Review by Dean Bedekar, January 2023 You may ask, what’s the big deal if grownups believe in ancient aliens?  Nothing really unless those beliefs cause harm to the believer and society. The list is long, from anti-vaxxers, consumers of crackpot remedies like homeopathy and acupuncture, to science deniers.  In each of 5 volumes, Dunning takes on 50 such pop phenomenon, explaining them in simple terms, without casting judgment. In this review, we’ll cover some of most flagrant violations of science…

….and    If You’re Woke You Dig It In 1962 the young and talented author William Melvin Kelley published an article in The New York Times. He had recently seen a public notice posted in a Manhattan subway car on the subject of encouraging the ridership to help officials keep the car clean. The post was supposedly written in 21 languages; one in particular belied the humorless bureaucratese one would expect:  “Hey cats this is your swinging-wheels, so dig it…

…and   Postliberalism Does Not Bode Well for Groups Like Ours January 22, 2023 It is easy to be distracted by the continual ruckus coming from the evangelical Protestant Christian crowd which, with their demagogue-of-the-day, almost weekly seems to draw a new battle line by trying to block the rising tide of secular modernism and the liberal administrative state that they believe is complicit in all sorts of anti-Christian conspiracies.  But on another level, practitioners of another Christian sect are…

…….and       When Fantasy Meets Virtual Reality   The secular community should be concerned that Facebook’s multi-billion dollar, all-in investment in metaverse development includes millions of dollars to upstart Virtual Reality churches. The metaverse is the immersive, virtual reality digital world that includes video games such as Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft, others, and a host of non-gaming platforms that allow the user to create an avatar and interact with others active  on the platform in digitally…

    ..and SECULAR SKETCHES                                                                                                                                                        …

Here’s an idea for a new Christmas Twilight Zone episode were the program to be revived, if you will indulge me: imagine, during this season of giving, what might be the best gift the non-theist secular community could receive from the conservative Christian community. To be sure, spending much time ranking a wishlist like that would  be time wasted, since offering an olive branch of peace,  much less anything like a gift from the latter is an adventure into the…

The route back through the historical turns that eventually led to the corruption of the Chrisian message of charity would surely be staked with signposts marked Exit Here>Hubris, Greed, and Folly. I’m not going there, but promise to honk when I pass.   Old-time Faith, sans  Hope, Charity First, then, The Great Depression, when millions in the United States and elsewhere were out of work in an economic system that was supposed to award hard-working citizens a stable and comfortable…

  What happened in Chautauqua, New York on the 12th of August was disturbing yet predictable. Salman Rushdie, who wrote the controversial book The Satanic Verses, became a primary target of the former Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued a fatwa that would legitimize the execution of Rushdie. To no one’s surprise, such fatwas were regularly issued by the Iranian totalitarian theocratic regime that has been actively causing socio-political turmoil in the Middle East. …