Definitions, Data, and Poverty

‘Infographics’ seem to be the hot thing lately and they really, really bother me. I am usually fine with funny ones, but too often they portray a warped view of the world which is designed for the advancement of an agenda. I may even agree with that agenda, but whenever I see summations with percentages […]

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Mission Drift, Conflation, and Food For Thought

In my last post, I took issue with the a number of problems with a particular straw man complaint that organized skepticism is too narrow. As part of that post, I wrote: …skepticism, secularism, and atheism are different things. Among them, secularism has the closest ties with liberal ideology, but even secularism is not liberalism. […]

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What “Matters”

I am doing some more ‘navel gazing’, but in a very real sense, it is of a skeptical nature. Given the name of this blog space, it should be no surprise that my primary goals include refuting or correcting misinformation. Well, I found some more of the kind I have written about many times here: […]

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Are Atheists More Compassionate or Prosocial Than Highly Religious People?

I hope I grabbed your attention with that title, but do not expect to find the answer to that question here. What I am going to discuss today is a study that many people seem to think answers that question, but it doesn’t. As I noted in my last post, the study I’ll be discussing […]

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Science and Spin Are Very Bad Bedfellows

It seems that the best motivation for me (to write) is frustration. A press release by UC Berkeley about a study that was recently published on the relationships among religiosity, compassion, and prosocial behavior has been making the rounds over the last couple of days, waved by proud atheists as evidence of superiority and bashed […]

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