I was truly privileged and honoured to listen to Nate Phelps talk about growing up in Westboro Baptist church and also talk about his eventual escape from it when I attended #QEDcon in Manchester on 13th April. Given his background and indoctrination in a cult labelled the most hated family in America, he is truly a testimony to our ability to rise above our circumstances and truly better ourselves. Wish you could have been there? Well, Giles Wendes, recorded it and has now put that recording up on YouTube. (Hat tip to Giles for doing that). (Side Note: The sound is not perfect, but is still OK) (Side Note 2: Giles has put a lot of work into this, he has added captions, so you … [Read more...]
Eating Chocolate makes you really really smart … right?
Eating lots of chocolate has been proven to make you a lot smarter. Really? Yep, the details are all in a study published within the New England Journal of Medicine and is entitled Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates. Read and you soon discover that the findings of the author, Dr. Franz H. Messerli, a cardiologist and director of Clinical Hypertension with St. Luke's and Roosevelt Hospital, demonstrate that there is indeed a close significant linear correlation (r=0.791, P=0.0001) between chocolate consumption per capita and the number of Nobel Laureates per 10 million persons in a total of 23 countries. But don't take my word on this, here is a graph for … [Read more...]
UK MP Gary Streeter claims that only Christians help the poor
Mr Streeter, a former government minister and current MP, made some rather strange the remarks on Radio 4's Today programme, he basically asserted that only religious people can be moral. The dialog proceeded as follows ... Mr Streeter said the Prime Minister is "reflecting a new-found confidence in the Church in Britain, and a new-found sense of mission that we really are here to serve our communities." He went on: "There are Christians right now who are serving their communities – whether it be street pastors, Christians Against Poverty, all kinds of groups for elderly and vulnerable people. The reality is on the ground Christians are out there serving the most vulnerable in our … [Read more...]
Is Guerrilla Skepticism OK?
Guerrilla Skepticism is a team led by Susan Gerbic that consists of Wikipedia editors who have a specific focus on improving the quality of the available information. In fact they are quite open about what they are all about, and have their own website here where they invite anybody to join them, and describe their goal to be as follows: The mission of the Guerrilla Skepticism editing team is to improve skeptical content on Wikipedia. We do this by improving pages of our skeptic spokespeople, providing noteworthy citations, and removing the unsourced claims from paranormal and pseudoscientific pages. Why? Because evidence is cool. We train – We mentor – Join us. The challenge here is that … [Read more...]
Are some truly Immune to Facts?
Are some truly Immune to Facts? The short answer is "yes", so if this is TLDR, then you can stop reading now. So here is the story. A rather strange claim was posted by a Muslim girl regarding the expansion of the earth. The context is that the Qu'ran says the that Allah expanded the earth (79:30) (and yes, OK, that is just a word plucked from one english translation, the actual Arabic used is the word for rolling out a carpet - Quranic cosmology is flat-earth). So the claim is ... Here is a scientist who confirms that the earth was expanded (inflated like a balloon) To which many then point out that this is complete and utter Nonsense. So her Husband, a chap called Assadi, … [Read more...]
It’s magic Friday
If you have no idea what I'm on about, then you should indeed celebrate. Alas, most do know exactly what I'm talking about. Today the moon is in the right phase (yes really, it is that bizarre), and so a good percentage of the population are celebrating today as the day that god gets killed as a sacrifice to himself in order to appease his own wrath towards all of us because one of our ancestors was tricked by a talking snake into eating some fruit - you are buying into this idea right? Oh and least you wonder, yes I'm mocking the very core of the claim, but I'm not excluding myself here in any way because I once truly did believe it. What is far more interesting of course is not … [Read more...]