At the start of December, I traveled to Buenos Aires to begin the first leg of a journey following Arizona State University’s Origins Project on a cruise to the Antarctic Peninsula. I had booked the trip in order to participate in their event “Science and Adventure in Antarctica“, and ended up dragging my dad with me for […]
Increasingly, when laws restrict Christians from imposing their childish beliefs upon others, or practicing their bigotry, they claim to be persecuted. Recently this cultivated whining was in the spotlight, when Kim Davis was jailed for actually persecuting gays when she refused to sign their marriage licenses. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee even tweeted at the time that her jailing was […]
The Republican Party is overtly anti-science. The current group of candidates for President of the United States is comprised of people who reject reason and evidence in favor of detrimental myths and superstition. Our Founding Fathers deliberately made the United States a secular nation—something that was unprecedented at the time—and yet today’s Republicans pander to the lowest common denominator of our […]
Today, Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will travel to Kentucky to support Kim Davis at an “#ImWithKim Liberty Rally”. His support of a woman who refused to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples (due to her belief in a homophobic deity) shows that once again, Huckabee and the Christian right have gotten it all wrong.
In June this year, California Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 277, a law that made vaccines mandatory, eliminating the right to abstain due to religious or conscientious reasons. Now, only medical exemptions are granted. While this law is undoubtedly great, it has been highly polarizing, for reasons that are honestly difficult to understand.
A year after he robbed a store and then assaulted a police officer, Michael Brown has a permanent plaque in Ferguson, Missouri. While police brutality is a serious issue, the fact is that there is absolutely no evidence that Brown’s killing had anything to do with race, or with overzealous law enforcement…
Despite the advances that we have made in our understanding of the natural world, a shocking number of people still are fleeced by charlatans regularly. With everything that we know, people such as Deepak Chopra and Dr. Oz continue to spout off meaningless woo—and inexplicably are not regarded as the crazy people that they truly […]
Yesterday, yet another tragic attack left four Marines and a Navy sailor dead in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A 24 year-old Kuwaiti named Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez fired more than a dozen rounds at a Marine Corps recruiting center, wounding a Marine. Abdulazeez then drove seven miles to a Navy Operations Support Center, where he rammed his car through a […]
Unsurprisingly, the hateful Westboro Baptist Church is upset about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to be married. The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is comprised largely of the family of its now-dead founder, Fred Phelps. This group of people pickets controversial funerals, holding up signs that say […]
Last weekend, Republican Presidential candidate Ben Carson spoke at the Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington, D.C. and mentioned a debate he had with an atheist (whom Carson would not name). Then, Carson— a retired neurosurgeon— displayed an utter lack of understanding of biology