7 August 2023
As a reminder of what we covered in my last article on the Global Flourishing movement, also called ∑±, it's a new group setup in Auckland recently by a member of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. The group claims to be aligned with skepticism, humanism and rationalism, but appears to have some concerning characteristics that make it look less like a group of skeptically-minded people, and more like a cult - at least to me.
15 May 2023
A Manual for Creating Atheists, Peter Boghossian, 2013, Pitchstone Press.
27 February 2023
If you live in Aotearoa/New Zealand, which most of our readers do, it's time for the 5 yearly census.
9 January 2023
Skeptics, rationalists, atheists, freethinkers and other secular folk often encounter an annoying rhetorical device when discussing politics, ethics or history with religious people. If conversation turns to some atrocity or scandal committed by adherents of some religion, members of religion often deny that it has anything to do with their “real” religion. Pedophile priests are “not real Catholics,” suicide bombers are “not real Muslims,” and so on.
31 May 2021
Over the next couple of months I'm hoping to visit a few interesting religious groups, to get a feel for them - what they believe, how they act, who attends their events. So, all being well, after this week's report into Christian Science you can expect to hear about the Theosophical Society, Druids, and maybe more!
14 April 2021
On the news of Prince Philip's death, my thoughts go out not just to the British Royal Family, but also to the members of the Prince Philip Movement in Vanuatu. This movement, a very small religious group, believe that Prince Philip is the son of a local mountain god who traveled overseas and married a powerful woman. The group has been described as a cargo cult, and there's even a suggestion that Philip was John Frum's brother - John Frum is a mythical American military man, around which a cargo cult religion started in the late 1930s.
1 November 2018
In 2005 The Kansas State Board decided to permit the teaching of Intelligent Design (a form of Creationism) as an alternative to evolution.
26 March 2017
The NZ Census asks a question of respondents about Religious Affiliation. Historically, the only response available for non-believers has been "No Religion". NZ Stats have now added several categories in time for the next Census in 2018.
1 May 2011
The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values. Sam Harris. 2010. Free Press, New York. ISBN 978-1-4391-7121-9 Reviewed by Martin Wallace.
1 August 2005
Since I wrote my piece (NZ Skeptic 75) based on Bruce Flamm's article in Skeptical Inquirer concerning a research paper on the efficacy of prayer, Dr Flamm has reported 'significant development'. Lest you jump to the conclusion that the authors, journal and university have acknowledged their serious error and have retracted the paper, be at once disabused. The significance of these developments, to my mind, is their minuscule and peripheral nature; nothing has really changed. One could reasonably grant a significant development to Wirth; he pleaded guilty to a 46-page indictment and is in jail for five years. Concerning the 'lead' author, Lobo, the journal later printed, at the bottom of the back page, an Erratum, that this name had been included 'in error'. Young researchers often complain that senior colleagues insist on their names appearing on papers unjustifiably. In the topsy-turvy world of this journal, people find their names put unknowingly on papers they have had nothing to do with!
1 August 2003
A Waikato University lecturer has been named on a website for Latter-Day Saints as anti-mormon.
1 May 2002
Aristotle's Books in Auckland has started a skeptics section of titles. Books debunking the New Age and religion in general are found there.
1 February 2000
I didn't wish to begin a debate about the issues surrounding religion in the 16th and 17th-century, nor would I ever wish to stop anyone from taking in interest in history. All I wanted to do was to point out that history is an academic discipline the same as any other, and it is dangerous to make pronouncements of such a dogmatic nature in the subject in which one has not been trained.
1 February 1997
The social vision associated with the name Walter Nash, or for present purposes Jack Marshall, has crumbled. The most secure and decent high culture, which flowered for some decades, is now on almost every measure except GNP in rapid decline2.
1 May 1995
Visitors to Fiji are still being told that village people have the hereditary ability to walk on white-hot stones. This is quite untrue (see Hot Footing it in Fiji,Skeptic 26). A tourist promotion video for airline passengers features the ceremony. It is pretty obvious to the discerning viewer that the stones are not white-hot, but how many tourists give more than a cursory glance?
1 February 1995
Lately -- my last few airline flights -- I've been listening to the in-flight comedy channels. This was how I discovered Bob Newhart and his monologues. These are things where he takes one side of a conversation and leaves you to imagine the rest. There's one that shows up quite often, where he takes one side of a conversation with Sir Walter Raleigh, who has just discovered tobacco and is sending eight tons of it over to England as an early sample.
1 November 1992
Are Skeptics pussy-footing around by not attacking the major source of superstition and pseudoscience -- religion?
1 August 1990
I have just got around to reading the article "Science vs Religion" in Skeptic No. 11, and am still wondering why it was written for such a journal (or was it?).
1 May 1989
"Do you believe in science or religion?" is a not uncommon question amongst layfolk caught in the crossfire between, for example, biological and cosmological evolution, and creationism. Creationism has made one largely unrecognised major inroad: it has managed to create a broad dichotomy in the public mind, which has on the whole responded according to the "two sides to every argument" sense of fair play and concomitantly cocked an ear to proponents of the "other view". It is my assertion, however, that the very issue of "'science vs religion" is as mythical as the charming creation-stories of many a mythology in that creationists are not at all representative of "religion" in its global sense.