Paul Fidalgo

Incredibly, there remain parts of the world where superstitions about witches and sorcery remain deeply embedded in the culture. Tragically, it is children who are often the victims of these beliefs. (See also Leo Igwe’s report on attacks on accused witches in Nigeria in the September/October 2020 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.) Some dedicated freethinkers from our own …

Let’s say you’ve been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Enough time has passed, and you’re now “officially” immunized. Now what? Can you go back to living life as it was in 2019? Should you still be wearing a mask? Can you still infect someone even if you don’t get sick yourself? Is it okay to hug? …

It really should go without saying, but a secular government based upon the separation of church and state should not be issuing proclamations declaring a National Day of Prayer, sending the message that, as Americans, we are all expected to seek favor from a supernatural overseer. But the religious Right, as usual, is not satisfied. …

Reality is not what it seems! This is not just a weak attempt at sounding vaguely profound (or what Daniel Dennett might call a “deepity”), but an honest-to-goodness truth about how our brains interpret the world around us. This was the lesson from the most recent presentation by Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing and …

The plight of persecuted nonbelievers has the attention of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Their most recent annual report on the global state of the freedom of belief highlights several instances and examples in which governments and non-state entities strip basic civil rights from nontheists, forcing them to live in fear …

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. It wasn’t so long ago, that when a newly inaugurated President of the United States, Barack Obama, mentioned “nonbelievers” in a wholly inclusive way, the minds of said nonbelievers were blown. We had become so accustomed to atheism being entirely taboo in political discourse and to the …

As a special treat to celebrate the 80th birthday of Richard Dawkins, the arts-and-sciences nonprofit Pioneer Works released a short clip of a 2019 interview with Richard in which he reads, to everyone’s great amusement, selections from the hate mail he regularly receives. Much to our delight, a couple of weeks later, Pioneer Works posted …

Any day now, perhaps just as you’re reading this, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule on the case of Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, in which a Christian foster agency that received government funding is suing to be allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ clients, claiming that their religious beliefs exempt them from having …

Hardline Islamists in Pakistan are, as The Economist recently said, holding their country hostage. After sparking violent riots in protest over cartoons in France that hurt their religious feelings, the extremist party Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan was banned and declared a terrorist organization by the country’s Parliament. But still feeling the pressure from Islamists, the Parliament then debated expelling France’s ambassador. Meanwhile, …

The “rise of the Nones” is now a well-documented demographic phenomenon, as surveys show that America’s religiously unaffiliated make up anywhere from a fifth to a third of the population. What’s still difficult to pin down is who exactly all these Nones are. At FiveThirtyEight, political scientist Ryan Burge and reporter Perry Bacon Jr. dig …

Are we doomed to infection in the infodemic? Not according to “inoculation theory.” As we learn from cognitive scientist John Cook on the latest Skeptical Inquirer Presents, we can build up our mental immunity to misinformation and fortify our critical thinking skills with exposure to facts and the elements of false claims. It can even …

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck another blow to secularism when it struck down California’s pandemic restrictions on gatherings in homes of more than three households, ruling that the restriction treats in-home Bible study and prayer sessions unequally as compared to commercial gatherings in places such as hair salons and retail stores. If this …