Links:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/sarcasm-how-the-lowest-form-of-wit-actually-makes-people-brighter-and-more-creative-10416281.html

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959781500076X

Sorta transcript:

Being sarcastic makes you so much better than other people. No seriously, it sort of does. Researchers collaborating across Harvard, Columbia, and INSEAD found that people who were sarcastic or who had people be sarcastic with them were more creative than people who didn’t experience any sarcasm.

And that was any kind of sarcasm: mean sarcasm, gentle sarcasm, and I don’t know, maybe even really dumb and obvious sarcasm like I used to start this video. Oh, I’m sure nobody thought to introduce this news story by employing sarcasm. How clever.

They tested creativity in part by giving subjects a test involving a box of nails, a candle, and a book of matches, asking them how they’d go about securing the candle to the wall and lighting it without wax dripping on the table. According to the study results, about 75% of you should get the solution to this, considering that you’re all so smart and clever, and you’ve already been exposed several times now to my high quality, biting sarcasm.

One fun detail about this study is that the people who benefitted most from the sarcasm were those who were the targets of it, not the originators. So remember that the next time some snot nosed kid says something snarky to you, just relax and whip out your acrylics because shit is about to get Bob Ross up in here.

This study fits in with a long history showing that irony is helpful. In my talk, Laugh Riot, I discuss a few of the ways that humor can be used to influence the public. Irony has a fascinating effect on people, because it forces you to stop and really think about what a person is saying. Because it requires extra processing, that kind of humor can be used, in a way, to distract people, making it so that they have trouble thinking up objections to what you’re saying. That makes it pretty effective as a persuasive tool, but pretty maddening when it’s used against you. That’s why a lot of my fellow atheist friends love seeing South Park address Scientology or Mormonism, but when the atheist episode came around, they noticed that it wasn’t nearly as subtle as they would have liked.

Anyway, these past studies showing that irony and sarcasm require the listener’s brain to work harder support the idea that that extra flexing can get you in the swing of thinking laterally when it comes to puzzles or other forms of creativity. And speaking of that, the solution to the candle problem is to take the box that the nails are in, nail it to the wall, and then put the candle inside it and light it up. Let me know in the comments if you got it right and we’ll see if YouTube commenters are any smarter than psychological test subjects. If you commented before you even got to that point in the video, probably to tell me I’m ugly or ask why I hate men, we’ll know the answer was probably “no”.

Links:

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/4/9095379/change-minds-vaccines

http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/stopping_vaccine_denial_are_we_doing_it_wrong/

Sorta transcript:

Earlier this year, I wrote about a preponderance of psychological research that shows us that trying to use logic and reason to convince a person that vaccines are safe and effective may have counterintuitive effects, leading many people to be even more fervently entrenched in their opinion that vaccines are dangerous. So much of this research is depressing that I feel the need to give the spotlight to one recent study that offers evidence that there may be a way to persuade vaccine deniers: scare the shit out of them.

In a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS as I will always call it, University of Illinois researcher Zachary Horne found that subjects who saw photos of children with vaccine-preventable diseases and heard a mother’s story of her child getting measles were more likely to come away with positive feelings about vaccines, compared to subjects who just heard all the facts about how vaccines don’t cause autism.

This jibes with other research showing that younger people tended to be more anti-vaccine than older people who lived through the terror of polio and measles and the subsequent relief of the vaccines. If you think of these diseases as something inconsequential and “natural,” you’re not likely to truly understand how important vaccines are.

Of course, this study isn’t a slam dunk for science communicators. It’s just one study, and it goes against some previous research that indicates even scare-tactics don’t work. But that said, it is a pretty well done study in that it wasn’t just done on college students -- participants were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the researchers found no difference in the attitude change of parents versus non-parents.

Plus, because the researchers gave the participants a pre-test to gauge their baseline beliefs in vaccines, they were able to look at the vaccine deniers specifically and how they were changed. If the drastic change only occurred in people who already were warm to vaccines, it doesn’t mean much, but the researchers actually found that the greatest positive influence occurred in the people with the lowest initial opinion of vaccines.

