This was announced by American Atheists president David at Stanford University in California on May 6.

He said the channel will run atheist content 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Religion News Service reported that Mr Silverman estimated the venture would reach 7 million households and be free, at least initially.

It will be available via Roku, an Internet streaming player that attaches to television sets.

"Why are we going to television?" Mr Silverman asked his Stanford audience.

"It's part of our strategy of going where we are not," he said.

There are more than 100 Christian and four Jewish television stations broadcasting in the United States.

The channel will show video of previous atheist events, such as footage from past American Atheist conventions and speakers at 2012‘s Reason Rally in Washington, D.C.

It will also air content provided by atheist video bloggers and other atheist groups.

In addition, the channel will air segments of "The Atheist Viewpoint", a show produced two decades ago by the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair.

Ms O'Hair was the American Atheists' founder.

She was the plaintiff in the 1963 landmark Supreme Court case that removed Bible readings from public schools.

"We are envisioning a lot of different content from many different atheist content creators," said Dave Muscato, American Atheists' director of communications, to RNS.

"We are hoping to sign on many other atheists who create videos currently on YouTube and other places."

Reaction from the Stanford crowd was enthusiastic.

A few began to applaud and a ripple of discussion buzzed through the room after Mr Silverman's announcement.

In answer to a question, he said a future atheist radio station is also a possibility.

There are individual atheist cable television and YouTube shows in the US.

Sources

• Religion News Service
• Image: the405media

Paul Vallely says. "Think different is the Apple slogan. Ironically, there was a pretty undifferentiated consensus in the tributes being paid to him. Eulogies likened him to Edison and Einstein. He was 'the Leonardo da Vinci' of our time.

"More tellingly, his death was compared with that of Elvis Presley or John Lennon as marking the end of a cultural era. All this tells us more about ourselves than about the untimely-taken Mr Jobs," says Vallely.

No saint, maybe, but a remarkable man as is revealed in a remarkable commencement address he gave at Standford University in 2005, which even PC lovers would enjoy reading. In the speech he tells three stories:

• His first story: "connecting the dots" - Birth to a single mother and adoption
• His second story: "about love and loss" - being dismissed from the company he founded
• His third story: "about death" - his experience of cancer

On the other hand Paul Vallely shines some light into the shadow side. He says, for example, "Capitalism, Marx argues, conceals the human relationships behind commodities. That is why there is not much mention in the Jobs tributes of the dark underbelly of the iPad, which is produced in factories where conditions are so unrelenting that last year 14 young workers killed themselves. Most of them jumped from the roof of the Foxconn factory in Taiwan manufacturing iPads - as well as kit for Dell and Sony".

Source

• New Zealand Herald
• Image: Hark