Citing the work of CFI and other advocacy groups, Paul Rosenberg at Salon looks at the efforts to push back against Christian nationalist policy being pushed by Trump and in the states:
[T]he battle to reclaim the true meaning of religious freedom has inextricably become increasingly central to the 2020 election, and to the political concerns of virtually all Americans, whether they realize it or not.
Education Dive looks into Trump’s promise to pressure public schools on student prayer and allowing religious groups to use school facilities, and highlights CFI’s response:
… while the proposal didn’t change previous guidelines on school prayer, some suggest the department’s emphasis is reviving the contentious “prayer in schools” debate. In a press release, Nick Little, vice president and general counsel for the Center for Inquiry, — a nonprofit that focuses on fostering secular society — said DeVos’ “Orwellian threats” suggest the department wants “school-sponsored prayer and religious events.”
Amanda Tyler of the Baptist Joint Committee explains what’s wrong with Trump’s policy from a Christian’s perspective:
The law cannot anticipate the nuances of every situation that might arise at a given school, and sometimes a misunderstanding or misrepresented incident spurs a call to “bring back prayer” to our schools. In most cases, these misunderstandings simply create an opportunity to reaffirm commonsense guidance and constitutional principles that support voluntary, student-led religious exercise.
But using any incident to institute state-sanctioned prayer, written and delivered by school officials, should be deeply concerning for all Christians. For a Baptist, as I am, voluntary prayer is an important part of my religious practice, and it has been since I was a student in Texas public schools. Why should government schools have a say in how and whether our children pray?
Idaho’s state legislature hears testimony on the state’s deadly faith-healing exemptions. Boise Weekly reports:
Former Idaho Chief Justice and Attorney General Jim Jones expanded on Donahue’s analysis, describing the faith-healing exemption as “clearly unconstitutional,” and an oversight on the part of legislators, whom he said have demonstrated great interest in building sideboards around access to abortion services, but have provided few resources for children once they’re born, including an obligation on the part of their parents to provide essential care in situations that threaten the child’s life or could cause permanent injury or disability.
“The legislature has failed, once that child has come to term, to make sure that child has necessary medical care,” he said.
Benjamin Radford marks the passing of Rush’s Neil Peart and reflects on his “skepticism-infused lyrics.”
Scottie Andrew at CNN gives an overview of the battle over vaccination mandates in the U.S., but, ugh, the headline misuses “skepticism” to refer to the attitude of the anti-vaxxers.
Carly Weeks at The Globe and Mail reports on how Canadian judges are having to get up to speed on the science behind vaccinations as lawsuits pile up from anti-vaxxers wielding truckloads of propaganda. But regardless of the judges’ scientific literacy, having this issue in the courts at all is problematic:
[O]ne of the problems with using the legal system this way is that it could give the false impression the debate over vaccines is legitimate, said Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist at Toronto General Hospital. “We already have overwhelming answers to those questions,” Dr. Bogoch said.
Timothy Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta, said he’s also concerned about using the courts to make decisions in vaccination disputes. “It can create an impression of false balance, that there’s two equal sides,” he said.
At Vox, Sigal Samuel reports on a study comparing and contrasting rationality and reasonableness, and there’s a lot to go into, but one conclusion is:
When you see someone acting in a way that seems irrational and you’re tempted to write that off as a stupid mistake, think again. Maybe they’re not failing at rational decision-making. Maybe they’re succeeding at reasonable decision-making, which they’ve deemed more appropriate for that situation.
Polly Mosendz at Bloomberg reviews the Goop clown show on Netflix:
A three-hour-long pseudoscience marathon, The Goop Lab is ultimately an infomercial. Most of the guests have previously appeared on its podcast, which is monetized. Goop Lab is also a store, online and in Manhattan and Santa Monica, Calif., where the website is based. The shop’s bestselling product is a $90 who’s who of vitamins called High School Genes, which has a nice synergy into an episode about aging gracefully (“The Health-Span Plan”). You could buy access to a session with psychic medium Laura Lynne Jackson, the star of Episode 6 (“Are You Intuit?”), by attending a Goop conference for the low price of $1,000. …
… In a country where vaccination rates are falling and public health emergencies are increasingly common, praising untested theories to millions of viewers is irresponsible
Kylie Sturgess lists 10 things that The Goop Lab has in common with My Dad Wrote a Porno, and concludes:
… my sincere apologies to any fellow MDWAP fans who know (as I know) that it’s a far better show than anything that is produced by Paltrow.
David Gorski considers whether all this fighting pseudoscience in medicine is worth the anguish, and honestly I’m afraid to read the piece because I’m afraid he might push me over the edge.
Guess what, anti-GMO folks! You’ve been consuming GMOs the whole time! Steven Salzberg explains why you’re not allowed to have any more tea. Or beer. Or bananas. Or peanuts. I could go on.
