Derren Brown – Experiments … the secret of luck

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Derren Brown, the UK-based illusionist, mentalist, painter, writer and skeptic has just finished a TV series called “The Experiments”. The last episode, “the secret of luck” was last night, so it is that I am now blogging about, but first, a bit of background. Derren is well-known for some truly amazing illusions and feats of … Read more

Claim: “Fundamentalist Atheists are … angry, anti-intellectual, unloving, judgmental, etc…”

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Bob Kellemen of RPM Ministries has blogged an article over at everyday christian living that is a good encapsulation of the numerous myths surrounding non-belief, so lets take a look. [Note to Bob … I dropped a link to this into your blog, so do feel free to reply in the comments section below] He … Read more

Homophobic Bigotry from the oppressed Ahmadiyya community

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I’ve been having an ongoing dialog with several members of the highly oppressed Ahmadiyya community. You might wonder, “Who?”. OK, let me explain, they claim to be Islamic, but most Orthodox Muslims consider them to be heretical and non-Muslim for a number of reasons (if curious, click here to find out more from Wikipedia). The result … Read more

Claim: “You can’t criticize my belief, you know nothing about it”

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When debating with some believers the other day, I encountered a rather common claim. The context was a conversation regarding end-times in which some nonsense was being spouted about the Antichrist. I was rather astonished to find that the “proof” on the table consisted of the symbols on the US dollar. I asked the direct … Read more

Hubble directly observes the disc around a black hole

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An international team of astronomers has used a new technique to study the bright disc of matter surrounding a faraway black hole. Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, combined with the gravitational lensing effect of stars in a distant galaxy, the team measured the disc’s size and studied the colors (and hence the temperatures) of … Read more

Claim: There is no such thing as an Atheist

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Vasko Kohlmayer has written an article in the Washington Post in which he claims that nobody can really be an atheist and that anybody who claims they are is being intellectually inconsistent and also partial to cognitive dissonance. OK, lets take a look at what he wrote. According to the dictionary, an atheist is “one … Read more