Time to be on the lookout for something called the American Charter of Freedom of Religion and Conscience, a kind of religious-liberty-contract-with-America-accord developed by Christian scholars, and which Frederick Clarkson at Rewire says “is marred by efforts to slant the meaning of religious freedom towards conservative interests in the culture war, and to silence advocates for equality and social justice in the name of civility.”
A referendum to ban same-sex marriage in Romania fails due to lack of interest. No, seriously. Turnout was too low for the vote to even count.
Hardline Islamists in Pakistan are making big threats about what they’ll do if Asia Bibi, currently looking at the death penalty for blasphemy, is given any leniency.
Russell M. Nelson, the 94-year-old president of the LDS Church and “prophet,” says that using the word “Mormons” is “a major victory for Satan.” Which makes me think that Satan needs loftier goals. Anyway, the prophet sayeth:
When the Savior clearly states what the name of his church should be, and even precedes his declaration with, ‘Thus shall my church be called,’ he is serious. And if we allow nicknames to be used and adopt or even sponsor those nicknames ourselves, he is offended. … It is a correction. It is the command of the Lord.
Oh, and this bit from the article is great:
The entry about the church in the Associated Press Stylebook, which many news outlets follow, remains unchanged.
Another point for Satan!
In Skeptical Inquirer, Denise Sutherland is not messing around when she says that multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes are not just sketchy, but straight-up dangerous:
Cult specialist and counselor Steve Hassan defines “any group that uses unethical mind control to pursue its ends—whether religious, political, or commercial—as a destructive cult.” On this basis, my view tallies with his—MLMs are cults. [ … ] We’re all at risk. Just being smart isn’t enough protection. MLMs are everywhere, infiltrating your social groups and communities, both online and off.
The Nuns on the Bus are back, touring the country in strategically chosen areas where they can have an impact on the midterms, targeting Republicans who voted for the tax overhaul and to kill the Affordable Care Act. Their last stop is Mar-a-Lago on November 2.
Harriet Hall takes the American Academy of Family Physicians to task for embracing pseudoscience:
Every month, [the AAFP publishes] a monograph on a topic important to family physicians. I have subscribed for as long as I can remember, and I thought I could rely on it to keep me up-to-date with evidence-based information. I can no longer trust it. In their recent monograph on Musculoskeletal Therapies, there is a whole section (constituting a whopping 1/4 of the material presented) devoted to acupuncture, dry needling, and cupping! One-fourth of what they think family physicians should know about treating musculoskeletal conditions is non-evidence-based alternative medicine. This is not acceptable.
Jennifer Ouellette at Ars Technica reports on research showing that some of those who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD may have perished more quickly and painlessly than once believed. Rather than asphyxiating on smoke and ash, it looks like many of them just had their precious bodily fluids vaporized and their brains boiled. So, you know, you can feel good about that.
WKFR in Michigan covers the good works of the Atheists Alliance Helping the Homeless in Kalamazoo.
If you’ve seen a viral video with a woman pouring water with bleach on “manspreaders” on a subway, you should know that it’s fake. It’s from the Kremlin-owned In the Now, and it’s just one more example of Russia’s attempts to make us all hate each other.
Consumer Reports advises against some alt-med treatments like ear candling, but gets wishy-washy about things like acupuncture.
A bunch of speckled lights in the night sky over a lit-up resort town during a thunderstorm are obviously from an alien spaceship and no other explanation is possible.
Popular Mechanics has a feature on the search for Bigfoot called “Science Meets Legend.” I haven’t read it, but I have to assume that it goes like this: Science meets legend, science is unimpressed, science looks for a way out of conversation, science slips out while legend is in the bathroom.
Quote of the Day
The science team at FiveThirtyEight do a chat on the IPCC report about how screwed we all are by global warming. There’s a lot of interesting discussion on mitigation versus adaptation, and there’s this bit from Maggie Koerth-Baker:
The impacts — as this report makes clear — will disproportionately going to fall on the global poor. But the global rich, while we won’t be unaffected, won’t be necessarily living in a Mad Max dystopian hellscape, either. It’s really, really easy for us to basically be history’s assholes here.
We talk about how we’ll explain this to our grandchildren. But we’re really, at a certain level, talking about how we’ll explain this to somebody else’s grandchildren. Our grandchildren will continue to be the frog in the slowly warming pot, while those other people’s grandkids die.
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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.