You had me at “Dark Energy”

When you’re busy fighting against the forces of superstition, dogma and pseudoscience, you can often forget about the smaller doses of idiocy that go almost completely ignored. Take Flat-Earthers. I mean, no one even bothers to debunk these clowns anymore. It’s gotten so bad that they end up doing most of the hard work of calling them on their retarded shit for you.

Take the FAQ for the Flat Earth Society. It attempts to lay out all the arguments against their wacky belief, and by doing so, instantly arms anyone with the ability to debunk this garbage. Take a look at these hilarious claims:

  • Satellites are a lie. Sustained spaceflight is impossible, and all signals are broadcast from towers or ground based satellites.
  • The Sun and moon are 32 miles in diameter and are suspended above the earth via Dark Energy [NOTE: oh look, they learned a scientific term!].
  • The Earth is constantly accelerating, thereby providing the experience of gravity. [NOTE: presumably without end].
  • A vast “Icewall” protects the worlds oceans from falling off the sides.
  • The atmosphere is actually an Atmolayer [NOTE: whatever the fuck that means].
  • The sun and the moon have gravity, but the Earth does not, because it’s special.
  • The North pole is cold because the 32 mile wide sun circles around the equator.
  • Time zones exists because the sun doesn’t emit light in all directions, but rather is like a spotlight.
  • Eclipses are caused by the “antimoon”, a mysterious moon shaped black body.
  • If you drive directly southward, you will eventually fall off the edge [NOTE: none of their “scientists” have yet attempted this daring scientific experiment].
  • The Coriolis Effect is a lie.
  • All space-based organizations are involved in a global conspiracy to keep the truth of the earth’s flatness hidden.
  • The giant “Icewall” is guarded by a government agents to prevent people from exploring it. No one has survived the attempt.

Where does one even begin? The antimoon? Government conspiracies to prevent people from realizing they’re are living on a constantly accelerating disk orbited (somehow) by a 32 mile wide spotlight and its glowing cousin? Yes, it all makes sense now! America is going bankrupt trying to pay off everyone to keep the Icewall a secret. Can you imagine what’ll happen if it melts away?

Rome braces for urban myth Earthquake

Hey, if you’re going to be superstitious, you may as well embrace all the crazy and stupid shit you hear, right? That includes an urban myth floating around Rome that an earthquake is supposed to destroy them today. This quake was apparently foretold decades ago by a famous scientist by the name of Raffaele Bendandi, although there is no evidence that he actually did so. So basically, a number of citizens have “called in sick” believing today is their last day on Earth.

There are reports of an 18% increase in the number of city employees planning to stay away from work. “I’m going to tell the boss I’ve got a medical appointment and take the day off,” barman Fabio Mengarelli told Reuters. “If I have to die, I want to die with my wife and kids, and masses of people will do the same as me.”

All of this is pretty silly, since earthquakes can’t be predicted so far in advance. Turns out our mantle is a lot more unpredictable than we think. Just ask Japan. Point is, this is just another example of how gullible people are when they have such a poor understanding of science. I bet most of these people can name more patron saints than they can scientists. Is it any surprise that you would have a large radius of ignorance when the Vatican is next door?

Psychic steals $250,000 from victim

It takes a special kind of scumbag to be a psychic. Seriously. I mean, your job is basically to manipulate people who are at a low point in their lives. Lonely, sad, desperate and terribly uneducated people are seduced by these charlatans intent on bilking them out of their hard earned money.

It’s easy to feel judgmental about the suckers, like the case of “Jane Doe”, defrauded to the tune of 250,000 dollars by Lisa Debbie Adams. A self professed psychic, Adams told her that a curse had been placed while she was still a baby inside her mother’s womb. Despite how utterly stupid that may seem to us, people like Jane are susceptible to these superstitions. In the end, Adams succeeded in convincing Jane to give her entire life savings in a series of increasingly wild spending sprees (including the “spiritual” benevolence of Mercedes-Benz, a feeling perhaps familiar to some owners).

