1. Where are our baloney detectors?
(Paranormal/General)

...or? Yesterday the police in the Western Cape approached a psychic to find a missing child. How desperate and incompetent have theSAPD not become to venture into the field of psychics when shoulder...

2. Belief, God Genes, and the Findings of Science
(Religion/Atheism)

...the late Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould. According to Gould religion and science are two separate fields; he defines the relationship between the two as Non Overlapping Magisteria. Accordin...

3. Leading vaccine scaremonger debunked
(Medicine/General)

...on the vaccine-fearing, anti-establishment mood of the zeitgeist. The book tells parents what they desperately want to hear, and that has made it an overnight success. Dr. Robert Sears is perhaps one...

4. Next week, blasphemy gets its own holiday
(Religion/Atheism)

...rovocative title of the painting: “Jesus Does His Nails.” Blasphemous? Absolutely. Deliberately provocative? You bet. It is part of an upcoming art exhibit in Washington that will ma...

5. Child sacrifice and ritual murders rise in Uganda as famine looms
(Religion/General)

...e are not poor people paying for these rituals, they are the wealthy elite taking advantage of the desperate poor," said Binoga. "In January a 21-year-old woman was jailed for 16 months for ...

6. Science is just one gene away from defeating religion
(Religion/Atheism)

...eligious metaphor: "Man with all his noble qualities... with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system - with all these exalted powers - ...

7. Origin of the Specious: Race, lies and stereotypes in Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy
(Religion/General)

...lained. Schools are cagey and evasive at the mere mention of the word, and swiftly move on. It is deliberately buried. This is a religion which recruits by intentionally not setting out its beliefs. S...

8. Vatican rejects adoption of Italy's laws in historic shift
(Religion/General)

...ini and Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, the Vatican Secretary of State, Italian laws are automatically incorporated into the Vatican legal code. However the Treaty allowed for exceptions in cases where th...

9. God will, in fact, be mocked
(Religion/Atheism)

...excellent A History of God, to find out how that transition in God's personality takes place.At any rate, we can be clear that fear is the start of faith. Instead of fearing the terrors of existen...

10. On a wing and a prayer
(Religion/Enforced religion)

...all-time favourite proponent of rational thought - was always keen to note that 2 500 years after Hippocrates of Cos adopted an evidence-based approach to medicine, he is still celebrated for his effo...

11. "Atheist bus" more like a bandwagon on highway to hell
(Religion/Atheism)

...eems that those atheists who shade somewhat towards agnosticism prevailed, with their slightly more moderate "There is probably no God ... " As it happens, I was invited by The Guardian blog...

12. SA a country of God - Zuma
(Religion/Enforced religion)

...to find its identity in South Africa. Moral values "I believe the time has come for the religious fraternity to identify its role and place in our constitutional democracy. "I have a feeling...

13. Sylvia Browne
(Paranormal/General)

Sylvia Browne . It's a name which causes strong reactions in a lot of people. To her fans, who believe that she is a "true psychic medium," she is a down-to-earth, spiritually deep woma

14. "Child-witches" of Nigeria seek refuge
(Religion/General)

...e few cases of children stigmatised by witchcraft. But since then the numbers have grown at an alarming rate and have reached an estimated 15,000 in Akwa Ibom state alone. Some Nigerians blame the in...

15. Sarah Palin's church : Pray away the Gay
(Religion/General)

...r about six years. Palin’s conservative Christian views have energized that part of the GOP electorate, which was lukewarm to John McCain’s candidacy before he named her as his vice presid...

16. Shofar Christian cult mobilizes in the Western Cape
(Religion/Shofar Shogood)

...s fair right? Since the damaging days of the Dark Age, mankind in enlightened cultures has tried to seperate religion from as many aspects of public life as possible. We learnt in the Dark Ages what h...

17. Anger over Satanism lesson
(Religion/General)

... School on the East Rand are upset about the life orientation syllabus, which provides 17 pages of elaborate information about Satanism in a textbook. A parent fumed on Thursday over the "absolut...

18. An Atheist Manifesto
(Religion/Atheism)

...destroyed by change. Parents lose their children and children their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without knowing that it...

19. Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill
(Science/General)

...e network of human relationships is wider and more complex, and just as important to survival. The corporate chairman throws out a sarcastic remark and those who "get" it laugh, smile, and g...

20. Quackery quashed, but Rath’s legacy lives
(Medicine/General)

...g, Rath’s fraudulent legacy continues here — that of wholesale preying on the sick and desperate by ped lars of so-called Aids cures. In that sense, Rath was probably a spent force long be...

21. Lizards make adaptive change
(Science/General)

...e lizards developed brand new structures, a part of their gut called a 'cecal valve' (which separates the chambers). No one had ever documented that kind of change before," Irschick said....

22. Put a Little Science in Your Life
(Science/General)

...ly come to believe: our educational system fails to teach science in a way that allows students to integrate it into their lives. Allow me a moment to explain. When we consider the ubiquity of cel...

23. The Neuroscience of Illusion
(Science/General)

...al Correlate Society recently announced the winners of its annual Best Visual Illusion contest. To celebrate the event, Mind Matters invited Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik, two neuroscie...

24. Fossil reveals oldest live birth
(Science/General)

... by its umbilical cord. The find, reported in Nature, pushes back the emergence of this reproductive strategy by some 200 million years. Until now, scientists thought creatures from these times were...

25. Karma comedians
(Religion/Humour)

...eople with disabilities. What you sow, you have to reap." Worryingly, though all this lunacy generated the ridicule it deserved, the last few years have seen a spate of new age "self-help&...

26. Teacher tortures, kills boy
(Religion/Enforced religion)

...old AFP. The teacher also failed to take the boy to hospital after he fell ill and his condition deteriorated, he said. Police said a post-mortem report also confirmed physical torture as the cause ...

27. Scientists rally against creationist 'superstition'
(Religion/Evolution vs Creationism)

...ot; he said. "I don't think society can be complacent when ideas which are unsound are perpetrated. We are trying not to compromise people's faith views, other than where they are absol...

28. The Mind-Altering Role of Incense in Religion
(Religion/General)

... that are formed by blood connections, religion has always been a way for unrelated individuals to cooperate, to depend on each other. As such, religion has always functioned as way of taking disparat...

29. Teenager faces prosecution for calling Scientology 'cult'
(Religion/General)

...e also protested outside another Scientology building in Tottenham Court Road which is policed by a separate force, the Metropolitan police, who have never tried to stop us using the word cult. "...

30. Is Comrades upsetting God?
(Religion/General)

...inal farewell. "On June 16, I will run the Comrades distance in Cape Town and will enjoy and celebrate Youth Day with my Christian friends. "May Comrades soon be dead and buried! Christ wi...