Voltaire2
Voltaire2's JournalFreedom From Religion Foundation to broadcast new, weekly talk show
The Freedom From Religion Foundation will broadcast a weekly television show beginning today.
“Freethought Matters” will be a half-hour talk show hosted by the foundation’s co-presidents, Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, and featuring notable “freethinking celebrities,” Gaylor said.
CBS affiliate WISC-TV Channel 3 will air the program at 11 p.m. Sundays with photojournalist Chris Johnson as the first guest. Johnson recently produced the book and film “A Better Life: 100 Atheists Speak Out on Joy & Meaning in a World Without God.”
The Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation was founded in 1978 to promote the separation of church and state and to educate others on atheism, and Gaylor said the show will work toward the same goals.
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/freedom-from-religion-foundation-to-broadcast-new-weekly-talk-show/article_2f2dcb4d-1848-5918-a762-56701e5533f2.html
Why Europes wars of religion put 40,000 witches to a terrible death
It was a terrifying phenomenon that continues to cast a shadow over certain parts of Europe even today. The great age of witch trials, which ran between 1550 and 1700, fascinates and repels in equal measure. Over the course of a century and a half, 80,000 people were tried for witchcraft and half of them were executed, often burned alive.
And then trials disappeared almost completely.
Their appearance was all the more strange because between 900 and 1400 the Christian authorities had refused to acknowledge that witches existed, let alone try someone for the crime of being one. This was despite the fact that belief in witches was common in medieval Europe, and in 1258 Pope Alexander IV had to issue a canon to prevent prosecutions.
But by 1550 Christian authorities had reversed their position, leading to a witch-hunt across Christendom. Many explanations have been advanced for what drove the phenomenon. Now new research suggests there is an economic explanation, one that has relevance to the modern day.
Economists Peter Leeson and Jacob Russ of George Mason University in Virginia argue that the trials reflected “non-price competition between the Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share”.
As competing Catholic and Protestant churches vied to win over or retain their followers, they needed to make an impact – and witch trials were the battleground they chose. Or, as the two academics put it in their paper, to be published in the new edition of the Economic Journal: “Leveraging popular belief in witchcraft, witch-prosecutors advertised their confessional brands’ commitment and power to protect citizens from worldly manifestations of Satan’s evil.”
The Guardian
Faith in the existence of dark matter.
In 1933 Fritz Zwicky was studying a galactic cluster and observed that the rotational speed of galaxies in the cluster was impossible unless there existed a huge amount of unobserved mass in the cluster. He, following in the footsteps of Lord Kelvin 50 years earlier, called this unobserved mass "dark matter".
The Zwicky observations have been confirmed over and over again in other galactic clusters and in the late 70's Vera Rubin and Kent Ford published new observational results using spectrographic analysis to confirm that most galaxies must contain approximately 6 times as much "dark matter" as visible mass.
Over the last 40 years numerous experiments have been conducted to test the two main hypothesis about what sort of particle dark matter might be composed from, WIMPS and axions. All those experiments have failed to detect the existence of either particle.
Dark matter has never been directly observed. Astrophysicists do not know what dark matter is. They believe however, absent any direct evidence, that dark matter exists. They have it seems "a faith based belief in the existence of dark matter".
Physicists generally have enormous faith in the existence of this unobserved entity (some don't, there are alternative theories.) But their faith in the existence of dark matter is entirely different than faith in the existence of gods.
While there have been no direct observations of dark matter, as noted earlier "dark matter" itself is just a placeholder for a problem with repeatedly confirmed observational data. There is plenty of indirect evidence. Something is causing the observed problem, one set of theoretical explanations assume the existence of large quantities of mass from an unknown new type of particle.
Research institutes across the planet invest resources into the search for dark matter based entirely on faith that this research, even if it, as it has so far done, fails to find any evidence for the constituent particle or particles. Their research is probing into one of the great mysteries in human knowledge, it is research into the boundaries of the unknown. It is part of the great project of the enlightenment to understand the universe we inhabit.
While faith in the existence of dark matter is pervasive among astrophysicists, this belief is not "unshakable". In fact, quite the opposite. If one of the alternative theories, for example that galactic clusters contain enormous numbers of very small black holes, proves valid, the search for dark matter particles would likely come to an end. Unlike irrational faith, scientific faith is based on theory, observation experimentation and analysis. New evidence can obsolete current knowledge.
I think we need better advocates for gods here.
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