The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
Kentucky’s House of Representatives has passed a bill mandating an annual student day of prayer. It’s not a problem, you see, because the bill doesn’t specify any particular religion’s prayers, so everybody is included. Wait.
Mississippi’s Gov. Phil Bryant signs into law a ban on abortion after 15 weeks. Within the hour of signing, the state was sued.
Nidhi Subbaraman at Buzzfeed takes a deep dive into a poop cult. Let me do that again. Nidhi Subbaraman at Buzzfeed has a big report on what she calls “the new snake oil,” a bizarre cure-all involving cabbage, candida gut fungus, and “waterfalls of diarrhea” that has found purchase in the nonsense-halls of Facebook pages, and has hurt a lot of people.
The cat is out of the bag regarding a big project of CFI/RDFRS to get Richard Dawkins’ books translated into several languages and distributed digitally for free download in countries around the world. More from us on this soon!
According to some guy called Anthony DeStephano, “Atheists today are the most arrogant, ignorant and dangerous people on earth.” Hemant Mehta, I suppose punishing himself for something, read DeStephano’s book Inside the Atheist Mind, and tells us all about the wonders within:
His whole book is like this. It’s a lot of whining with no substance. It’s a lot of conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality. It’s a lot of name-calling and dog whistles. It’s the sort of thing you read because a Dr. Seuss book would’ve required too much brainpower.
At CSICOP.org, Kenny Biddle deconstructs the “documentary” The Blackwell Ghost, which seems to be trying to go the Blair Witch route and get people wondering whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. IIIIII wonder.
Hannibal Buress, the comedian who helped get the ball rolling on bringing Bill Cosby’s crimes to light, has his mic cut during a performance at Loyola University after he makes jokes about priests committing sexual assault.
Apparently there are people who think that Pope Francis helped Stephen Hawkins to a deathbed conversion. Snopes? Have at:
Hawking’s phony deathbed conversion is one in a long series of similar hoaxes of opportunity. For example, after the 2011 death of the writer Christopher Hitchens — an outspoken atheist and critic of organized religion — American evangelical Christian writer Larry Alex Taunton published a controversial book in which he claimed Hitchens had reevaluated his religious faith while he was dying of esophageal cancer. The book was widely dismissed and fiercely criticized by friends of Hitchens. Before that, there were debunked eleventh-hour “conversions” to Christianity by Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution, and astronomer Carl Sagan.
A medical journal notes the death of a woman in Spain who sought to deal with some muscle stress by getting a kind of acupuncture that involves bee venom.
Mike Huckabee and Jim Carrey are yelling at each other on Twitter over scary pictures of Huckabee’s daughter Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the president’s press secretary. Huckabee calls Carrey a “Christophobe” which kind of sounds like a sort of brass instrument.
Ben Radford reviews the scifi flick Annihilation, and from what he writes it sounds like it makes about as much sense as the finale of Lost, which I’m still mad about.
Quote of the Day
The Washington Post reports that there is a 1 in 2700 chance that an asteroid the size of the Empire State Building will strike Earth on Sept. 22, 2135. Overdue. But NASA has a plan, “HAMMER,” to stop it. Our quote is a parenthetical from NASA’s Brent W. Barbee:
Please don’t print that an asteroid is going to crash into Earth in The Washington Post.
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