News and Links for Atheists: “The Secret Knowledge is just ignorance by another name.”

The Secret Knowledge is just ignorance by another name

Meaning that body of information not everyone has, that body known only to those few people who had the good sense to go off the beaten path and seek it. It is information you’ll never see in your “newspapers” or “network news” or any other place overly concerned with verifiable “facts” and reliable “sources.” It will not come to you through a university “study,” peer-reviewed “article,” renowned “expert,” government “agency” or any other such traditional bastion of authority.

I have to agree, in general.

Your Brain Is Primed To Reach False Conclusions

But, as Offit’s story suggests, the fact that a child became sick after a vaccine is not strong evidence that the immunization was to blame. Psychologists have a name for the cognitive bias that makes us prone to assigning a causal relationship to two events simply because they happened one after the other: the “illusion of causality.” A study recently published in the British Journal of Psychology investigates how this illusion influences the way we process new information. Its finding: Causal illusions don’t just cement erroneous ideas in the mind; they can also prevent new information from correcting them.

Myths Debunked

Religious Right Activists Love To Spread False Information About The Separation Of Church And State. Here Are Ten Rebuttals:

Biology Professor Says Creationist Magazine Misquoted Him To Perpetuate Lies Against Evolution

This one is both for ex-Witnesses and atheists, really.

A biology professor is speaking out, demanding an apology and calling for an end to attempts to “perpetuate lies against evolution” after a statement from him was taken out of context in a creationist article in Awake!, a Jehovah’s Witness publication. He says that a portion of his statement was picked from the whole, leaving a completely different impression from his actual statement.

What? The Watchtower Society misrepresent someone’s point of view? I mean, they’ve been doing that for over a century, so why assume they’d stop now? Wait, that’s totally consistent. Sorry.

The dinosaur deniers

So now apparently it’s a thing amongst the devoutly religious not only to believe that evolution is false, but that dinosaurs never existed.

College Students Are Abandoning Religion In Record Numbers

More than 1,000 Ontario teens potentially exposed to measles at Toronto Christian concert, health officials warn

Crows Understand Analogies