Discover the true meaning of Valentine’s Day, the latest initiatives of the JREF and Bill O’reilly’s skeptical side in this week’s roundup.
From Pagan Rituals to E-cards
Unlike Mother’s and Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day is not one of those holidays cooked up by card companies out to make a buck, even if they have parasitically latched onto it. Most of us have probably heard of Saint Valentine, but what exactly did he do? Well, he performed secret marriages between young men and women after they had been forbidden by the Roman Emperor Claudius II in an effort to keep his army strong, the legend goes.
More interestingly, this day of celebration can be traced all the way back to an ancient Pagan ritual, which was later annexed by the Christian Church some centuries after its inception, and pegged onto Saint Valentine. Is there anything they haven’t plagiarised?
Read more at National Geographic.
[Via Derren Brown Blog]
D. J. Grothe on Skepticality
Congratulations to D.J. Grothe on being appointed the new president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. The organisation being one of the major players in the field of skepticism, it was very interesting to hear D.J. reveal some of the JREF’s new initiatives in this week’s Skepticality bonus podcast. There look to be some exciting new developments in the pipeline.
Listen to the interview here.
[Via the James Randi Educational Foundation]
Airport Body Scanners Violate Muslim’s Modesty
Apparently Muslims should be given the choice as to whether or not they are searched and scanned in an airport like the rest of us. That’s according to the co-founder of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, who recently appeared on Russia Today to defend the notion that airport body scanners violate Muslims’ modesty. Oh yeah, and that kid with the trench coat and the twitch thinks locker searches are a bit ‘Big Brother’.
Watch the video interview here.
[Via Atheist Media Blog]
Life From a Test Tube? The Real Promise of Synthetic Biology
Scientific American this week reported that we are getting ever closer to that which scientists have longed for for so long. I don’t know all the ins and outs of making life from scratch, but I’m pretty sure it’s a bit more complicated than lightning striking a puddle of mud, which Kent Hovind would have you believe is science’s most comprehensive understanding of the problem.
[Via Richard Dawkins]
Doomsday Pod
What are you going to do when the end is upon us? Well if you’ve got $570,000 to spare, you’re presumably going to be wanting one of the new ‘Apocalypse Pods’ designed by an ambitious Russian engineer. You’d better hope that day doesn’t come any time soon though, because as it stands the prototype looks to be nothing more than cardboard box unworthy even of a Blue Peter badge.
Watch the Al-Jazeera News coverage here.
[Via Atheist Media Blog]
Is it a Column? Is it a Blog? Who Cares? It’s Jack of Kent
I feel obliged to plug Jack of Kent’s new internet column ‘Bad Law’, now featuring on The Lawyer’s website. Not only is his own blog consistently brilliant, but my parents met him at Cambridge Skeptics in the Pub the other night and they tell me “he seems like a really nice guy”.
The new column aims to provide its reader’s with a law-based version of Ben Goldacre’s excellent ‘Bad Science’ column in the Guardian. His first post is on the subject of Cherie Blair and her recent escapades.
[Via Jack of Kent]
Want a Frontal Lobotomy? There’s an App for that
Introducing the most useless iPhone app of them all (and it’s up against some strong competition): the Answers in Genesis app. I can’t think why anybody would want it, but in case you do, you’ll probably need some help in finding it. It’s in the store’s ‘education’ section.
[Via Pharyngula]
Bill O’reilly the Skeptic?
At last, proof that miracles do happen. This week Bill O’reilly of all people somehow managed to muster up some skepticsm when dealing with an author who claimed to have indisputable evidence for the existence of an afterlife. Quite how this guy made the news I don’t know, seeing as his ‘evidence’ is certainly nothing new. Bright lights, out of body experiences, yadda yadda.
Watch the FOX News video here.
[Via Atheist Media Blog]
For an interesting and light-hearted debunking of the relationship between near death experiences and an afterlife, check out this video by Penn and Teller.
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Bill O’Reilly said he was a believer, just a skeptic where near death experiences are concerned. The book by Dr. Long is solid, as well as the research being done at more than a dozen universities by a hundred or so scientists. It can be proven that life (consciousness) continues after the death of the brain and body. Not sure why there is so much denial of the research at this time. Just a phase new data has to go through before becoming mainstream. But science will eventually embrace the research as it did other new concepts in the past.
Hi Lekatt
I am genuinely baffled by some of the statements made on your website. Perhaps you could explain this one to me:
“There are in print many accounts of how brain activity can produce “thoughts, visions, and hallucinations” that are similiar [sic] in content to the NDE.
That may be true, but the experiencer would be unaware of these since he is out-of-body at this time and thoroughly enjoying his new view of the surroundings.”
I really don’t see how the second sentence goes any way to refuting the first.
The linchpin of your argument for the existence of an afterlife, as far as I can tell, is that people who’ve had a NDE know there to be one because the experience felt more overwhelming than anything they had previously known; enough so to have profound influences on the way they live their lives afterwards. You then say that
“I have never read of hallucinations, delusions, or any other kind of misperception that produced such positive changes in large numbers of scattered individuals. What these individuals experienced certainly had to be real. Only Truth is powerful enough to produce this kind of phenomenon.”
That’s just plain wrong. I’ll give you two examples, which you might choose to see as one, depending on your religiosity. Pick two mutually exclusive religions. Neither is true. Certainly both can’t be true, by definition. They are delusions, and yet both have led to equally “positive changes in large numbers”.
Hallucinations and wishful thinking do not an afterlife make.