Skepticism

Photo credit: Flickr By Reason Rally Tens of thousands of people will gather at the Lincoln Memorial June 4, 2016, to show the world that reason, science, and freedom of belief are vital to Americans. Reason Rally 2016 is a celebration of fact-driven public policy, the value of critical thinking, and the voting power of …

by Georgina Kenyon In 1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public. Called the Smoking and Health Proposal, and written a decade earlier by the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter “anti-cigarette forces”. In one of the paper’s most …

Photo Credit: Naomi Gingold By Naomi Gingold When Kyaw Moe Khine was in 9th grade, he told his parents that he was an atheist. His parents didn’t quite get it, he says. They didn’t even know what atheism meant. Kyaw Moe Khine, who goes by the name “Bart,” is from Myanmar, frequently referred to as Burma, …

by Ronald A. Lindsay Early humans believed in gods that could become angry and that bestowed or withheld favors based on the deference they were shown by humans. Humans needed to propitiate these gods, usually by sacrificing something valuable: depending on the culture, a prized heifer, a prisoner of war or one’s own child. One …

Steven Pinker, Eugenie Scott, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and more than 40 other eminent scientists and public intellectuals are backing the Center for Inquiry in a brief to the Supreme Court criticizing the state of Texas’s onerous restrictions on abortion providers. CFI’s brief argues that the alleged expert, scientific testimony used to justify the restrictions …

By Robyn Blumner Now that news editors have assembled and disseminated their end-of-year lists – Top 10 of This, Worst 5 of That – I’d like to mention one of the Most Missed Stories of 2015: how religious privilege plays out in American politics. You can’t escape it, and yet it is almost always escaped. …

More than half of Americans (53%) now say religion is very important in their lives, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. While this figure has declined somewhat in recent years – down from 56% in 2007 – Americans remain in the middle of the pack in terms of importance of religion when compared …

In late November, the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting where three people were killed and nine wounded sadly reminded Americans again that women are not safe in this nation when trying to make choices about their bodies. It compelled me to take a candid spiritual look at the popular Christian stance on abortion. As a transhumanist …

by Jerry Coyne The Big News this morning is that Pope Francis has, miraculously, come across another miracle performed by Mother Teresa—or rather by her spirit. This gives her the second miracle she needs to go beyond beatification to full canonization, becoming Saint Teresa. The Vatican clearly put the old fraud on the fast-track to sainthood …

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) – Women who take antidepressants during pregnancy may be more likely to have children with autism, a Canadian study suggests. The overall risk is low – less than 1 percent of the nearly 150,000 babies in the study were diagnosed with autism by age six or seven. But children of …

source: Indiana University Indiana University researchers have found that people who seek out news and information from social media are at higher risk of becoming trapped in a “collective social bubble” compared to using search engines. The study, “Measuring online social bubbles,” was recently published in the open-access online journal PeerJ Computer Science. The results …

Bacon lovers of the world, rejoice! Or at the least take solace that your beloved pork belly may be better for the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than the lettuce that accompanies it on the classic BLT. This is according to a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who found that …