Apparently if it isn't religious freedom, Cruz doesn't want to talk about it.

Perhaps you remember when scientists debunked homeopathy in 2002. Or 2010. Or 2014. But now a major Australian study analyzing over 1,800 papers has shown that homeopathy, the alternative treatment that relies on super-diluted substances and the principle of “like cures like” is completely ineffective.

Is the Hum, a mysterious noise heard around the world, science or mass delusion? By Colin Dickey.

I’m always surprised at how much rancor is directed toward “mythicists”—those who deny that there was a real Jesus who, whether or not he was divine, was the nucleus around which Christianity accreted. I’m also surprised at how certain many biblical scholars are that Jesus existed (Bart Ehrman, to give a prominent example).

“The philosophical problems that can be solved from the armchair have already been solved.” By Olivia Goldhill.

In this short video Vilayanur Ramachandran describes experiments with split brain patients, people who have had their corpus callosum cut. It is very interesting when he describes what happens when the question of belief in God is posed. 

While we may go through specific, common fallacies and how to spot them in future videos, this video offers a quick review of validity and soundness along with some thoughts on the sort of heuristic processes our brains might use when evaluating claims. I've included some tips on how to practice analyzing arguments - because you're not going to be an expert overnight!

The values of science are at war with the values of religion.

Evangelical Christians want to be persecuted. At some level, they need to be persecuted. It’s woven into their central narrative. It is a part of how they were taught to understand themselves. But what happens when Christians inhabit a country like the United States, whose freedoms are already built around them and their own concerns? What happens when a nation is comprised of more Christians (whether culturally or otherwise) than people of any other faith?

The magician delighted in exposing spiritualists as con men and frauds. By Edmund Wilson. (June 1925)

Yet another writer claims that Atheism is a Religion. Here's my response...

John Oliver wakes up the sheeple who have had the wool pulled over their eyes by the lamestream media.

It’s time for the first ever Fallacy Friday! So what’s a “Fallacy”? I know most vocally irreligious people have encountered theists who will try and either convert or re-convert them (depending on one’s original stance relative to the questions concerning the existence of a deity), so we tend to be familiar with their arguments and with the fallacies that at least a few of these arguments present to us.

They know when they know—and when they don't, they ask for help. By Ed Yong.

Science has a fundamentalism problem. By Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry.

Recently I wrote about presidential candidate Marco Rubio's comment that "all the answers are in the Bible" and his remarks to an atheist that our rights could only come from a creator. A number of readers agreed that Rubio's view made no sense, but they also mentioned that religious views of other candidates are just as bad, or worse. I agree. Rubio has never claimed that God told him to run for president.

The nonreligious are more liberal and more pacifist on most issues relating to violence: torture, the death penalty, corporal punishment, imperialism and more.

President Jimmy Carter says America, a once-free nation, is now an oligarchy, and that’s not just his opinion. It is provable, and backed up by the research of top political experts and scholars. An oligarchy is a government run by a small group of wealthy and influential people, rather than the majority.

The Evangelical “brand” has gone from being an asset to a liability, and it is helpful to understand the transition in precisely those terms.

This is a post I once made for John Loftus at Debunking Christianity and I remembered it recently, so here it is. I had been discussing the contradictions of the Bible. Many are fairly irrelevant in the scheme of things and don’t really invalidate the core claims of the Bible, only the claims of inerrancy. What it does show, however, is the rationalisation process of the average Christian.