The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
Oh no. At the National Post, Sharon Kirkey reports that homeopaths are pushing a “detoxification” treatment called CEASE, which, alas, is not what they will be doing. Instead, it stands for Complete Elimination of Autistic Spectrum Expression, where a treatment of—you guessed it—diluted vaccines are used to “cure” autism. Keep these people away from me.
Steve Salerno at WSJ looks at how the cancer treatment industry is pushing hard on advertising by peddling huge, heaping doses of false hope:
Ever since Oprah hand-delivered American culture to the gurus of empowerment in the 1990s, positivity has been hailed as the sine qua non of daily living. Amid this zeitgeist, merely to insist that objective facts and probabilities matter is to be labeled a gloom-and-doomer. But the war on cancer is not the place for pep talks and poetic license. We could do with more disclosure, less delusion.
Scott Pruitt (Destroyer of Worlds) absolutely DID NOT MEET WITH THAT LOBBYIST AT THE EPA BEFORE GETTING THAT SWEET APARTMENT DEAL, except that he did. But other than that, he didn’t.
An EU court rules that churches can, in fact, discriminate in hiring based on belief for “occupational activities within churches and other public or private organisations the ethos of which is based on religion or belief.”
The Paris climate agreement’s goals for average global temperarture are based on the prospect of technologies that suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmophere, but as Wired reports, the problem is that we still don’t quite know how to do that on the necessary scale. Uh oh.
Benjamin Knoll looks at a study on Mormons showing that after someone leaves the LDS church, their overall “spirituality” tends to drop overall, not just in terms of Mormonism specifically. Not a surprise per se, but interesting to see the numbers and to see how, as Knoll puts it, it’s difficult to be an ex-Mormon “none” who is “spiritual but not religious.”
Hey, you know, it’s easy to be all upset with Abraham for being SO READY to murder his son for God, but hey, it’s not like he went through with it, right? …. Right? Candida Moss at The Daily Beast writes:
Some scholars … argue that the version of Genesis 22 found in our Bibles was originally put together from more than one source. In at least one of those, the argument goes, Isaac ended up dying.
Jon Cruddas at The New Statesman says humanists on the left need to reject the techno-utopian ideals of what he calls “cyborg socialism.” Reject the cyborgs? Pfft, you first, dude. Tell me how that goes for you.
Hot take: Atheists and evangelicals? They’re the same, man!
Susan Gerbic writes about how former-famous person Nancy Grace once lashed out at fake psychics praying on the credulous, but now seems to fall for readings from “grief vampire” Tyler Henry.
The superhero team (which is neither super nor contains heroes) POTUS Shield prays for Trump on Jim Bakker’s show in order to protect him from “witches and warlocks.” I did not make that up. Now I’m going to keep expecting to see Voldemort’s face writhe out from the back of Trump’s head, from underneath all that “hair.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which just nixed its not-so-well-received “anti-Muslim” list, now issues a report on how those on the alt-right find their way in, calling out Sam Harris (who we know they really don’t like) and, quite strangely, the “skeptics’ movement.”
You know what would be cool? If you could 3D-print self-aware robot squids…. What’s that?… I take it back. Bad idea BAD IDEA.
Quote of the Day
It’s not often I’ll read a church sign and think “That’s what it’s all about.” pic.twitter.com/vmIfMb9LDk
— Jerry Lock (@jlock17) April 19, 2018
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