Check out Sam Harris and Michael Shermer as they unfathomably put up with Deepak Chopra’s nonsense…

Lachezar Filipov, deputy director of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, confirmed the research.

He said the centre’s researchers were analysing 150 crop circles from around the world, which they believe answer the questions.

“Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time,” Mr Filipov told Bulgarian media.

“They are not hostile towards us, rather, they want to help us but we have not grown enough in order to establish direct contact with them.”

Mr Filipov said that even the seat of the Catholic church, the Vatican, had agreed that aliens existed.

[…]

The publication of the BAS researchers report concerning communicating with aliens comes in the midst of a controversy over the role, feasibility, and reform of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Oh boy.  Even the Vatican agrees with you? There’s a hallmark of reliability if I’ve ever known one!

Funnily enough, crop circles are better “evidence” for aliens than anything the Vatican has for God.  You know, so long as you disregard the fact that there’s a logical human source for crop circles (which is no different than the Vatican disregarding most scientific explanations in conflict with its own dogma).

Myth:
Science is the atheists’ religion for the modern world, like Christianity or Islam, except that it is more superstitious and less refined. Atheists’ belief in science requires faith like religion, but atheists doesn’t recognize and accept its reliance on faith.

Response:
Throughout the course of modern history, science and the scientific method have contributed substantially to the reduced scope of religious claims about the world as well as the scope of religious authority. Science has done far more to both explain the world around us and help us improve our condition than millennia of religion. It’s not surprising that some religious believers resent this and among their response is to deny that science is any different from religion.

An important aspect of this tactic is to insist that science doesn’t really provide objective knowledge about the world and that science doesn’t utilize a consistently reliable or proven method for acquiring knowledge. Instead, science is supposed to be based on guesswork, “theories,” and false beliefs which are all inferior to “true” religions, like Christianity, and their revelations from God, like the Bible.

There is a curious contradiction here because people who argue for this myth end up involved in two efforts which should be recognized as contrary: first, they have to denigrate science and argue that it really isn’t as good as defenders claims; second, they have to argue that science is actually a type of religion which relies on faith, not unlike their own religion uses faith.

Continue Reading.  (via DenyReligion’s Twitter Feed)

I enjoy Mr. Cline’s articles on About.com more and more as I read them, this example being no exception.

I’ve been increasingly considering a topic he mentions in the article as of late:

To be fair, it can be argued that a certain amount of “faith” exists with how average person accepts what science says. Few people are in a position to confirm the results of modern scientific experiments so they have to accept what others say based on their experience and authority. Unlike with religion, however, anyone can in principle confirm those experiments on their own — and the ability of others to repeat experiments to make sure they are right is one of the things which defines the scientific method.

What a fantastically succinct way of putting things.  Yes, of course there’s a matter of faith that we put into the people who perform experiments and studies since it’s unreasonable to think that everyone will repeat the actions.  However, I usually decline to use the term “faith”, since what we’re really equating the term to in this situation is “trust”.  Faith and trust are not the same thing, though since most theists have faith that their god exists and put their trust in it, the issue gets muddled.

I must also mention that it’s dangerous to bundle atheism in with science to the extent that they become so closely correlated with one another that people will automatically assume that all atheists are firm believers in whatever science decrees, and that all scientists are atheists.  Many atheists do trust science for their world view, and science is to “blame” for many people’s atheism, but that does not inherently couple the two areas.  If the two become too tightly coupled, what we’ll see is a growing assumption that atheists treat science as dogma, which is clearly not the case, and chips away at the foundation of skepticism and freethought.

You may have heard the recent news about a Belgian man who was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after an accident, but who now has been miraculously discovered to have actually been conscious for the last 23 years, trapped in a partially paralyzed body. How horrific, and how frightening that the doctors could have made such a ghastly error.

Until you watch this video. How did they figure out that the poor man was actually alert and mentally competent beneath his deeply damaged exterior? They’re using facilitated communication: somebody holds his hand and moves it around to tap out messages on a computer. Look at the fellow, sitting there slack and grimacing and drooling, and the staffer deftly and quickly using his finger to peck out lucid and grammatical sentences. How does anyone fall for this?

I’d like to see how well Mr Houben communicates when his ‘facilitator’ is blindfolded, or when he is asked questions about objects in his line of sight but hidden from hers.

As many of the comments say, I don’t think I question whether or not the man is conscious - they may have determined that aspect independently of this, but like Mr. Meyers said, watch the video, and tell me you really think the guy is communicating.

I call shenanigans.

(via frabjousday)

This video on open-mindedness is fantastic.  I previously wavered a bit on the term “open-minded”, since it seems that its definition depends heavily on who is using the it. This video has made me quite a bit more comfortable with the terms open/close-minded, though, and it’s ten minutes well spent.

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

She is a wonderful actress, and I wish she would stick to her first chosen profession. I know some people will hear her message, follow her advice because of her celebrity status and be harmed. Her medical advice may even cause death.

She joins the list of celebrities who have advocated alternative and complementary treatments for disease and non-proven conventional medicine. I have spent much of my professional career documenting disparities in outcome, higher mortality and more suffering among minorities, poor people and even the uninsured middle class who have limited or no access to conventional medicine, the therapies Somers criticizes.

Dr. Otis Brawley’s criticism of Somers is welcomed, wholeheartedly.  I’m unfamiliar with Suzanne Somers’s new book, but I echo Brawley’s sentiment.  This kind of “medicine” is dangerous.