Should we punish the ignorant? Shall we forget they are victims merely because they were vulnerable, improperly educated dolts who had the misfortune of falling for a scam artist? It’s a cruel world if we can’t feel at least some sympathy. Reading the stories of victims reminds me how easy it is to fool desperate people wanting any easy answer to solve their problem. It’s a sad reality, a reminder that reason – the shield that should have protected these people against fraud – was paper thin.

It’s time for us to ridicule psychics more, and I mean A LOT more. We need to expose them as the fraudsters and tricksters they are. There’s no need to make the belief in superstitions illegal; it’s far more affective to make it shameful, and object to ridicule. The funnier, the better. So you know what to do…

My kind of Zodiac

One of the coolest ideas I’ve seen in a long time. According to the Geek Zodiac, I’m a Spy. My qualities are “confident, patriotic, duplicitous, selfish and resourceful”. Can you guess which two attributes DON’T describe me? I bet you can’t…

The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 190

To celebrate the day of my birth, I’ve recorded a special episode of the TGA podcast. This week, we compare the Biblical Jacob to me, and we also talk about Dr. Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science

The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 190
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The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 189

With all the Internet issues we’ve been having down south, it finally looks like I’ll be able to put up the latest podcast. This week, Carisa joins me as we ask ‘should we be intolerant of pseudo-science’, how intelligence isn’t static, and why believers need to wake up.

The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 189
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The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 187

This week, Carisa joins me as we continue our discussion about why religious people fear atheism, we also read a response to my ‘how to challenge faith’ request, and finally we discuss how ‘Theory of Mind’ helps explain why we are prone to believing in the supernatural.

The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 187
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The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 183

This week, Jeff joins me to help debunk Astrology, and we also talk about my awful tendency to try and medically diagnose myself with hilarious consequences.

The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 183
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Quackery claims another victim

If you’re a regular podcast listener, you might remember a show I did a few weeks back on The Lorne Trottier Science Symposium, and I talked at length about one speaker, Dr. David Gorski (who looks a lot like the guy with glasses from ER) who’s busy fighting superstition on his blog, Science-Based Medicine. David specializes in breast cancer, and over the years has constantly battled the dangers of pseudoscience and quackery. He sees the direct consequence of people listening to “The Secret” and other junk ideas rather than medical doctors.

The latest victim of this terrible and tragic new phenomenon of trying to use “positive thinking” to fight malignant tumors is a woman by the name of Kim Tinkham. She was diagnosed in February 2007 with stage 3 breast cancer, and every doctor she talked to gave her the same diagnosis: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. It’s not a pleasant process, but the odds of survival were still relatively good.

Instead of opting for surgery (I still like David’s “nothing heals like surgical steel” line), Kim watched the movie “The Secret”, and fell for their pathetic “think positive and you can have shit” shtick: she even appeared on Oprah to explain her decision:

I watched The Secret for the first time back in 2006. Shortly after The Secret aired on Oprah, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was shocked, but most of all, I became mad. Not because I had cancer, but because most of the doctors that I’ve spoken to -three so far- have all said that surgery was absolutely necessary within the next month. I would have to undergo a partial radical mastectomy of the right breast, followed by treatment. After much thought, I’ve decided to heal myself.

To be fair, Oprah did try to convince her to seek real medical treatment, but backed down a little when Kim suggested this was a life affirming decision on her part. Besides, “The Secret” was a movie that Oprah had recommended to her female zombies, and once the genie was out of the bottle, it’s kind of hard to put it back.

The problem here is Kim didn’t like the reality of her diagnosis, and was particularly afraid of surgery. Instead of accepting the reality of her illness, she chose to believe the fantasies that were presented to her as facts. When countless doctors gave her the same medical advice, she searched on the fringes of alternative “medicines” until she found some opportunist piece of shit (a dick by the name of Robert Young) who made her believe diet and wishful thinking would be enough to cure her.

