Road Trip!
12th September 2022
This Friday, Bronwyn and I will be setting off on a road trip to Hamilton to visit the Mormon temple there, as it’s recently been renovated and is currently open to visitors for the first time in 64 years. I’m really looking forward to getting to see the lavish interior before it’s “dedicated” and becomes inaccessible to us heathens again. Given that we’ll be near Auckland, Craig has organised a Skeptics in the Pub event for this Friday night. Details are below, and we’d love to see you there!
This week I document my latest web creation, an app that will choose a god for you to pray to in times of need - and hopefully manage to explain why I think this app might be helpful to skepticism. Bronwyn looks at cacao ceremonies, which to me seem like a teetotal version of the much more dangerous, and trippy, ayahuasca ceremony. I despair at the Herald’s decision to reprint an article about “auras”, and despair some more at the article’s Facebook comments. Given the very recent rise to power of King Charles the Third in the UK, I’ve tried to summarise some of the ways in which our new Head of State is a bit bonkers.
Finally, Daniel Ryan returns with a brief summary of Irlen in New Zealand, and what I think is a fascinating interview he conducted through emails with someone who has been diagnosed with Irlen Syndrome. I always find it useful to be able to get a perspective on the thought processes of everyday people who believe in pseudoscience, and I think Dan’s interview does a good job of accessing this in a way that manages to not be combative or argumentative.
