A new survey has revealed that atheists know more on average about religion than religious followers.The survey conducted in the US found that atheists and agnostics seemed to be more knowledgable about facts and histories relating to religions than people who followed thosefaiths.
A majority of Protestants, for instance, couldn"t identify Martin Luther as the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation, according to the survey, released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Anthony North: No occult figure is more puzzling than the Count Saint Germain. Always dressed in black, but decorated by diamond jewellery, Saint Germain first appears in Vienna about 1740 when he moves in high circles after curing a French Marshal of illness.Where the Count came from, no one knows - there are many versions of his birth from being the son of a Hungarian prince, to the son of a Portuguese Jew, to the b****** child of a Bohemian nobleman. In a full life he was known as a great musician, healer, spy, statesman, linguist, soldier and alchemist, havingadventures which took him from Vienna to Paris, Holland, London, Belgium, Russia, Nuremberg and eventually to the Himalayas in 1822 for a life of meditation – provided, of course, you don’t accept one of several accounts of his supposed death.Generally thought of as a charlatan today, he spent most of his life creating laboratories, where he was said to have achieved the Great Work of the alchemist - to produce the Philosopher’s Stone which turned base metals into gold, and the Elixir of Life, which gave him immortality.As proof of the latter, he claimed to have been a high priest of a cosmic race 50,000 years ago before intervening in history as the prophet Samuel.
He is said tohave also claimed to be:Joseph, husband of MarySt Alban, the first English Christian martyrProclus, head of Plato’s academyMerlinRoger BaconChristopher ColumbusFrancis BaconActivities within his contemporary life could be equally fascinating. Arrested as a Jacobite spy in England, he also tried to warn Louis XVI of his impending death, and was instrumental in placing Catherine the Great on the Russian throne.
Two years after challenging a selection of religious fundamentalists to justify their beliefs in Channel 4’s The Root of All Evil,Richard Dawkins – “Darwin’s rottweiler” – is growling again. This time, in The Enemies of Reason, he takes on the wider penumbra of the paranormal, New Age mystical mumbo-jumbo, and the often expensive spiritual services that bring succour to the sucker. His targets include astrologers, psychics, dowsers, homoeopaths and a woman called Elisis Livingstone who claims that in our Atlantean past we all had 12 strands of DNA rather than two. If the thought of being ten strands short bothers you, Livingstone claims she can restore them. What makes Oxford University’s Professor of the Public Understanding of Science different from most sceptics,rationalists and humanists is that he won’t let this stuff lie.
If someone claims that they can “channel” the spirits of the dead or alleviate the symptoms of some horrible incurable disease by pointing beams of coloured light at your chakras, Dawkins does not want to dismiss it as harmless fun. He wants to know how they claim to do it and what hard evidence they can produce to show that the effects they say they produce actually occur. This may seem like taking a steamhammer to smash a peanut, and Dawkins is aware that some people see him as a kill-joy, but for him the fun is not harmless. “We live in dangerous times,” he says at the start of the first show, by which he means not just the threat from, say, Islamic fundamentalism, but a more general flight from reason and the scientific method. Speaking at his office in Oxford, he says that the decline in interest in the physicalsciences in schools is tragic. “The lack of scientific education means that people are not armed, not equipped to see through irrationality.” Much of the material may seem familiar to interested sceptics: the practice of cold-reading, whereby “psychics” pick up cues from their audience’s reactions to a scattering of vague words and phrases and use them to make people imagine they have been told something that relates specifically to them. Or the fact that homoeopathic remedies are claimed to work despite containing not a single molecule of the supposed active ingredient.
Submitted by Peace Crusader: A girl born with three eyes and two noses has been attracting hordes of people who believe her to be an incarnation of Hindu god Shiva. The birth of the "wonder girl" in Angara block of Ranchi created quite a stir last week with villagers queuing up for a glimpse of the baby. "People from far-flung areas are coming for a glimpse ofmy daughter.
Why has god played such a cruel joke with me by giving me a daughter with abnormal features," rued Sukhlal Mahto, the girl"s father. Though her two eyes appear to be normal, she has a third eye in the middle of two noses. But she has not opened her third eye yet, Shuklal said. "Even Lord Shiva did not open his third eye regularly. Shiva opened it once to destroy someone," said Mahesh Mahto, a villager. Drawn by the belief that she is an incarnation of Shiva,the villagers visit Sukhlal"s house every day with garlands and incense sticks to worship the girl. "It is a case of a genetic disorder," said Manish Kumar, a general physician.
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Source: LATimes
Anthony North: No occult figure is more puzzling than the Count Saint Germain. Always dressed in black, but decorated by diamond jewellery, Saint Germain first appears in Vienna about 1740 when he moves in high circles after curing a French Marshal of illness.Where the Count came from, no one knows - there are many versions of his birth from being the son of a Hungarian prince, to the son of a Portuguese Jew, to the b****** child of a Bohemian nobleman. In a full life he was known as a great musician, healer, spy, statesman, linguist, soldier and alchemist, havingadventures which took him from Vienna to Paris, Holland, London, Belgium, Russia, Nuremberg and eventually to the Himalayas in 1822 for a life of meditation – provided, of course, you don’t accept one of several accounts of his supposed death.Generally thought of as a charlatan today, he spent most of his life creating laboratories, where he was said to have achieved the Great Work of the alchemist - to produce the Philosopher’s Stone which turned base metals into gold, and the Elixir of Life, which gave him immortality.As proof of the latter, he claimed to have been a high priest of a cosmic race 50,000 years ago before intervening in history as the prophet Samuel. 
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Two years after challenging a selection of religious fundamentalists to justify their beliefs in Channel 4’s The Root of All Evil,Richard Dawkins – “Darwin’s rottweiler” – is growling again. This time, in The Enemies of Reason, he takes on the wider penumbra of the paranormal, New Age mystical mumbo-jumbo, and the often expensive spiritual services that bring succour to the sucker. His targets include astrologers, psychics, dowsers, homoeopaths and a woman called Elisis Livingstone who claims that in our Atlantean past we all had 12 strands of DNA rather than two. If the thought of being ten strands short bothers you, Livingstone claims she can restore them. What makes Oxford University’s Professor of the Public Understanding of Science different from most sceptics,rationalists and humanists is that he won’t let this stuff lie. 
Submitted by Peace Crusader: A girl born with three eyes and two noses has been attracting hordes of people who believe her to be an incarnation of Hindu god Shiva. The birth of the "wonder girl" in Angara block of Ranchi created quite a stir last week with villagers queuing up for a glimpse of the baby. "People from far-flung areas are coming for a glimpse ofmy daughter. 
