Right, that does it – a post I’ve just read at Pharyngula has goaded me into doing the post I’ve been meaning to do for a couple of days.

It’s time for a look at credulity and superstition and general soft-headedness in the Mass Media and popular culture.

Here is the Pharyngula post. About a story on MSNBC (hey if it’s partly owned by Microsoft shouldn’t it be all full of rationalist geeky types who would throw heavy rocks at anyone who suggested such a story? No? Why not?) about a ‘legendary Roman stone’ that gets soggy when a pope is about to snuff it that is currently dry therefore the stone ‘says pope will live.’

My item is … Read the rest

This is typical. And irritating. Irritating in many ways.

Humera Khan of the An Nisa Society, an organisation that represents the views of women, agreed the school had failed to take into account the huge diversity of the UK’s 1.6 million Muslims. “If you consult on what is Islamic, and you for instance only talk to the Pakistani community, they will say the shalwar kameez is suitable. But other communities would have a different view that then becomes excluded,” she says.

Where to begin. How about with that ridiculous misleading essentially meaningless phrase ‘an organisation that represents the views of women’? The views of women. Does it mean all women, or some women? Notice that you can’t tell. It … Read the rest

And since you mentioned skepticism – explain something to me. This Intelligent Designer we hear so much about. It’s supposed to answer those questions that atheists and biologists and similar tiresome people can’t answer. But the thing about this Intelligent Designer character is that it raises a hell of a lot of questions that don’t arise if there’s no need to explain the Intelligent Designer. Surely finding the Intelligent Designer a satisfactory answer to questions while finding Designer-free answers unsatisfactory, relies on ignoring a great barnlike stack of questions that trail in the wake of the Intelligent Designer. The most obvious one of course is Okay smartyboots then who designed the Designer? But there are others.

The one that I’ve … Read the rest

The Third Skeptics’ Circle is posted. Read, doubt, enjoy.… Read the rest