by Jesse Galef
Why are dirty underwear, mutant clover, and amputated mammal appendages associated with good fortune? How did humans develop our “lucky” rituals? And why are they usually gross when you think about them? I hope to address two of these three questions, read on to find out which.
A lucky charm I made [...]
by Jesse Galef
I’m always astounded at how poor data-gathering devices we humans are. Forget all the hallucinations and misinterpretations, we simply don’t notice or retain most of what happens around us. Here’s a great demonstration (via Richard Wiseman’s blog)
I was pretty pathetic. How did you all do?
This is one of the reasons we developed [...]
by Jesse Galef
Can you tell the difference between Aliens and Demons? If you were visited in the night by an intelligent, non-human entity, could you really distinguish between them? (In a sidenote I’m not addressing right now, how would you know the voice in your head is God and not a tricky demon? How do [...]
Guest Post by Vincent Skolny
It sort of hit my wife and me suddenly late in our process of deconverting. Every Christian rejects something (or a lot of things) in the Bible. Particular things. Things about which the Bible is very clear. It turns out, there’s no other choice.
The Bible contains a lot of paradoxical statements, conflicting [...]
Here’s the fraudulent, unfaithful Todd Bentley using painfully obvious cold-reading techniques:
It’s sad that people fall for that — they think God is telling him things when he’s just using the same old tricks that have been used by frauds and magicians for centuries.
I have no idea if this is truth or fiction (I’m guessing fiction), but it’s an interesting metaphor for the dangers of groupthink:
Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs [...]
by Ernst Hayim
Early in 2005, I found out that god was in fact, a pedophile. Curiously, this discovery occurred through an expose on the Internet by a British pianist I had met in India several years ago.
David was a staunch devotee then and we had both belonged to the Sai Baba cult. He had grown [...]
Prof. Robert Sapolsky talks about the biological roots of religion through schizophrenia (hearing the voice of a god), OCD (ritual), and temporal lobe epilepsy (mystical experiences):
There’s a condensed version of some of these thoughts in Sapolsky’s essay “Belief and Biology.”
(via)
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rA: Psalm 109:9, Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Pray for Obama
Craig Duckett: Now if Dennet would have said that “God is just a word” that would’ve been another... Meaningless Deepities
BD: http://blog.cafepress.com/2009 /11/20/psalm-1098-update/ Designs are off the website. Huzzah for reasonable people who see the... Pray for Obama
Siberia: Darth Pope wins. 2009 Bad Faith Awards
Offred: I was wondering how long it would be before Daniel or someone posted this, dkos has been having some involved discussions... Pray for Obama
