Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
There are some individuals who, when confronted with facts that clearly conflict with a belief, will become even more entrenched within the belief, not less. The observation that this happens is known as the backfire effect. The “backfire effect” is a name that was first coined by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, for the finding that, given evidence against … Read more
Now here is a truly weird bit of news. There is a Christian group that is rather eager to promote the idea that masturbation is evil, so much so, that they give talks to kids on the topic. Basically they have a guy dressed up as a Dolphin called Fappy who will turn up at the school … Read more
Things in Egypt are really not turning out well at all, the revolution may have offered hope, but then a bunch of religious lunatics hijacked it all and proceeded to impose their specific religious ideals by force upon the population. The Military responded and they in turn grabbed power, and so we are once again back … Read more
Sharon Hill over at Doubtful News reports on Deepak Chopra’s latest bit of shenanigans, he has a new challenge that he has targeted specifically at James Randi as follows … I challenge the non “amazing” Randi & his professional debunkers & skeptics to explain normal experience & offer them a $1 million prize. Seriously? Yep, here … Read more
We do not just impart information, but often construct a narrative and tell stories to each other – now here is something odd / amusing / strange / funny / scary that happened to me / a friend / somebody famous – and often when doing so we are simply repeating something we have heard … Read more
Does being religious justify being labelled “stupid?”. The short simple answer is – No, there are plenty of very smart highly intelligent humans who are also religious, in fact some of the most famous thinkers, philosophers, and scientists in history have been religious. Ah, so that might imply some truth then? Actually no, not at … Read more