Marc kreidler
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
Heather Adams at Religion News Service profiles Voices of Reason, the only atheist choir in the U.S. Oh, and look who she quotes:
James Underdown, executive director of the Center for Inquiry-Los Angeles, where Voices of Reason has performed several times, said the choir is a natural philosophic fit for their organization, whose mission is “to foster a secular society.”
“There’s a lot of music out there that celebrates religious beliefs,” Underdown said, adding that people in his community “appreciate hearing something that lands in their perspective every once in a while.”
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
Finally, finally, finally, we have a new episode of Point of Inquiry, all ready to fill your ear-holes with podcast-tastic wonderment. A confluences of circumstances have delayed new episodes of the show, but I’m happy to say that this long-awaited episode has two amazing guests: Alan Stern, head of the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and his co-author, astrobiologist David Grinspoon. Share and enjoy.
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
The mother of a cancer-stricken 11-year-old girl is pleading with the public for financial help to save her daughter as treatment costs spiral out of control. They’ve come from the UK to Texas because of the promises of a cure from someone our community is all too familiar with: Stanislaw Burzynski. The Grimsby Telegraph simply notes, “The Burzynski clinic is a facility in Texas that claims its treatments can cure cancer.” And it can’t.
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
There was no Heresy yesterday because I was recording an interview for Point of Inquiry, and yes, I know, I know, it’s been a while, but this episode will totally make up for it. And now I’m in a hurry because of other stuff. So this will be a little shorter than I’d like. Onward!
The recent assisted suicide of David Goodall, the 104-year-old Australian ecologist, has brought into focus some key issues in the continuing debate over assisted suicide and euthanasia. One issue is whether we should legalize assisted suicide or euthanasia for those “tired of life.” A related issue is whether legalization of assisted suicide or euthanasia for even a restricted class of individuals (such as the terminally ill) places us on a slippery slope to accepting euthanasia in cases that many of us—at least now—consider questionable or objectionable, for example, the nonvoluntary euthanasia of incompetent patients who physicians deem to have an unacceptable quality of life.
The recent self-immolation suicide of a prominent lawyer raises questions about the motives for such acts.
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
Here’s a story to make you go all googly-eyed like Cookie Monster: Two of the trailing candidates in the GOP primary for the Senate in Missouri, Austin Petersen and Tony Monetti, have been trying to strike a deal to use polling of support and name recognition to see which of them should drop out of the race in order to take on the frontrunner Josh Hawley. But Monetti is blowing the deal because he insists that the poll include a push-poll type question asking respondents if they would vote for a candidate even if he “does not believe in God,” a question aimed squarely at Monetti who is apparently agnostic. Petersen is, like, no.
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
Don’t freak out, but Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, tasked with leading the federal government’s responses to deadly pandemics, has just up and quit. The Post:
Ziemer’s last day was Tuesday, the same day a new Ebola outbreak was declared in Congo. He is not being replaced.
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
Alright, stop. Everyone just STOP. There are people drinking hydrogen peroxide to cure headaches and Alzheimer’s because some health-guru-dingbat told them to on YouTube, to the point where government health officials have to tell people NOT to do this.
The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.
Susan Gerbic interviews political scientist Joseph Uscinski in the run-up to CSICon 2018, who says, “Conspiracy theories are in many ways a battle between insiders and outsiders over truth.”
Speaking of which, conspiracy theories are now bubbling around the left about the assault allegations against New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, which Gaby Del Valle at The Outline says is “indicative of a larger pattern of #resistance liberals prioritizing politics over real women’s lives.”