A judge in Texas has ordered a psychic to pay a couple $6.5 million for the harm she caused them by telling police that a mass grave containing 25 to 30 bodies was on their property.

But the major question is why police would act on the basis of information provided by psychics. Surely there must be someone in the police department who could have pointed out that psychics are useless people who prey on the gullible and desperate?

This is another consequence of the magical thinking promoted by religion.

While perceptions and treatment of the LGBT community by the general public have undoubtedly improved in recent years, they still feel some stigma, as a new Pew survey reveals. [Read more…]

When the Boy Scouts of America changed its policies last month to allow gay students, there were dire warnings by opponents of the move of a mass exodus of troops sponsored by religious groups such as the Catholic Church, Mormons, and evangelicals. Has that happened? [Read more…]

One of the reasons for my view that religion is a bad thing that I would like to see disappear is because it encourages people to believe in magical thinking and thus makes them easy prey to all manner of charlatans who take advantage of their gullibility. [Read more…]

Why can’t Jews and Muslims get along politically in the Middle East when the two religions clearly have so much in common when it comes to trampling on the rights of women? [Read more…]

There is more information on the atheist monument to be placed in the courthouse grounds in Bradford County in Florida that I wrote about earlier. [Read more…]

I wrote recently about the children in some Ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools who spend most of their time studying the Torah and other religious materials and very little time on regular secular education, leaving them woefully unprepared to work in the modern world. As a result of that post, I became interested in the question of to what extent religious groups can deny access to secular education for their children. [Read more…]