The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Some folks in politics and the media want to scare the crap out of you about Ebola. Others want you to calm down and know there’s nothing to worry about. Then you read this interview by James Hamblin with Dr. Steven Hatfill in The Atlantic, and you start to think everyone is full of crap. Or I do, anyway. If Hatfill’s name is familiar, it’s because he’s the guy the Bush administration fingered as the Anthrax guy back in 2001, and he totally wasn’t.

Douglas Adams, a sentient puddle of water, and Ken Ham. Stephen Law puts them all together, and, well, it fits!

Michael Specter at The New Yorker checks your FODMAPS and does a deep dive into the War on Gluten:

While there are no scientific data to demonstrate that millions of people have become allergic or intolerant to gluten (or to other wheat proteins), there is convincing and repeated evidence that dietary self-diagnoses are almost always wrong, particularly when the diagnosis extends to most of society.

The McGill Daily reports on the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium’s “Are We Alone?” event on the search for extraterrestrial life, which included our own Joe Nickell:

Nickell explained that he’s not a “dismissive, arm-chair, put-downer” debunker, but rather, an investigator who does fieldwork and searches for evidence of purported claims.

Joe is interviewed at some length about the idea of the existence of ghosts, and why people are so convinced of it, at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Relatedly, The Daily Targum speaks to several Rutgers faculty about the non-existence of ghosts and why belief in them persists.

A survey shows that int he UK, more folks believe in aliens and ghosts than God. Progress? A lateral move?

Ouija boards. Come on. Ben Radford at Discovery News:

The fact that people must be touching the board for it to work offers an obvious clue: if ghosts or spirits (instead of people) are moving the planchette to spell out messages, there would be no reason anyone would need to touch it.

The Westboro Baptist Church wants to be a defendant in a Kansas same-sex marriage case, because marriage equality would be a violation of church-state separation. Or something. With signs.

Meanwhile, Michigan State University is playing host to a creationists’ conference, and science is all, “wha?” (And it’s called the “Origins Summit,” I think just to make Lawrence Krauss’s head explode.)

Cal State’s InterVarsity Christian Fellowship protests the stripping of its school recognition because it doesn’t want to allow non-Christians to be allowed to be club officers, violating the school’s “all-comers” policy.

Yusuf Islam (neé Cat Stevens) says he does’t endorse the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, sort of?

Hemant suggests cutting some slack for the Sikh high school student who wants to carry his ceremonial knife in school.

Stuart Vyse laments the Halloween season’s perennial reintroduction of the scientist-as-villain trope.

Satan commands a man to topple the Ten Commandments monument at the Oklahoma Capitol. Satan, please, CHECK WITH US FIRST.

Maine Atheists and Humanists are opposing the Good News Club’s use of local public school facilities.

The Vancouver Sun looks at end-of-life care, and points out the needs of the nonreligious:

Given such religious-secular diversity and polarization, “The ideal chaplain is the spiritual equivalent of an ethno-botanist,” says former chaplain Will Wilson, “someone who is familiar with the tools and taxonomies of a wide range of spiritual systems.”

By the way, my favorite line from Star Trek: The Next Generation is Picard to Crusher, in an exchange that could ONLY occur on Star Trek: The Next Generation:

Picard: I didn’t know you were an ethno-botanist!

Crusher [deadpan]: It’s a hobby.

Praise be unto this python, who hath produced offspring by way of “virgin birth.”

Reportedly, the National History Museum of London planned to hire bounty hunters to kill and bring back the Loch Ness Monster. Um.

Quote of the Day

Shawn Van Valkenburgh pokes holes in the pseudoscientific reasoning behind what he calls “spiritual meritocracy”:

The implicit idea here is that our professional and financial growth depends on our spiritual merit, not on the presence or absence of social structures and biases. We are told that if we are grateful enough, if we put enough happy energy into the universe, then we will be rewarded with material wealth and earthly pleasures. (Think “The Secret.”) We are told that we actually can have it all: a rich spiritual life, leading to a rich material life.

Of course, this is just the new-agey equivalent of the same old meritocracy myth that’s been floating around America since at least the 19th century; that in the land of the free, anyone can become rich if they just work hard enough, if they use the right brand of elbow grease . . . [F]or the same reason we look suspiciously on Horatio Alger-esque theories of social mobility, we ought to also be skeptical of their spiritual version, which says that underserved groups can get ahead not by standing up to power, but by focusing on love and positivity.