Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Here is more evidence to illustrate how belief-systems can utterly screw-up and skew the human mind …
WARREN, MI (WDIV/CNN) – A Michigan man shot and killed his stepdaughter because he felt she was not honoring her Muslim religion, according to police.
Great article in the latest Scientific American by Daniel T. Willingham. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?”. His article discusses why so many people choose not to believe what scientists say, so is of direct interest to skeptics.
A friend of mine has long held that a vaccination his son received as an infant triggered his child’s autism. He clings to this belief despite a string of scientific studies that show no link between autism and vaccines. When the original paper on such a link was recently discredited as a fraud, my friend’s reaction was that it will now be more difficult to persuade people of the dangers of vaccination. He is not alone: nearly half of all Americans believe in the vaccine-autism link or are unsure about it.
We, that’s the collective we, buy an astonishing quantity of Vitamin supplements each year. To give you an idea, here are some numbers (Sorry I only quote UK stats here, but you can probably extrapolate from that for other locations):
Queens University press release reports …
KINGSTON, ONTARIO – The world’s first interactive paper computer is set to revolutionize the world of interactive computing.
“This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years,” says creator Roel Vertegaal, the director of Queen’s University Human Media Lab,. “This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen.”
Ron Cowen reports in ScienceNews that there are Possible evidence for WIMPs reported, supporting claims of Italy-based experiment
An experiment in Minnesota is the first to bolster a long-contested claim that detectors a continent away have found evidence of particles called WIMPs.
WIMPs are theorized particles considered to be leading candidates for dark matter, invisible material believed to make up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe. In the Minnesota experiment, called COGENT, a hockey puck–sized chunk of germanium deep in a former iron mine attempts to record rare collisions with WIMPS.
I need not name him, the subject line says it all. Normally the loss of any human life is a tragedy, but in this specific instance we find an exception to that rule. An individual such as this who was relentlessly driven on a self-appointed celestial mission to inflict a delusional belief-system upon innocents by force made him exceedingly dangerous, not just in theory, but in practise, for he inspired many to spill blood on an industrial scale.
There is much I’d be tempted to write, but others have already done a far better job than I could ever muster, so I’ll simply draw your attention to the words of two such writers.