This paper also found, contrary to previous studies, that just presenting people with the facts about autism didn’t entrench them even more in their anti-vaccine beliefs. It didn’t convince them that vaccines were safe, either, but at least it didn’t actively cause harm.

So, this isn’t concrete proof that scaring people will convince them to vaccinate their kids, but it’s at least a bit of positive news, which frankly, we need right now.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/04/federal-appeals-court-drug-dog-thats-barely-more-accurate-than-a-coin-flip-is-good-enough/

Sorta transcript:

Are police officers allowing their personal biases to influence how they treat the general public and possible criminal suspects? Yes, obviously. Have you not been paying attention?

What’s newsworthy at the moment, though, is the discovery that those personal biases are even screwing up canine units. Police often use drug-sniffing dogs in places like border crossings to identify and apprehend possible smugglers. Dogs are really good at this job: they have about 50x more olfactory receptors in their noses than humans, and the part of a dog’s brain that processes that information is about 40x the size of ours, proportionately speaking.

Dogs can use their noses to find drugs, people, and according to some preliminary research, even cancer cells. Here’s the thing, though: they need to be trained by a human to do that, and after training they have to work with a human to properly apply their training. And that’s where we run into the Clever Hans effect.

Clever Hans was a horse who got famous in the early 20th century for supposedly being able to solve math puzzles. You would ask him or write a problem on a chalk board, like “1+2”, and Clever Hans would stamp his hoof three times. Some of the questions were pretty complex, even, like "If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?”

Clever Hans was usually right, but when researchers studied him more closely, they realized that he was only good at getting the answers right if the person asking the question knew the correct answer, and if Hans could see the questioner. In other words, Clever Hans really was clever, but he was much better at the art of reading a person than at mathematics. Even his owner probably didn’t realize that this was happening, at least in the beginning.

It’s a great example of the importance of double blinding your experiments -- making sure that the person running the experiment doesn’t know the desired result, and that the subject of the experiment doesn’t, either. Because it turns out it’s really hard to remain perfectly unbiased, as we’re all constantly giving off subtle hints about what we’re thinking or what we want to happen, and these can unknowingly influence the experiment.

You may already be able to guess how Clever Hans applies to drug-sniffing dogs. The dogs are usually properly trained in how to detect a drug, but when they’re working in the field, they are with a human who they desperately want to please.

A federal appeals court has just ruled that the use of a drug-sniffing dog was legal, despite the findings that the dog in question, Lex, signalled that he had found drugs 93% of the time he was used. His actual success rate at finding the drugs was only 59%. So he was constantly subjecting people to invasive searches, but was barely better than a coin flip at actually finding drugs.

It turns out that Lex’s handler was giving him a reward every time he alerted, whether or not the alert led to a drug discovery. So he learned that alerting = treat.

It also turns out that Lex’s success rate is higher than what was found in a study of Chicago drug dogs, who managed to correctly ID drugs just 44% of the time, or worse than a coin flip. And if you narrowed it down to Latino drivers, the dogs were only accurate 27% of the time. But they’re still used, and the federal courts have given their approval for their continued use, despite the fact that there are no controls in place to prevent the Clever Hans effect from subjecting millions of innocent people to unnecessary search and seizure.

The only scientifically reasonable next step is to either stop using the dogs or better yet, stop using police officers, since an unbiased dog should be able to do their job about 50x better than they can, and we’d probably see a significant decrease in the number of innocent people gunned down without provocation. Also a significant increase in tummy rubs. Everyone wins.

You're more likely to hear about people's personal experience with religion in a testimonial form than any of the standard arguments for the existence of God.

In this live presentation from Gateway To Reason, I talk about the problem with appealing to personal experience and how to think about those appeals when you're talking to believers.

And, there's a bonus magic trick.

