Faith and health

Steve Benen points to a new Time article claiming positive benefits for ones health through faith.

The problem with this sort of claim, of course, is the complete absence of real evidence. See here for stuff I've written on this topic before, and here.

Pretty random thing

A student that I had last year, who I genuinely like, came by randomly Friday and asked me, "What do evolutionists think happens after we die?"

After I corrected his notion that all believers in sound biology are necessarily non-believers in an afterlife, I used the frequent parallel between "before you were born" and "after you die" to try to explain what it means to lose consciousness.

By coincidence, Sunday, I read this article in SciAm: "Never Say Die - Why We Can't Imagine Death".

Today, I saw this and giggled.

The Importance of Skepticism

When I am asked by my Christian friends how I can reject the historicity of the Gospels, I am reminded of the story of Ronald Edwin Hunkeler, the young boy who would later be depicted as a possessed child in The Exorcist book and movie.

About a year and a half ago, I strong-armed my wife into agreeing to watch The Exorcist with me. I was falling asleep about an hour into it, while she was starting to get frightened, and used the excuse of my non-interest to turn it off. I can remember her mentioning at some time that the demonic voices and sounds in the movie were from some "real" exorcisms, added for authenticity and scare effect; I'd heard this before. I can also remember people talking about how this movie, based on the novel of the same name, was derived from a true story. Now, this is where the title of my post starts to come in.