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January 2019

January 28, 2019

The Problem with “Thoughts and Prayers”

The use of the phrase "thoughts and prayers" in the wake of mass shootings and...

January 10, 2019

Reaching ‘Faith Healers’ Is an Urgent Public Health Need. How Do We Do It?

Our species has spent thousands of years trying to use magic to cure diseases. When...

September 2018

September 02, 2018

Storytelling while Secular: Writing about Loss in an Indifferent Cosmos

Last week I offered up a rather dense introduction to the storytelling problem of "sacrifice"...

August 2018

August 26, 2018

What We Talk About When We Talk About Societal Regression

This week in Colombia, the Constitutional Court overturned a two-year-old ban on bullfighting, citing its...

October 2016

October 04, 2016

Patheos Atheist Writers Mourn the Loss of Niki Massey

A courageous atheist voice has been silenced too soon.

July 2016

July 25, 2016

Police Racial Profiling – How Neuroscience Can Help

____________ The deliberate murders of white police officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas...

April 2016

April 19, 2016

Your Fate is in Your Hands (except when it isn’t)

Today is the third birthday I wasn’t expected to celebrate. That makes it a very...

April 07, 2016

Making America Safer From Muslim Terrorists

(image credit) How do we make America safer from suffering the same kind of...

February 2016

February 03, 2016

A Little Birdie Told Me to Do It

In my last post, I compared the behavior of a serially mendacious hospital chaplain, who...

January 2016

January 29, 2016

Born This Way?

Our species is suffering from the post-traumatic stress of 120,000 generations in hell. By Dale...

January 28, 2016

A Teacher in the South

The moment I stopped waffling between agnosticism and atheism, I was sitting at the wake...

January 25, 2016

The Chaplain’s Cat Logic

Most cats understand the word no, despite all appearances to the contrary. But to them...

January 22, 2016

Idaho’s Faith Exemptions are Killing Children

At least 12 children have died in 3 years from preventable causes in one Idaho...

December 2015

December 05, 2015

The Passion of the Frost

Frosty the Snowman and Jesus the Christ are the same guy.

November 2015

November 11, 2015

When One Partner Leaves the Faith: The Story of Hope and David

She was drawn to the intensity of his faith. When he said he didn't believe...

November 07, 2015

Unpacking from a Trip to Heaven

Stuff can get lost in the packing process. In my case, it was a favorite...

November 06, 2015

Near-Death is but a Coma-Dream

The eyes of skeptics did a collective pirouette when, in 2012, neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s published...

November 05, 2015

Armin Navabi: Ex-Muslim Turned Global Atheist Activist

When he was just 12 years old, Armin Navabi threw himself off the top floor...

October 2015

October 28, 2015

Useful Monsters and the Problem of Fear

By Dale McGowan - Beneath the amber waters of the River Tees in Northern England...

October 23, 2015

“Please Put a Blanket on Me” — I Was Aware in My Coma

My doctors had written me off as a vegetable. But I was aware of what...

October 22, 2015

Getting My Own Story Straight

by Dale McGowan It’s easy to get your own story wrong. Selective memory takes a messy life and creates a narrative...