After the Santa Barbara Independent runs a puffy cover story on astrology, reader David Rivette writes to tell the paper of his disappointment:
[A] cover story giving implicit approval to astrology is just plain irresponsible. This pseudoscience has been thoroughly debunked since the ancient Greeks, and to treat it as a serious subject in your paper is not only insulting to your reasonably educated readers, but by association implies approval of other such nonsense such as spiritualism, fortune telling, healing crystals, and clairvoyance.
At a time when a large portion of the conservative population has chosen to reject the consensus of the scientific community on a major issue for purely political reasons, it is sad to see a liberal publication such as the Independent supporting a pseudoscience which no doubt helps to undermine the respect for real science in the eyes its more naïve readers.
Speaking of disappointment, Vox goes and interviews an astrologer, Chani Nicholas, who says:
The line that is given is, “Well, it’s a pseudoscience. Anybody that believes it is completely untethered from reality.” Astrologers are humans so we run the gamut. But, in my experience, astrologers are super nerdy, deeply into science, and probably going to be much more loud about the climate crisis and everything that we face that is scientific in nature than an average group of humans.
Science and astrology don’t cancel each other out. We can believe that nature is speaking to us in some kind of way — which is what astrology is — and we can also believe in ice caps melting and needing to work out our greed, our consumption, and our severe imbalance with nature.
The Satanic Temple is waging a lawsuit to be able to offer invocations at city council meetings for Scottsdale, Arizona, and their attorney, Stuart de Haan, spoke to Religion Dispatches about it. Joseph Laycock asks whether the Temple is just a “colossal hoax,” to which de Haan replies:
We face an immense amount of ignorant familiarity. Humans hold their prejudices near and dear to their hearts. When one’s entire religion is based on people challenging their own personal views of good, evil, and the rights of those with whom they disagree, it’s going to cause an understandable amount of discomfort and pushback that we are prepared to face.
Speaking of churches that aren’t churches, the Washington Post reports on how evangelical organizations are rebranding themselves as churches in order to avoid scrutiny from the IRS. It’s what Jesus would want.
Trump is on trial today in the Senate, not that is matters (hashtag-nothing-matters). But you know who’s really responsible for this impeachment? THE JEWS! At least that’s what the vice chair of the Sussex County, Delaware Republican Party, Nelly Jordan, said, and now she’s out of a job.
At Davos, Trump calls Greta Thunberg and other climate activists “prophets of doom” making false “predictions of the apocalypse,” which is ironic considering that his political base is literally trying to bring on the Biblical apocalypse.
Running out of things to be aggrieved about, Christians in British Columbia seek to stop public schools from marking indigenous cultural events, and the court tosses their case. The judge said:
I conclude that proof on an objective basis of interference with the ability of the petitioner or her children to act in accordance with their religious beliefs requires more than the children being in the presence of an Elder demonstrating a custom with spiritual overtones or being in the presence of a dancer who said a brief prayer. In most instances, it is not difficult to recognize the boundary between a student learning about different beliefs and being made to participate in spiritual rituals. A field trip to a mosque to watch prayers would be learning about Islam; an Imam coming to the classroom and demonstrating prayer rituals would likewise not be problematic.
Popular Mechanics cannot get enough of the Navy’s UFO tape, so here they have a recounting of how the thing came to be in the first place.
Clare Coffey at The New Atlantis reviews and considers the larger implications of Linda Godfrey’s book I Know What I Saw: Modern-Day Encounters With Monsters of New Urban Legend and Ancient Lore:
Local journalists survey boundary lines and erect landmarks around human life in a place and time. They are part of the mapping process. They say, this place exists because we say it does. Here is what happened. That mapping is always incomplete, and always a product of human sight and human artifice. And at times, like the signs announcing that you are leaving Delaware and entering Pennsylvania, it hovers between the silly and surreal. But the civic, especially in its record-keeping, boundary-drawing forms, has one great advantage: It lets strangers know where they are. It opens up space for those who were not in at the death, or who might not yet be embedded in a web of personal ties or privy to furious dens of partiality. The social feeds the civic, and the civic expands the social. The glossy official is parasitic on both.
There is something melancholy about Godfrey’s transition from reporting to monster-hunting, since both seem poised to devolve entirely into content production. Whether Godfrey is capitalizing on or resisting this devolution is unclear. On one hand, her latest book is full of MonsterQuest nonsense. On the other, her look at her Wisconsin home through the lens of a monstrous bestiary suggests passionate attachment to the local and concrete. The damned and bizarre can capture the particular vividness of a world in a way that resists reducing it to tropes, or over-valuing its reputation in the world of images.
Harriet Hall looks into the “BioCharger,” a device that looks like it might have been in the background of the engineering room on the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s supposed to be “a ‘subtle energy’ device that promises to improve performance, recovery, energy, flexibility, sleep, and focus.” Is it available at Goop?
The Holy Land is a money pit. The Orlando theme park is running on fumes and needs someone to buy it.
A mother and daughter team of scammers are going to prison for performing fraudulent psychic readings. You’d think one of them would have done a reading on the other and been like, “Uh, mom, I think we’ve got trouble.”
Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by Paul or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.