Oh hey, new hair time! Let's see how dramatically this color fades every time I get in the ocean.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/08/13/the-real-reason-sesame-street-is-going-to-hbo/?adfsfd

Sorta transcript:

Sesame Street, the public television show that has taught little kids to count, write, and tell near from far for 45 years, has just been sold to HBO. Those who don’t live in the US may be confused -- you probably know what Sesame Street is, since it’s shown in dozens of other countries from Afghanistan to the UK, but you probably also know what public television is, and it’s generally not something that’s only available to people who can pay for premium cable channels.

Sesame Street’s entire purpose from the very start was to provide educational and entertaining content that was informed by scientific research and targeted toward poor, inner-city kids who generally weren’t exposed to early educational television.

So the idea that it will now be shown on HBO has a number of people understandably upset.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have often threatened to revoke federal funding of shows like Sesame Street despite its demonstrable positive effect on kids who need that kind of education the most, which has been shown in thousands of peer-reviewed studies over the years.

Because of that, Sesame Street has attempted to fund itself through multiple means, including selling toys and books and other merchandise. Unfortunately, it all hasn’t been enough, as more and more people stop watching public television and start streaming shows online.

To continue to compete, Sesame Street made a deal with HBO, and it’s actually not as bad as many people may think: HBO has 9 months to broadcast each episode, after which they’ll be given to public television for free. The funding they’re giving Sesame Street will allow them to produce twice as many new shows as before, 52 in a year. All past episodes are still able to be shown on public television without restriction.

Some people are still upset at this scenario, saying that it effectively splits children into a rich tier and a poor tier, forcing poor kids to get the rich kids’ leftovers. These people are 100% correct -- that is what is happening, and on a philosophical level it’s fucked up and wrong. Our government should care enough about children’s education to fully fund scientifically proven methods for enriching kids’ lives and making better, smarter adults in the future. And in this case, there are few programs that describes better than Sesame Street.

But the fact of the matter is that our government doesn’t prioritize children’s education, because they’d rather spend billions of dollars on killing people in other countries with robots. Whatever, America, you do you.

So until we get our shit together, I’m really impressed that HBO has offered such a great solution. Sesame Street gets all the funding they need, PBS gets free new seasons, and children won’t know the difference. Seriously. Sesame Street is for kids from age 3-8, basically, and their needs aren’t like yours. I loved Sesame Street as a kid. And what would I do when I turned on the TV and saw a rerun? I’d sit there and watch it and love it, either because I didn’t even remember watching it the first time because I was 3 and I had the memory of a fruit fly, or because I liked watching things I’d already seen and loved once before.

In fact, I was surprised to learn recently that Mr. Hooper died in 1982, before I was even old enough to watch the show. I loved Mr. Hooper. He had been dead for 5 years, and I had no idea and I loved him.

And I mean, have you ever been around a kid? How many times can a kid watch a thing they love? A million times. 10 million times. 100 million times more than you can bear.

So no, no kids will give a shit that there are new episodes floating around out there that they can’t watch yet. And if they do care, you’re raising shitty kids and you should fix that.

So is this HBO deal a bad thing? Yes and no. It’s a great thing for children, but it’s an embarrassing thing for America when the rest of the world sees how little we truly value children.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/us/dna-is-said-to-solve-a-mystery-of-warren-hardings-love-life.html?_r=0

Sorta transcript:

At the start of the 1920s, Warren G. Harding was one of the most popular US presidents who had ever served. He signed peace treaties with Germany and Austria, he established the first ever child welfare program, he lowered taxes, he cut unemployment in half, he established the Veteran’s Bureau, and he even advocated for an anti-lynching bill that was ultimately not passed because we come from many generations of racist assholes who couldn’t even agree to not allow random black people to be murdered by mobs.

Then he had a massive heart attack in office, and the nation mourned. Then eventually the public found out that his entire presidency had been chock-full of corruption, mostly involving all his pals he put in prestigious positions, like director of the aforementioned Veteran’s Bureau. Now he’s often regarded as one of the worst presidents of all time.

In addition to his political scandals, Harding was also known for being a lady’s man. He was married before becoming president, and in fact his wife, Florence Kling, was a badass who was a big part of his success in both business and politics.

