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An astronomer's personal view on life, the Universe, and everything. Informative, funny, skeptical, and topical, it's mostly cool astronomy stuff and science in general, with a definite slant against antiscience and uncritical thinking.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'religion'
Bananeidolia
Quick! Someone call Ray Comfort! Yup. It’s Jesus in a banana peel. The article has all the usual nonsense, so I’ll spare you the details. But my favorite part is where the banana owner says, "It definitely wasn’t that way when I bo...
Terroreidolia
So this time, a guy leaves a brillo pad (for those not from the U.S., a steel wool pad with soap in it to scour pans and such) in his sink. He removes it, and what does he see? He claims it’s Jesus. Um. Seriously? I mean really, Jesus? In that?...
Holy cow!
Sigh. I have only one comment (especially if you’ve seen my earlier posts on stuff like this): why would God have such terrible penmanship? ...
Hospital workers fired for refusing vaccinations
NBC is reporting that several workers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia were fired for refusing to get vaccinated. CHP cares for very sick children, many of whom have compromised immune systems or are too young to get vaccinated. The t...
Ironic icon
Sigh. OK, so a woman in Massachusetts thinks she sees Jesus in her iron. If she wants to believe that, it’s fine. It should come as no surprise to anyone that I think she is mistaken, and that this is simply a random happenstance, and that it&...
Careidolia
OK, I know that some people see the face of their religious icons in random things. I’ve written about this a zillion times. And I know that sometimes it’s just pareidolia, our tendency to see faces in random objects. And I know that peop...
Koran verses “appear” on baby in Russia
In Russia, thousands of Muslims are flocking to see a baby who has verses from the Koran mysteriously appearing on his body: I’d like to be very clear here: this is not pareidolia, our ability to see patterns in random objects. The verses are ...
A Halloween bag full of Dum Dums
I actually am fairly tolerant of religious differences between people. Religious beliefs run very, very deep, and touch a part of us that is incredibly difficult to analyze rationally or with any sort of real self-skepticism. In general, a personR...
When self-fulfilling prophecies Knock
A couple of weeks ago, thousands of people gathered at Knock Shrine in Ireland, gazing upward, looking for a vision of the Virgin Mary. Why? Earlier in the week Dublin-based clairvoyant Joe Coleman predicted Our Lady would appear at the old parish c...
Atheist’s Guide to Christmas now in the US
If you’re in the US and you want to read the book The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, then you’ll be happy to find out it’s now on Amazon in ‘murica. Not only that, the audiobook is now available as well, with individual e...
Mr. Deity gets squishy
If you don’t know about Mr. Deity, then where have you been? It’s a satirical video series that assumes that God is something of a clueless high-level executive, running into all sorts of issues while constructing the Universe. It’s...
The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas
Are you secular? Humanist? Even (gasp!) atheist? Or are you any one of the thousands of other non-Christian religions peppering the planet? And yet, do you celebrate Christmas every year, reveling during the moment, but feeling shamed and guilty on B...
Falling Away
Remember Anna Falling, who ran for mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, under the platform that there just plain ol’ wasn’t enough religion in government? Yeah, she got 10% of the primary vote, way behind her competitors. I don’t know much at...
Calling 911
On this day, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, it’s common for people to look back at what they were doing at that time, how they were involved, what they were thinking. It’s human nature to look back on big a...
Cosmic ballet
Several people sent me a link to a short and pretty little video showing two cycles in the sky: the Earth’s rotation, and that of Jupiter. Nicely done! I was surprised to see the video was made by Thunderf00t, whom I didn’t know was a...
