1+ week, 12+ hour ago   (536+ words) Several decades ago, when I was a student at the Chouinard Art School, out of curiosity I dropped in at a local Scientology center. I attended a few introductory lectures there, one of which included a filmed interview of L. Ron…...

3+ week, 5+ day ago   (225+ words) That is exactly what the next generation concluded. Behind the theology lies a question disputants too rarely refer to empirical testing: does religious therapy help the people it claims to help? Here skeptics may be surprised in both directions. Its…...

2+ mon, 2+ week ago   (787+ words) On April 7, 1966, Time magazine generated headlines by asking “Is God Dead?” Four decades later, the “Four Horsemen of Atheism,” Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett famously heralded religion’s unraveling. A mere eight years after their declaration, Pew…...

2+ mon, 2+ week ago   (975+ words) Every tradition begins somewhere. Every religion, moral code, legal system, and political identity emerges from a particular language, place, history, memory, fear, victory, defeat, and symbolic world. There is nothing wrong with that. Human beings do not begin from nowhere....

2+ mon, 4+ week ago   (1433+ words) A review of God: The Science, The Evidence. The Dawn of a Revolution by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies. Protesting too much, elsewhere in the book the authors assert “the purpose of this book is not to militate for a…...

4+ mon, 3+ day ago   (1223+ words) About a month ago, a woman in Egypt was harassed on a public bus (she will go unnamed to protect what privacy and dignity she still has left). She recorded the man who was targeting her, and when she confronted…...

4+ mon, 4+ day ago   (228+ words) “By facts, I mean what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan meant: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.” By reality, I mean what the science fiction novelist Philip Dick meant: “Reality is that which, when…...

4+ mon, 3+ week ago   (381+ words) Think for yourself—and dress like it too. 🧢👕 New merch at shop.skeptic.com The validity of this dramatic testimony is somewhat undone by Elsie’s statement that she thought her husband was dead and that he was then “a little…...

6+ mon, 4+ day ago   (87+ words) Michael Shermer responds to a remarkable letter from a group of eighth graders at a Christian school in Texas who say they’ve been praying for him and want to talk about Christianity, Jesus, and the Bible. Become a paid member…...