But that wasn’t enough for Harding, so he also had a mistress named Carrie Fulton Phillips, who we know about because of the many love letters they exchanged. Some historians, like Francis Russell, thought of Philips as Harding’s one true love.

This is despite the fact that just after Harding died, another woman named Nan Britton wrote an entire book about their affair, called The President’s Daughter since it resulted in the birth of Elizabeth Ann Blaesing. Britton pointed out that Harding financially supported her daughter for the years leading up to his death, and that she was only going public because once he died there were no preparations made to continue helping her.

A lot of people at the time believed Britton, but a lot of other people, particularly Harding’s surviving family, ripped her to shreds in the media, villifying her and implying that she was a lying whore who was just out for money. For decades, she and her family were abused about the claim, including during a court trial during which she attempted to sue someone for defamation.

Britton died in 1990 still claiming that she was telling the truth. And thanks to one of Harding’s own “legitimate” grand-nephews, we now know with 100% certainty that she was. Dr. Peter Harding compared his own DNA to that of Britton’s surviving grandson, and found that they are in fact second cousins.

Some of Harding’s family members are still skeptical, which is incredible to me. Harding is already known, fairly or not, as one of the worst presidents of all time. There’s really no danger to someone coming along and stealing the glory of being related to Warren G. Harding. And does it really matter to you, 100 years later, if he had an affair? And not even “an affair,” but “another affair”?

The denial of science by some Harding relatives illustrates the power of idolizing an ancestor. I’m sure they took a lot of pride, growing up, in being related to a US president, even if he was maybe one of the worst ones we had. But maybe now it’s time to set that aside and take pride not in who your grandparents were, but in who you are. And who you are should not be someone who stops believing in DNA because you hate a woman who had sex with your grandpa.

In conversations with Christians where challenges to the Bible are raise, we'll often hear them try to dismiss the Old Testament. So, let's take a look at what they're really saying.

Religions exploit our existing fears and sometimes manufacture fears that are exploited. Can this continue? Are we doomed to be fearful forever?

As we learn more about the world, it seems that religions grasp on the emotional anxieties of the world may be destined to fail.

http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/chrissie-hyndes-10-pieces-of-advice-for-chick-rockers-1994.html

http://time.com/4016811/chrissie-hynde-pretenders-rape/

Sorta transcript:

Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders, has a new autobiography out in which she talks about how she was once raped by a guy in a biker gang. Which is horrible, and to make matters worse, she is coping with that memory by telling herself and others that it was her fault. And to make matter even worse still, she expands upon that broken thinking by telling other women that if they get raped, it’s their fault, too.

We’ve been over this territory many times before: telling women, as Hynde does, that if they wear high heels then it’s their fault they get raped because they should have planned to be able to run away from their attacker, leads to more and more ridiculous situations until we’re all in burkas being told that we deserve to get raped because we blinked the wrong way or showed a bit too much ankle.

It’s a pretty stupid thought process, but it IS what we should unfortunately expect from a woman coming out of rock and roll in the 70s and 80s. Unfortunately, to get by in a severely misogynistic culture, sometimes it can seem easier if you have to become one with the misogynistic culture. Become the “cool girl” who doesn’t care if she gets groped or raped, who doesn’t go out of her way to help other women, and who in fact helps enforce the existing hierarchy.

And if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that Hynde was already playing that role. In 1994, she had some truly shit advice for other women interested in getting into rock and roll, including insisting that they shave their legs. Because nothing says “rock” like spending a lot of time and money conforming to society’s expectations of you, am I right? She also suggests that women don’t sound “hysterical” by “belting” or “screeching,” which is in fact hysterical considering that “hysterical” is derived from a sexist idea that a woman’s over-the-top emotions come from her uterus, and considering that there were a number of amazing female singers who were about to hit it big by belting and screeching in 1994, like Courtney Love and Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney.