I don’t think I need to tell you what happened next: as the cancer continued to spread, it was eventually too much, and according to her Facebook account, she recently died. While Kim had a good change to survive her cancer had she listened to her doctors, the trendy “alternative” treatments offered by quacks and charlatans gave her the idea cures can be found in your head rather than with science based medicine. Since it’s unlikely either Oprah or Robert Young will be held accountable for their culpability in this woman making such poor life choices, it’s up to us to keep fighting the forces of irrationality and pseudoscience.

A&E support pseudoscience

I don’t watch cable television. It’s an expensive way to rot and deteriorate your mind, especially when shows like “Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal” make their way to the youtube. The show is set to air on A&E, the same channel which has that awful “Paranormal State” show where morons run around pretending to be scientists while they attempt to scare the crap out of each other.

Speaking of Paranormal State, the main “psychic” on the show is the same latent gay dude who runs around supposedly haunted houses and says spooky things like “someone died in a lot of pain here”. It must take supernatural abilities to know something that amazing, am I right? As you can see from the above video, Chip Coffey is on a mission to “help” these kids deal with their “abilities”. And by helping,  I mean this fraudulent sack of shit is deliberately deceiving people for the purpose of making money (be sure to check out his website. It looks like the 90’s threw up all over it).

If these kids are genuinely hearing voices, the last thing you want is a psychic fraud convincing them the voices they hear are really dead people trying to talk to them. They either need therapy, medication, or maybe both. Instead of actually bothering to care about the well being of these children, A&E has decided this mess makes good television.

It looks like the Skepchicks are trying to start a letter writing campaign, but I don’t see how A&E would change their minds about catering to New Agers who desperately want this kind of fantasy to be real. You can try joining them if you like; I’m just one of those pessimists who realizes the only thing that matters to TV stations are ratings, not integrity. There was a time when specialty channels like A&E, TLC and the Discovery Channel used to try and provide some educational merit, but those efforts were abandoned when it was discovered that you can’t get good ratings that way. Turns out America is full of dummies who hate it when shows make them feel stupid. Keep it dumb, and then no one feels bad about themselves! How else can you explain this kind of garbage TV?

The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 166

This week, we have a special episode about Cryptozoology and the search for Bigfoot, all centered about a hilarious movie called Bigfoot Lives!. We talk about everything from why do some still believe to the famous hoaxes that have been exposed but still ignored by true believers. We also talk about okapis, probably the weirdest animal you’ve seen in a while.

The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 166
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The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 163

This week, Ryan and I attended the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium for their lectures entitled Confronting Pseudoscience, and this show, we’ll be discussing the speeches of Michael ShermerDr. David Gorski, and Ben Goldacre. Also in the mix is The Amazing Randi, who had a crowd so large we had to sit on the floor. It’s 50 minutes of fun you won’t want to miss.

The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 163
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The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 142

This week, we make fun of Michael Crichton’s belief in auras, we explore the new pro-Islamic ad campaign around the world, and we try to predict how silly the next new religion is going to be!

The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 142
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The MMR Vaccine / Autism story from start to finish

We’ve covered a lot of the MMR vaccine / autism controversy on the Good Atheist, but I don’t think it’s ever been laid out from start to finish in as concise a format as in this comic from Darryl Cunningham. From major conflicts of interest to falsifying data to the unethical treatment of children (which included colonoscopies and lumbar punctures amongst other unnecessarily shitty tests), there’s 15 pages of information that’ll piss you right off. Thank SpaceGod Andrew Wakefield and his bogus study have been discredited. If you ever want to see the effect a few bad apples can have on our society, look no further than this guy, who’s work has literally led to the resurgence of measles and is one of the major roots of the current anti-immunization movement (a movement many atheists and skeptics subscribe to, sadly enough).

The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 138

This week: why ‘Everyone Draw the Holocaust Day’ makes Muslims look even more insane than usual, and how Dr. Wakefield can’t use the name doctor in Britain anymore.

The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist
The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 138
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