This is why people dislike Gwyneth Paltrow

Have you ever seen a more off-putting Christmas ad than this one from goop, featuring their consciously uncoupled (but now remarried) Gwyneth Paltrow? The funniest part is what she gives herself for Christmas. On Saturday I’ll show a much better Christmas ad: the one from Sainsbury’s a few years ago that featured Mog the cat. […]

Oy! LiveScience touts panpsychism as the solution to the hard problem of consciousness

Until I read this piece, I always thought that LiveScience was a rigorous science site. Indeed, most of it is, but here’s an exception: a paean to “panpsychism”, the view that everything in the Universe, from electrons to elephants—indeed, the Universe as a whole—has a form of consciousness. The author of the article is Philip […]

Our SOULS make us equal?

David Brooks’s new op-ed in the New York Times says exactly nothing. So why am I writing about it? Because of his thesis, squeezed into the last three paragraphs (see below). First, read his piece—if you can stand the sanctimonious attitude—by clicking on the screenshot below: I’m not sure whether Brooks is really religious. He […]

Bogus accommodationism: The return of Adam and Eve as real people, as proposed by a wonky quasi-scientific theory

If you’re a liberal Christian scientist (no, not the Mary Baker Eddy kind, but the profession), and would like to persuade more fundamentalist Christians that evolution really happened, what do you do? Well, Joshua Swamidass at Washington University, with the help of his secular friend scientist Nathan Lents (a professor of biology at John Jay […]

National Geographic appears to go all numinous again

UPDATE: Al added his own version of National Geographic, below: ,___________________   In the past few years I’ve posted sporadically about how National Geographic magazine, which is now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Media conglomerate largely by The Walt Disney Company [since March] has been writing about religion, spirituality, and other numinous topics, and, disturbingly, in […]

Marianne Williamson’s vaccine woo

I have to admit that when I first saw Marianne Williamson in the Democratic debates my jaw dropped. How did this woomeister, who doesn’t hold elective office and never did, manage to get on stage with credible candidates? I did know about her history of anti-vaccination efforts as well as denial of depression and other […]

Discovery Institute puts out video purporting to refute materialiam and atheism

The Discovery Institute has put out a series of videos that, they claim, will do in atheism—and presumably lead us to Intelligent Design and then to Jesus. I hate to give publicity to a bunch of superstitious yahoos, but will put up one sample of what they consider to be a convincing attack on atheism. […]

Intelligent Design advocates finally sneak God back into their “science”

  The video below, in which Intelligent Design creationist Stephen Meyer explains ID to conservative writer and speaker Ben Shapiro, accomplishes two things—beyond demonstrating that Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, continues, despite withering criticism from scientists, to bang on about supposedly unevolvable “complex specified information” and the Cambrian Explosion […]

HuffPost pushes erotic astrology

What is it with the Leftist media now? The other day Greg pointed out how the New York Times is growing soft on astrology (see here and here), dramatically increasing the number of columns it’s published on the topic, with almost all of those columns being either neutral or slightly positive. Now HuffPost has this […]

The New York Times has an ongoing soft spot for astrology, but not everyone there has drunk the Kool-Aid

by Greg Mayer After Jerry posted about the recent New York Times piece touting astrology and its harmlessness, I came across some good news, and some bad news. First, the good news: some of the Times‘ writers continue to be able to exercise their critical faculties. In a piece, “#MAGA Church“,  about a loony, apocalyptic […]