Hynde’s first point of advice is the worst by far, though: she says that women shouldn’t “complain about sexist discrimination.” Because again, quietly accepting abuse is SO fucking rock, right? I guess we should just be glad her number one tip for making it as a woman in the music industry was “suck a producer’s cock.”

It actually reminds me of Hilary Clinton, in a way. Bear with me: Clinton has the chance to become the first female President of the United States of America. Her toughest liberal competition right now is Bernie Sanders, who is way more radically progressive, and he’s spent decades maintaining a remarkably unwavering democratic socialist platform. If Sanders were anything but a white male, I don’t think he’d have a chance in hell. Those privileges balance out his radical ideals in the same way that Hilary’s conservative centrist ideals balance out the fact that she is a woman.

In other words, it’s really, really, really hard to be both a member of a marginalized group AND a radically progressive thinker who is accepted by the majority. People like that can kick off movements and inspire generations to come, but they also tend to get murdered.

So Chrissie Hynde worked hard and fought through a lot of sexist bullshit to be a woman in rock for that long, but she wasn’t good enough to do it without throwing other women under the bus. She wasn’t strong enough to do it without telling herself that the horrific things that happened to her were her fault. Because if we believe that something horrible is our own fault, we also get to have the optimistic hope that we can prevent it from happening again. It’s a comforting idea, but I much prefer to understand that shit happens and we should all fight back as best we can, even if we end up pissing some people off along the way. Because that’s truly rock and roll.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/08/carbon-dating-suggests-worlds-oldest-koran-is-even-older-than-the-prophet-muhammad/

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2015/07/quran-manuscript-22-07-15.aspx

https://c14.arch.ox.ac.uk/embed.php?File=dating.html#what

Sorta transcript:

Carbon dating suggests ‘world’s oldest’ Koran could be older than the Prophet Muhammad, states misleading headline crafted specifically to make atheists jizz their pants.

Let me start by saying that Muhammad definitely didn’t get any divine instructions to pass down any message ever, because there is no god. But some people believe that, anyway. Even though they’re wrong, this isn’t the evidence you’re looking for if you want to prove Muslims that their religion is baseless.

The University of Birmingham has a really old Koran, and some researchers there had it radiocarbon dated at a University of Oxford lab. Radiocarbon dating can be really fantastic for archaeologists and anthropologists to place certain organic materials within certain time periods within the past 50,000 years. It’s pretty accurate, but there are still error bars. In this case, the researchers found that the parchment probably dated between 568 and 645 A.D.

Muhammad supposedly got his revelation between 570 and 632 A.D. So right there, you have a lot of overlap that supports the current understanding that the various parts of the Koran were written down after Muhammad’s death. He died in 632, and this parchment could date to around 645. Done.

Even if that overlap wasn’t there, if the carbon dating showed the parchment must have been created, say, before 570 AD, it still wouldn’t prove the Koran was created before Muhammad. A parchment could have been created long before someone decided to write something on it.

And parchment basically means an animal skin. Radiocarbon dating works by measuring the amount of carbon left in something, which allows researchers to count backwards and see when that animal stopped consuming carbon, i.e., when they died, because the carbon isotope leaves the body at a reliable rate. So we know that the animal died between 568 and 645, but we don’t know when that animal was skinned, and when that skin was turned into parchment, which is a pretty interesting and painstaking process.

And then we don’t know how long that parchment was around before it was written on. Testing the ink may get us a little closer to pinpointing the date, but that’s really difficult, since ink only tends to have tiny amounts of carbon and it’s usually going to be co-mingled with carbon from the parchment.

It’s really fascinating how researchers use various techniques to pinpoint dates like this. That’s the story, here, and also the fact that this manuscript may be the oldest portion of the Koran we have. That’s really cool and it helps us form a better picture of how Islam began and grew.

