‘Rationality is useless if it is not sound. This is what Martin Luther meant when he called reason a “whore”. Pick the wrong premises, and rationality is utterly screwed. Therefore, merely that someone is “rational” means absolutely nothing about whether that person is well-connected to reality.’
Urghhh. This was so painful to watch. They should be had up in court for misinforming and mischaracterising. This is…
Being that time of year, let me remind you of some things that I have written on the Resurrection (and…
This was exactly what I espoused here in my piece “Why do normal people believe ridiculous things?” Except way way…
Here is another account in my series of real-life deconversion stories. They are often painful, psychological affairs, as you can…
I was thinking over the weekend, as I wrote my own eulogy for the SIN Series – Death piece I…
The Skeptic Ink Network are running a little series on death, so keep your eyes peeled for some articles across the network from a few contributors (see our previous series on moral panics). To start the ball rolling, here is something that I have to offer on the subject:
I’m hopefully not going anywhere soon, but if I do, I would like to be prepared. Sometimes death just pops up and hits you, leaving you thinking, “I wasn’t ready for that!”…
The Skeptic Ink Network has always kept current and perhaps even ahead of the game in comparison to similarly themed…
Jeremy Clarkson, right wing pundit and presenter on the ever popular everyman BBC TV money spinner car show, Top Gear, has not had his contract renewed. He has always been controversial, and the last incident was the brick that broke the weary camel’s back. He has a long line of things he has got up to, which I will later list. Essentially, he is a very rich man who doesn’t seem to have a care in the world for anyone or anything, whether it be the environment, foreigners or fellow workmates. As the Economist reported:
This is a guest post by Little Fire who submitted through a friend. An interesting little twist on the idea of God’s love:
WHY?
Why Is God’s Love Conditional? Love is different for everyone because we all put different conditions or expectations on the ones we love — consciously and unconsciously.
WTF? BBC (video available from there): Utah will resume the use of firing squads to carry out the death penalty when…
EARLSBORO, Okla. – Rafael Cruz, father of Texas Senator and Tea-Party favorite Ted Cruz, spoke recently against atheism and secular humanism at a gathering of an Oklahoma Second Amendment advocacy group. He claimed that the belief systems are two of the main ills facing our society, that they lead to sexual perversion, sexual abuse, and the complete loss of hope, and that people following these two views should be rounded up and placed in special ‘camps’ to keep them separated from the rest of America.
This will be part of a short series looking at UKIP in the context of the upcoming election, including expressing my views on immigration since that appears to be UKIP’s main serious concern. This is a long piece, so get yourself a nice cuppa and settle into it.
So to the uninitiated (and to those foreign readers) who are UKIP?
Dr Caleb Lack has had three books published on my Onus Books imprint and I am glad to announce his fourth; this time he has edited and contributed to an important anthology dealing with the psychology and treatment of OCD. This book provides a vital reference of experts and students in the field, to psychologists seeking an academic companion to their work or studies. Here is Caleb’s post welcoming its publication:
Brilliant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP3HJVp3n9c
…or at least not wholly right.
For those across the pond who are not familiar with the Hillsborough disaster, it was a a grim day in Sheffield in 1989 when 96 Liverpool Football Club fans died (with 766 injuries), being crushed to death in surging crowds in the old terrace-style ground enclosures.
A spokesperson for Australian Homeopathic Association has released a statement today conceding that they are “baffled” by the concept of cordial.
Homeopathy, an alternative medicine practice dating back to the 18th century, operates under the principle that water holds “memory” and that a substance will increase in efficacy as it is diluted in solution.
With John posting about Bruce Gerencser’s deconversion account the other day, I thought it would be opportune to mention that his full story is published in a great book I edited called Beyond An Absence Of Faith: Stories About the Loss of Faith and the Discovery of Self which documents some sixteen deconversion accounts from different religions and denominations. Let me tell you about a few of them.
The Friendly Atheist has an excellent short piece which utterly destroys liberal and moderate Muslims in their case for Islam being a religion of peace. It is not that, as I have shown here, and due mainly to this. The problem stems from the core text, the Qu’ran. And you can’t really be a Muslim and drop the Qu’ran – they are inseparable.
I have made sticky (sent to the top of the blog post list) the post Andreas Schueler wrote about the…
Mwah ha ha!