Why religious people can’t ‘keep it to themselves’

There’s this recurring comment I keep hearing from people, mostly people who are primarily concerned with political issues who aren’t very well acquainted with religion. They’re not necessarily atheists, but not really believers either. A good word to describe them is apatheists. They really just don’t care about religion either way and they complain about Mormons knocking on their door and so on. “Why can’t they just keep their beliefs to themselves?” they ask. Here is just one recent example of this, a superficially reasonable response to the Vatican’s comments about Avatar.

“Super Earth” Not So Super After All

At least not for life, that is.

CoRoT-7b is the first rocky exoplanet to be discovered. It’s only 480 light years away, which is about 2,821,740,179,128,132 miles.

OK, that’s kind of boring since all stars are really fucking far away. But Space.com is reporting some new interesting details about CoRoT-7b.

More Jesus Pareidolia

Jesus is appearing on naan bread now. I’m very excited about this because there is a bit more detail in this one than in this one or this one and definitely more than this one.

But it still looks more like Al Jourgensen than whatever Jesus might have looked like. Observe:

Macy & Me

Here you will find the transcripts of a tragic love story between an alleged Senegalese millionaire refugee and me. This story is ongoing.

Antivaxers Get Litigious

So if anyone’s reading this on the actual website and not through a reader, you might have noticed that I have a few of these ‘widget’ things on the right side here. The first one is for a campaign by Sense About Science in support of science writer Simon Singh in his ongoing legal battles with the British Chiropractic Association.

You can click on it to read more about Singh’s case, but the gist of it is that he said that the BCA happily promotes bogus treatments, because they do, and the BCA sued him. This all happened in the UK, where libel law is completely ass-backwards and the burden of proof is on the defendant(s) to prove that they’re innocent, instead of on the prosecution to prove guilt.