After posting that video of a shocked Harold Camping refusing to give an interview, I was beginning to feel sorry for him. He seemed confused and crestfallen at the idea his buddy Jesus didn't come down to slaughter 99.9999% of the human race. Truly, a sad day for all of us. So rather than admit he's an old fuddy-duddy with a bullshit math formula, Harold instead suggests that the "spiritual" Apocalypse has ...

A fan of the site sent me this Buddhist exchange that I had to say something about: Curious Buddhist: I have an odd question which was raised by a friend, who was asking me questions about Buddhism. They wanted to know how Buddhism deals with the concept of evolution? Are Buddhists creationists? Our teachings don't seem to deal with such matters and I was rather at a loss as to how to answer them. Lama Shen ...

It takes a special kind of scumbag to be a psychic. Seriously. I mean, your job is basically to manipulate people who are at a low point in their lives. Lonely, sad, desperate and terribly uneducated people are seduced by these charlatans intent on bilking them out of their hard earned money. It's easy to feel judgmental about the suckers, like the case of "Jane Doe", defrauded to the tune of 250,000 dollar ...

I can't imagine the kind of terror I would experience if I was a woman and suddenly was faced with a complication in my pregnancy at a Catholic Hospital. The Church's dogma concerning abortion is one that causes the misery and death of countless women, all because they're convinced babies are all miracles of a male God, and conclude abortionists are worse than child molesters (you can't rape what doesn't ex ...

If you're a regular podcast listener, you might remember a show I did a few weeks back on The Lorne Trottier Science Symposium, and I talked at length about one speaker, Dr. David Gorski (who looks a lot like the guy with glasses from ER) who's busy fighting superstition on his blog, Science-Based Medicine. David specializes in breast cancer, and over the years has constantly battled the dangers of pseudosc ...

  What's the harm in a little superstition? Ask all the people who listened to an energy peddling "holy man" and ended up worm food. These were folks who received advanced warning from serious scientists, and still chose to believe a man who managed to convince himself he could speak directly to the spirit of the volcano. You also have to love how "Islamic" Indonesians are. It's obvious elements of the ...

Of all the pervasive superstitious traditions, the most popular has to be astrology; I can't think of one American or Canadian newspaper that doesn't have a section devoted to this nonsense. Like an immature religion, astrology makes a series of bold claims which have been shown, time and time again, to be based on nothing more than fantasy. That hasn't stopped millions of suckers, however, from believing t ...

Another tragedy in the name of superstition: A four-month-old baby is dead and 10 other people are injured in the small town of La Verriere, west of Paris, France after they jumped out of their apartment's third-storey window after believing to have seen the devil. The story is still a bit of a mess, but it goes something like this: in a crowded appartment, a bunch of naive superstitious dummies mistook the ...

Do you sometimes feel like Western religions have a monopoly on idiocy? Well, the good news is all beliefs based on superstition are equally dumb. Buddhist monks in China are currently undertaking a 500-mile pilgrimage that will have them crawling on their knees in prostration to whatever make-believe deity they've somehow managed to worship. "They will crawl and then every third step they will stop and bow ...

Here's the deal: you can forcibly rape hundreds of children, beat them, mistreat them, and fuck them up for the rest of their lives and keep your job, but if you so much as help one woman have an abortion, you're automatically excommunicated. It's a harsh lesson Sister Margret McBride recently learned when she was punished for allowing a woman, who was on the verge of death due to complications with her pre ...