[MSNBC]
A Newsweek survey estimates 10,500,000 self-declared atheists in the United States. However, 6 in 10 (62 percent) registered voters say they would not vote for a candidate who is an atheist. Majorities of each major party—78 percent of Republicans and 60 percent of Democrats—rule out such an option. Just under half (45 percent) of registered independents would not vote for an atheist.

[Edge]
Steven Pinker: The idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood"). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.

[Los Angeles Times]
Sam Harris: There is no question that many people do good things in the name of their faith—but there are better reasons to help the poor, feed the hungry and defend the weak than the belief that an Imaginary Friend wants you to do it. Compassion is deeper than religion. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence.

[The New York Times]
Archaeologists have applied more polish to the long-tarnished reputation of the Philistines. In recent years, excavations have established that the Philistines had fine pottery, handsome architecture and cosmopolitan tastes. If anything, they were more refined than the shepherds and farmers in the nearby hills, the Israelites, who slandered them in biblical chapter and verse and rendered their name a synonym for boorish, uncultured people.

[CNN]
Evidence mounts that ship being salvaged off the North Carolina coast is Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge.

[Radio and Internet Newsletter]
RIAA screws web broadcasters with exhorbitant rate structure (while FM stations and radio conglomerates like Clear Channel pay nothing).