Ahoy-hoy! Welcome to your Friday Morning Heresy, CFI’s roundup of news and headlines for the reality-based community.
CFI’s Office of Public Policy (OPP) is calling on Michigan residents to take action and urge their state representatives to support a Secular Celebrants bill currently pending before the state House.
The Michigan bill, SB 1044, would amend state law to allow a “civil celebrant” to solemnize a marriage. A civil celebrant is defined under the bill as anyone who is at least eighteen years old and who “works in accordance with the wishes of the client couple.” The bill is thus simple and open-ended in allowing marrying couples to choose the person who will most meaningfully perform their wedding ceremony.
Free Inquiry editor Ronald Lindsay’s new “Unprayerful Reflections” column takes on the tiresome late-December embrace of “misguided efforts to offer ‘scientific’ explanations of the Christmas star.”
Stop. Just stop this nonsense, this prostitution of science. The story of the wise men and the Christmas star is transparently an attempt by the gospel writer to enhance the prestige and significance of Jesus. […]
There is no more point to providing a scientific explanation for the stories of the Bible than there is to providing a scientific explanation of Greek myths.
You’ll find several other new items at Free Inquiry, including a trio of politically-minded pieces and Ed Buckner’s review of Dan Barker’s new book, Contraduction.
As those of us who knew and loved Paul Kurtz know well, inventing a new word, one that will stick and survive, that will endure, is tricky. But I think Barker has pulled it off. His word, contraduction, joins induction, deduction, and abduction as terms about reasoning and logic—terms defining the way a logical sequence gets to a conclusion (or fails to).
The political observations include Mark Kolsen’s “How a Third (Fourth or Fifth) Party Can Be Fostered in the United States,” Gary Whittenberger on “Secession,” and Maxim Nikiforov’s “Is Secular Humanism Today a Conservatism?”
It is a sign of the times that today Thomas Paine can in many regards be identified more with William Buckley than the American Civil Liberties Union, and that Richard Dawkins has been excommunicated from the church of progressive so-called “humanism.” What is it that ultimately today is so in danger of causing one to dare adopt (dear god!), the name “conservative” to conserve?
Our team remains hard at work populating Quackwatch’s new “RFK, Jr. Watch” resource page, which collects news and opinion pieces highlighting why Robert F. Kennedy is “the worst possible choice” to run America’s public health infrastructure. At the same time, new pieces keep emerging, including this Medpage Today feature on “How Measles, Whooping Cough, and Worse Could Roar Back on RFK Jr.’s Watch” (which quotes CSI Fellow Paul Offit).
“The notion that he’d even be considered for that position makes people think he knows what he’s talking about,” Offit said. “He appeals to lessened trust, the idea that ‘There are things you don’t see, data they don’t present, that I’m going to find out so you can really make an informed decision.’”
The New York Times profiles attorney Aaron Siri, a close ally of Kennedy’s (and active anti-vaccine litigator).
The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death. […]
Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions.
In the UK, the government has announced an indefinite ban on puberty blockers for people under the age of 18.
Britain’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, announced the decision Wednesday. He cited guidance from an independent panel that suggested prescribing puberty blockers to young people carries an “unacceptable risk” and recommended indefinite restrictions “while work is done to ensure the safety” of those treatments.
“Children’s healthcare must always be evidence-led,” Streeting said in a statement.
The decision extends a temporary halt put in place in March, following the release of the Cass Review, “a landmark review of the country’s approach to gender identity in health care.”
The New York Times Magazine has a…”fawning” is too strong a word, but I feel like “unsettlingly sympathetic” is an accurate description…new profile of Oklahoma public schools boss Ryan Walters and his ongoing efforts to demolish the separation of church and state (schools).
Now that he has control over Oklahoma’s schools, Walters has made it a goal to shrink the state’s management of education. An atrophied Department of Education makes it much easier to support religious, especially church-run, schooling as a way to supply needed services.
Next week the Kern County (California) Board of Education will hear a proposal to post the Ten Commandments in school classrooms, much like the statewide measure passed earlier this year in Louisiana.
As 2025 approaches (and the above stories all demonstrate), the stakes for science, reason, and secular values have never been higher. The Center for Inquiry is on the front lines of the fight to defend evidence-based reasoning and humanist principles, and we cannot do it without your support. Right now, you can double the impact of your donation: every gift made to CFI this December will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to $250,000, doubling our ability to combat misinformation and defend rational thought as we step into the new year.
Thank you for standing with us to champion a more rational and compassionate world!
Linking to a story or webpage does not imply endorsement by the author or CFI. Not every use of quotation marks is ironic or sarcastic, but it often is.
