The Amaz!ng Meeting is on the horizon again! Enthusiasm for TAM increases every year, and every year we have added new speakers and events to the festivities. This year promises to be amongst the most exciting so far, with a great combination of leading thinkers and celebrities and activists, all united to advance critical thinking and skepticism in our world.

Join us for four days of fellowship, fun, and critical thinking this July at TAM 8.

Harriet Hall, MD, The SkepDoc, discusses her column in O, The Oprah Magazine that focuses on debunking medical myths. She contrasts science-based medicine and “complementary and alternative medicine,” and tells why she objects to the latter term. She details why homeopathy elicits more moral outrage from her than other kinds of CAM remedies. Other topics she addresses include acupuncture, chiropractic, radical life extension, pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers, the difference between fringe-science and pseudoscience, and also the risks of science-based medicine.

Listen at ForGoodReason.org.

I recently had the pleasure of dealing with a very polite young woman who wanted to give me a flyer about a presentation by Eric Hovind, son of the more (in)famous Kent Hovind. A snippet of our conversation went something like this:

Me: Has this been experimentally demonstrated?
Her: Oh, yes.
Me: Can you give me the publication history where I can find this information?
Her: Actually, the atheist organizations don’t want us to publish it.

Martin Ssempa is a pastor from Uganda and the force behind a bill that would cause a lot of homosexuals to become dead precisely and only because they are homosexuals. This hateful excuse for an argument says that privacy extends no further than god’s right hand — or more accurately, the influence of a pastor with dreams of being parochial and small-minded on a continental scale.

When the story hit the MSM, it caused problems for some American Evangelical Christians and their “Church First” method of nation building. Never known as enthusiastic supporters of the LGBT community, American Evangelicals still abandoned Ssempa — at a leisurely pace, and indignant about being expected to choose between a carried-away pastor and sodomites. Though historically uninterested in extending the right of privacy to same-sex sex, as a group they tend not to want to kill people over it.

With his American backers gone, Ssempa’s fortunes seemed to have taken a turn for the worse. Like so many of us, the Pastor found respite in the arms of pornography.