящих паранормальных способностей.
Ученые отказываются писать школьный учебник по основам светской этики для Минобрнауки. Работа по созданию книги поставила ведущих этиков России перед моральным выбором: идти на поводу у министерства и конфессий или соответствовать нормам профессиональной этики. В итоге эксперимент, стартующий уже в апреле, остается без единственного по-настоящему светского модуля.
Whenever in past epochs Prophets and Apostles talked about their Gods and about the orders their Gods supposedly had given, they never had the well - being of their fellowmen in mind, they rather used those religious notions as a means to rule and exploit men and the people and impose their will on them. Religion was therefore used only as a means of power and to nothing else.
In all large religions God is thought of as being the creator of men and the world, that is, the creator of the universe. And God existed already before space, time and matter was created. God was therefore capable to reside and govern in an absolute “nothingness” according to the theologians. Great thinkers of all times have attacked and criticized this God - idea with philosophical arguments. Despite of that the God - idea is still alive, respectively is being kept alive with questionable arguments and means. In what follows this idea of a Creator - God is analyzed and scrutinized with the logic of a physicist.
The majority of the hundreds of proposed amendments to Russia's 1997 law on religion - including the introduction of the term "traditional religion" - cannot be adopted because they contradict the country's constitution, Andrei Sebentsov, vice-chairman of the government's Commission for Religious Associations and chairman of the working group currently considering them, told Keston News Service in his office in the Russian parliament building (the White House) in Moscow on 28 November.
The growing role of the Russian Orthodox Church has led some atheists to band together to defend the once-official ideology and warn of what they call a threat of clericalism.
Russia's beleaguered atheists have formed a new society to campaign against the growing power of the Church in government and what they perceive as the 'threatening clericalisation' of society.
We are glad to introduce to you the first atheistic magazine in Russia. As is known, in the former Soviet Union atheism was part of "communist" ideology and, quite naturally, it went out of fashion with the collapse of the Union. But as the Russian saying puts it "a holy place can never be vacant", and the government did not hesitate to substitute Marxism-Leninism with Orthodoxy. The country was immediately seized with a religious boom, a true hysteria at the so called "spirituality revival", which actually turned out to be the return of the wildest medieval times. And it is only now, in the year 2000, that a group of young scientists has managed to publish a magazine and open an atheistic site in the Internet.
I came back to Moscow after an eight-year absence expecting to find the country tightly in the hands of the anti-enlightenment. For years we have been hearing about American evangelists in Eastern Europe, feeding like vultures on the minds of helpless, ignorant and superstitious Russians and other peoples, taking every advantage of a supposed "spiritual vacuum" left after the collapse of communism. We have been reading about the increasing influence of the Russian Orthodox church and a spiritual "re-awakening" after decades of godlessness. These descriptions have elements of truth, but my general impression was more one of disinterest in religion by the bulk of the people.