But there is no sense in taking this interesting little finding and forming an atheist circlejerk around it. It misrepresents the scientific research and just makes atheists look like ignorant assholes, and we don’t need another reason for theists to think that about us.

http://www.ksat.com/news/texas/muslim-boy-14-arrested-for-making-clock-mistaken-for-bomb_

Sorta transcript:

A 14-year old Muslim boy was arrested in Texas this week for making his own clock and bringing it to school. As we all know, clocks are a necessary feature of all the bombs we see on television. If it weren’t for the clock part, we would have no idea how much time we have left to run away, or cut the green wire, or hacksaw our arm off.

The good news is that the boy, Ahmed Mohamed, is getting a huge outpouring of support from the Internet, including from President Obama who invited him to bring his clock to the White House. That’s probably not going to ease the minds of the Texas high school administrators, of course, since they probably think Obama is a Muslim, too, and so he probably just wants to examine the death clock to find out how to put them into large-scale production and use them to take away Texans’ guns. Somehow.

This is all reminiscent of Kiera Wilmot, the 16-year old black Florida girl who was arrested and expelled from school two years ago for creating an unapproved small chemical reaction in a science lab. The reaction caused a “pop” and a bit of smoke, for which the girl faced felony charges.

I know it’s a bit of a done trope to say “in my day,” but seriously. When I was in high school, a chemistry teacher let my friends write their names in a flammable liquid on their tables and then set it on fire. And as I mentioned in a previous video, just prior to my day, when kids could drink at 18, my biology teacher would let seniors brew beer for their final project.

Of course, we also had jarts, aka lawn darts, aka deadly projectiles that you were encouraged to hurl at your siblings for a fun summertime activity. And when I say “deadly” I’m not kidding. Children were murdered by them. Even our “girliest” toys were lethal: Easy Bake Ovens may as well have come with a recipe for baked children fingers, and they were especially deadly when combined with flammable Rainbow Brite sleeping bags. Oh, and of course there were those Snack Time Cabbage Patch Kids that looked like they were eating little plastic snacks, which was super cute until they turned on our very children and began trying to consume their tiny fingers and strands of hair.

Chuckie was a documentary, you guys.

I guess what I’m saying is that things weren’t necessarily better before we had safety regulations, and we shouldn’t be fooled into false nostalgia. But we do have to strive to maintain a really difficult balance, between keeping kids alive and giving them room to make mistakes. Or for Christ’s sake, at least room to make something that looks like a pipe bomb but absolutely obviously is not.

I mean, I’m a person who travels with the Quizotron machine, which looks as close to a bomb as you can get without having a clock attached. If I were a Muslim man, I’d never get through security.

And that brings me to the other bit of bad news in Ahmed’s story: the school followed up with a letter to all the district’s parents in which they didn’t apologize, but instead advised them to make sure their kids say something if they see something. Way to make the racial profiling worse, assholes! How about this: if you see something, ask what it is. Maybe you’ll learn something, like how to make a clock and how to not overreact and end up nearly ruining a kid’s life.

Links:

http://trowelblazers.com/rising-star-trowelblazers/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2015/09/10/a-new-human-ancestor-arises-from-the-depth-of-a-south-african-cave/

Sorta transcript:

If you’re anything like me, last week you woke up to the astonishing news that scientists discovered a new species of human in a cave in South Africa, and you thought Holy Christ, how did those people survive so long in that cave, how did no one realize they were in there, and most importantly, even though they’re a different species would it still be considered bestiality if we have sex with them?

And then, again, if you’re anything like me, you woke up a bit and read the article and realized that all the members of this new species have been dead for quite some time, so having sex with them would I guess be necrophilia. Or maybe osteophilia because they’re just bones.

Realizing they were dead was a bit of a downer, but then as I read more, the story got amazing again thanks to how these bones were discovered. The lead researcher, Lee Berger, was heavily criticized by others for staffing his Rising Star Expedition team with young and inexperienced researchers, and for finding the perfect team members by advertising on social media.

