I was sick yesterday. I don’t feel much better today, but someone has to bring you these all-important links. No, no, it’s fine. I’m sure I’ll make it through the day. Somehow.
Our boss Robyn Blumner was the guest on the Secular Jihadists podcast discussing our Secular Rescue program, which they call a “lifesaving, herAoic initiative.”
We cheered on the FDA for putting out a warning about, ahem, “vaginal rejuvenation” products, and now they’re also cracking down on the use of cesium chloride by naturopaths to treat cancer, which it doesn’t.
Marc Fisher and Isaac Stanley-Becker at the Post report on the conspiracy-fueled “QAnon” group, birthed on 4chan, based on the “insights” of an alleged rogue member of the “deep state,” and ferociously loyal to Trump.
Not content to cause further torment to the families of Sandy Hook massacre victims, Alex Jones also wants to squeeze Sandy Hook families suing him for defamation for $100,000.
Pew Research has a new study on why folks decide to go to church or not. Fewer than a third of the people who don’t attend church services cite a lack of belief as the reason. Most non-congregants either “practice faith in other ways” (37 percent) or simply haven’t found the church that suits them (23 percent).
The latest issue of the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality is all about irreligion and unspirituality.
Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania name a total of 71 priests and other church members who have been accused of sexually abusing children. Try not to throw up while you consider that fact.
Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at FiveThirtyEight report that insurance companies push folks to Catholic-owned hospitals for treatment and don’t tell patients that the care they can receive is limited by Catholic dogma.
Agnostic philosophy professor Stephen Asma has a new book called Why We Need Religion, profiled here by Cathy Lynn Grossman at RNS.
Also at RNS, Yonat Shimron looks at the new book From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity by political scientist Michele Margolis.
Richard Dawkins says he is working on two new books, one on atheism for teens and another for kids, so of course everyone needs to panic about atheist indoctrination of THE CHILDREN.
Folks are invited to partake in this survey from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga all about “the concealment of nonreligious identity.”
A 12-year-old mystery about a severed leg at a country club in Connecticut is solved, revealing the goings-on of a cult called The Work. The leg belonged to an “apostle,” Paul Sweetman, “who needed to be killed because he was hurting his wife Joanne Sweetman,” according to the perp, and that “God would have wanted them to kill Sweetman.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders lies about the media messing up surveillance of Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s.
Dinesh D’souza’s d’structive d’nial and d’ception is amplified by D’nald d’president.
Quote of the Day
Hadley Freeman at The Guardian reacts to the NYT profile of Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop snake-oil empire:
It is always satisfying when bullshit is exposed in the cold light. It is not surprising that Paltrow should be so puzzled by the media’s quirky adherence to fact-checking, given that her reaction to Donald Trump – the ultimate anti-facts, anti-quality media, anti-science bullshit-peddler – winning the 2016 election was: “It’s such an exciting time to be an American because we are at this amazing inflection point and everything is kind of up in the air.” Everything including caring about facts, presumably. It is but a short hop from insisting science is wrong in saying your vagina shouldn’t be steamed to celebrating Trump, because both rely on people being more sure of their opinion than factual reports.
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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.