Skepticism

By Tammy Mutasa & Brian Wiechert   A Brookville, Indiana, Christmas display at the center of a federal lawsuit is getting a new look. This year, the Founding Fathers and Lady Liberty stand guard over the Bill of Rights, which sits in a manger. The new display joins baby Jesus, who lies in a nearby Nativity …

by Jamie Palmer By supporting fundamentalists, the Left simply chooses one camp in a political struggle without acknowledging it. Maryam Namazie, a trenchant campaigner against religious fundamentalism, made this observation last week during a fraught lecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. It would turn out to be pertinent. Namazie’s appearance at Goldsmiths was causing trouble …

by Shaunacy Ferro People are incredibly receptive to meaningless buzzwords, according to a new study in the journal Judgment and Decision Making. Yes, the vast majority of people are willing to believe complete bullshit, to use the scholarly term. (Title of the study: “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit.”) Over the course of four …

Is it ever ethical for a physician to prescribe a treatment to a patient that they know to be entirely without efficacy? Is it ever possible to do this without deceiving the patient to some degree? I think the answer to both questions is a clear “no.” Within the flipped reality of “alternative medicine,” however, …

Credit Susan Walsh/Associated Press By NICHOLAS WADE An international group of scientists meeting in Washington called on Thursday for what would, in effect, be a moratorium on making inheritable changes to the human genome. The group said it would be “irresponsible to proceed” until the risks could be better assessed and until there was “broad …

Britain is no longer a Christian country and should stop acting as if it is, a major inquiry into the place of religion in modern society has concluded, provoking a furious backlash from ministers and the Church of England. A two-year commission, chaired by the former senior judge Baroness Butler-Sloss and involving leading religious leaders …

RDFRS also received this letter: “Dear whoever it may concern, My name is Asher Fainman and I run the Goldsmiths university Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society. We recently invited the speaker Maryam Namazie to give a talk which was aggressively interrupted by members of the Islamic society and associates, who tried to shout and intimidate …

by Francesca Gino “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence,” wrote that connoisseur of wit, Oscar Wilde. Whether sarcasm is a sign of intelligence or not, communication experts and marriage counselors alike typically advise us to stay away from this particular form of expression. The reason is simple: sarcasm …

by Richard Dawkins I once tried to persuade an American atheist conference that the slogan,  “In God We Trust”, on banknotes was a cosmetic trivium. We should stop bellyaching  about it and concentrate our fire on more substantive issues such as the tax free status of churches. I was kicked around the room by the …

An Ontario father has lost custody of his children in part because he refused to stop trying to cure their autism through homeopathy. “Not only were these treatments not effective, but they had negative effects,” reads a court decision granting sole custody to the children’s mother. The father, a 48-year-old computer programmer in the Greater …

Source: RTI International Approximately 34 percent of children in the United States do not receive all doses of vaccines recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) by age 2, according to a new study by researchers at RTI Health Solutions, a business unit of RTI International. This is consistent with findings reported by …

The Center for Inquiry and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science are urging the Federal Trade Commission to put an end to false advertising by the manufacturers of homeopathic products. They point to the overwhelming scientific consensus that these pseudoscientific alternative remedies have no effect (other than a placebo effect) on any condition, …