Last week we debuted a new weekly column by CFI West director (and actor and comedian) Jim Underdown, Ask the Atheist, an opportunity for believers to get some straight answers along with some jokes, like all good secularist blogs, ahem ahem.
Since Jim is way out in Los Angeles, maybe he can stop by BOTI Studios, and take part in some past life regression:
In past life regression, participants view what they believe are memories from their past lives or incarnations. … More closely related to the field of psychology than religion, practitioners nonetheless spend much of their time discussing the soul. With a strong spiritual-not-religious sentiment among young urbanites, the practice is gaining steam around Los Angeles.
This is a pretty puffy piece on what is obviously nonsense, but at least they included this:
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) doesn’t have an official statement on past life regression, but a former APA medical director called the practice “pure quackery.” …
“During this mental state, the hypnotized person is vulnerable to get false memories from the hypnotist,” [ethics professor Gabriel] Andrade said, and these false memories can traumatize a person. Past life regression and its association with reincarnation veer too closely into religion.
“Doctors are entitled to their private religious beliefs, but they should keep them out of their medical practice,” he said.
On a Comedy Central show I’d never heard of (which should tell you nothing because I am deeply out of touch), Jordan Peterson seems to do a weird 180 on the Cakeshop case and whether it’s okay for a person to discriminate against LGBTQ customers because of religious objections. The thing is, it’s not clear to me which thing he’s saying was “wrong.” Oh, who cares.
Vatican diplomat Monsignor Carlo Capella is sentenced to five years in prison by a Vatican court for accessing child pornography.
A pregnant woman in Arizona, who discovers her child will not survive to full term and is no longer growing, tries to fill a prescription to induce a miscarriage, but the Walgreens pharmacist decides his personal beliefs about what women can and cannot do with their bodies are more important, and refuses to fill it. Walgreens allows pharmacists to do this, as does Arizona law.
Derren Brown, an illusionist and mentalist, takes on faith healing in a new Netflix special.
Thanks to the new “right to try” law, we can look forward to desperate patients trying to come up with $300,000 to fork over to companies like Brainstorm Cell Therapeutics, Inc. for treatments that may or may not be safe or effective at all, because now no one has to check.
The Pentagon tells Pastor Robert Jeffress that he may not use military insignia to advertise his church event.
Koko the gorilla, who seemed to be able to fluently express herself through sign language, perhaps wasn’t as precise with her communication as is commonly reported, and as Charles Seif at Slate notes, by failing to openly discuss Koko’s, um, quirks (an obsession with nipples), we miss out on valuable insights about animal cognition.
In a review of the book The Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things, Alex Berezow calls it “one-sided fear mongering that won’t die.”
For filing under “things that are not UFOs but are actually just clouds,” we have something called a “roll cloud,” which, as the National Weather Service explains, is a “low, horizontal tube-shaped arcus cloud associated with a thunderstorm gust front.”
Christian television “personality” Rick Wiles is deeply concerned about not just his own precious bodily fluids, but about those of the forty-seven bazillion babies slaughtered every second by the zombie-communist-Satanists at Planned Parenthood.
I’ll tell you where [the babies’ blood] goes. It goes down the drain, into the sewer system and the blood of those babies is running through your town’s sewer, under your street. The sewage pipes in your city [are] carrying the blood, the guts, the brains, the tissue of all the babies murdered in your city today. It’s going right into your city’s sewer system. You’re actually drinking — you’re drinking the babies’ blood, being recycled and going right back into the city’s water supply. Cannibalism.
Wow. Life just keeps getting more complicated.
Quote of the Day
Less a quote than a recommendation. Netflix’s kids’ show, The Who Was? Show, is really brilliant and hilarious, and in one episode, Galileo sings a song about how everyone around him in the 17th century is a dumb-dumb for believing in things like evil spirits, witches, and the flat Earth. Note how he could be singing this song in the 21st century and wouldn’t have to change a single complaint.
* * *
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.
Follow CFI on Twitter: @center4inquiry
Got a tip for the Heresy? Send it to press(at)centerforinquiry.net!