astrology
gboustead | January 14, 2011
Yesterday, I went on Facebook. Not an unusual activity for someone my age. Or for someone my parents’ age, which I still haven’t gotten used to. But that’s not the point of this.
Several of my “friends” had statuses mentioning "Ophiuchus", whatever that is. One girl’s panicked reaction to this unpronounceable phenomenon had received enough attention to elicit ten of my peers to "comment" on it.
So, I did what any self-respecting person would do. I decided if nineteen-year-old girls were fascinated by it, it was probably just as important as Justin Beiber and Twilight.
But when I went on…
gregladen | January 14, 2011Sometimes, that is what I think news reporters do. There are occasions when you know the story and have the opportunity to watch them spew out incorrect information. Sometimes you do not know the story but you can watch them getting it wrong and see that happening while they appear to remain oblivious to their own clumsy ineptitude.
Several years ago Minnesotans watched in horror as the bodies of a dozen kids where pulled out of a cave where they had suffocated, a cave in a Mississippi River bluff in Saint Paul. Or was it six kids? Or was it a mine and not a cave? Or was it eight kids?…
razib | December 10, 2009A friend pointed me to a new Pew survey, Many Americans Not Dogmatic About Religion. It shows the general finding that though Americans are a religious people, they're moderately ecumenical in their practices and beliefs. I was concerned in particular though with the resurgence of supernatural beliefs with the decline of institutional religious orthodoxy.
The back story to this is that many psychologists posit that humans have an innate predisposition toward supernatural beliefs because of the cognitive biases we're hardwired with. For example, it isn't a coincidence that almost all human…