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Written with the same candor and conversational style that characterized his earlier work, this selection of material from the Godless in America web site ranges from rebuttals of criticisms of atheism, “Answering atheism’s critics,” to essays on science, “Genes don’t care,” and some hot-button issues, “A death in the life of a controversy,” to reflections on the joy of sailing and the impact of the world outside on the world within in “Mockingbird.”

The twenty-four essays cover a wide variety of subjects, and the collection concludes with the one-act play, “A last rite and some wrongs…with apologetics.”

Obscene, belligerent, obsessive, and brilliant, the infamous and outrageous Madalyn Murray O'Hair succeeded in becoming "America's Most Hated Woman." Now award-winning journalist Ted Dracos reveals the incredible true story of the life and murder of the woman who changed the religious habits of an entire nation.

As the woman who won a longshot, landmark Supreme Court case to ban prayer in public schools -- and also the millionaire murdered for her ill-gained money -- Madalyn Murray O'Hair was one of the most powerful personalities of the twentieth century. Investigative reporter Ted Dracos presents an amazing account of O'Hair's life -- a story that is rare in the annals of crime and is truly stranger than fiction.

With impeccable research based on thousands of pages of court records, nearly one hundred interviews in fourteen states, and never-before-released documents UnGodly traces the self-anointed atheist high priestess from her public skirmishes with the law through her remarkable legal maneuverings and her schemes to siphon off enormous sums of money from the foundations she created. O'Hair's private life proves as bizarre as her public life. UnGodly also explains for the first time the full story of the kidnapping and murder of O'Hair, her son, and granddaughter -- a grisly multiple murder masterminded by a genius ex-con who hoped to pocket nearly a million dollars worth of loot in a pitiless and cunning plot.

That the essential doctrines of the world's major religions -- especially Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -- are matters of truth or falsity is itself a fact around which no amount of sophistry or special pleading can get. Unfortunately for them, evidence has been steadily accumulating for at least the last half-millennium to suggest that these doctrines are false. What has saved religions from completely collapsing of their own absurdity is, of course, the difficulty--indeed, the impossibility--of definitively determining the truth or falsity of these doctrines. The impossibility allows the pious to maintain, as a slim and ever-decreasing hope, that the tenets of their religion might somehow still be true, or at least not clearly false. No amount of negative evidence can ever conclusively put any given religious dogmas out of court (aside from those that can be shown to be self-inconsistent), because there will always remain the remote possibility that they are true. . .

Recent surveys have shown atheists to be the least trusted group in the nation, despite the fact that atheists espouse the use of reason in determining acceptance of claims. So why is reason so distrusted, and how did the atheist come to be seen in a negative light?

Until these questions are addressed, the U.S. will remain a highly polarized nation along both cultural and political lines. This we cannot afford, nor can we afford closing the popular mind to what atheism is about. This book makes a major effort toward casting much needed light on atheist thinking, and how the position of unbelief in a God or gods is arrived at on the basis of diligently applying scientific principles and reason.