It made sense that he would cast a wide net, though, considering that the bones he needed to get were located deep inside a cave that required you to squeeze through a 7-inch diameter passageway and then another longer and more terrifying vertical and horizontal passageway that was about a foot in diameter, all 100 feet underground. So Berger needed a crew of archaeologists and paleontologists who were trained spelunkers and excavators who were tiny enough to fit through those passageways even while dragging their enormous metaphorical testicles. And as chance should have it, that entire team was made up of six truly badass women: Lindsay Eaves, Marina Elliott, Elen Feuerriegel, Alia Gurtov, Hannah Morris, and Becca Peixotto.

The huge number of bones brought back by these researchers are incredibly fascinating, because they show a species that complicates our evolutionary history, which is the most fun sort of scientific discovery you can make. The species is a mix of modern and ancient traits: it probably walked upright but also spent a lot of time in trees. It has front teeth like ours and back molars like our ancestors. It has a globular skull but a tiny little brain, which I will leave for you to make your own jokes, probably relating to presidential candidates or something.

And all this tells researchers that they need to be more careful at extrapolating from incomplete bones, because when you have the full set you may see that your specimen is very different from what you expected.

In other words, this expedition is some next level science, and so it’s particularly awesome that so many women will go down in history as having played an integral role in it. I know that if I had seen a story like this when I was a little girl, I would have been thrilled to know that my dream of being a mountain climbing ballerina scientist wasn’t as crazy as I was told. It’s too late for me, of course, but not for all the future mountain climbing ballerina scientists out there today.

Link:

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/court-forces-non-religious-mom-to-get-therapy-from-bible-thumping-counselor-or-lose-custody-of-sons/

Sorta transcript:

A woman in Albuquerque was ordered by a court to get therapy from a religious nutcase, and when she refused to go the court took her children away.

First of all, kudos to New Mexico. Usually we see shit like this from Florida, maybe Texas...New Mexico tends to keep its head down and remain safely hidden in the middle of the pack when it comes to states doing shitty things.

Second of all, the good news is that the woman in question got her kids back, but only after gritting her teeth and returning to the religious nutcase therapist. Luckily for all of us, she didn’t give up so easily, and when she went back she took a tape recorder and got solid evidence that the therapist was saying things like “If you want to explore how God was in your past, how God was in your life and not in your life… I know you don’t believe in God which is fine but I know at some points he was in your life in some way.”

If a Christian was forced by a court to attend a therapy session where the therapist said “I know you don’t believe in Ganesh but I know at some points he was in your life in some way,” all of Albuquerque would be on fire right now. If the therapist was Muslim, Bill O’Reilly would have ejaculated live on Fox News.

It’s sad but true how easy it is to point out violations of separation of church and state using “the Muslim test.” I hate to play upon the fears many Christians have of Muslims, but it’s really the fastest and easiest way to convince them that they don’t want the government meddling in religious affairs.

This Albuquerque case reminds me of the huge problem we have in the US with Alcoholics Anonymous. I know a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts, and some of them have been helped by AA. But the fact of the matter is that AA is fundamentally religious in nature, requiring a belief in some higher power. Many people, atheist AA members included, apologize for this by claiming the higher power can be anything, not necessarily the Christian god. This bullshit is on the same level as those who try to justify government-sponsored public prayers by saying that all the nonbelievers can just sit quietly and have a moment of silence. AA is a fundamentally spiritual movement, which is totally fine for them.

The problem is that AA is often court-ordered punishment for people who commit crimes under the influence, and it’s often the only option available regardless of the alcoholic’s religious beliefs.

People shouldn’t have to dig into the history and tactics of the therapists they’re forced by a court of law to see. That should go without saying, but obviously the US needs to institute some serious quality control in the way we certify counselors who treat people. Rule #1: your religion has nothing to do with my recovery.

While the Problem of Evil has been a long-standing favorite argument against many different god models, I don't find it particularly compelling and am very particular about when and how I use it.

In this video, I'll talk about why that's the case...and it's all preparation for an argument that I personally view as a much more effective and powerful argument.

Muhammad Syed, Co-Founder and President of Ex-Muslims of North America sits down to talk about his views about Islam and debating with Muslims.

A live lecture at Baylor University on why I prefer the problem of Divine Hiddenness to the problem of Evil.