>> Bogus Trend of the Week: Booming Evangelical Attendance. The New York Times whips up an article based on anecdotal evidence, reporting that church attendance is up due to bad economic times. A Gallup editor then writes in to call out the paper on its fake “news.”

>> No Reason for the Season: The joy of celebrating a godless Christmas. Writes Torie Bosch in Slate:

What I love about the holidays are what [Rick] Warren and his ilk surely consider distractions: the trees, the lights, Santa, and Muppet specials…. The best thing we nonbelievers can do, in fact, is be honest about not celebrating the religious side of Christmas.

>> God according to the philosophers. Alex Byrne lays out the ontological and design arguments in a long article, simply titled “God,” in Boston Review:

If a persuasive argument for the existence of God is wanted, then philosophy has come up empty. The traditional arguments have much to teach us, but concentrating on them can disguise a simple but important point. As Anselm and Paley both recognized, the devout … do not believe that God exists on the basis of any argument. How they know that God exists, if they do, is itself unknown—the devout do not know that God exists in the way it is known that dinosaurs existed, or that there exist infinitely many prime numbers. The funny thing about arguments for the existence of God is that, if they succeed, they were never needed in the first place.

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