During April, Dispassionate Doubt posts will be personal definitions, explanations, and conclusions regarding gods or other sundry beliefs, superstitions, religious practices, and logic fallacies held or done by otherwise normal, intelligent human beings.

I will not set out to offend. However, some folks, such as hard-core Evangelical Protestants, Southern Baptists, devout Roman Catholics, Muslims of any sect, or people who are super serious about god, religion, metaphysical philosophy, or some other ontological fantasy may sense an unintended mild ribbing.

I may unintentionally omit some things, but I’ll try to give no woo-woo a pass. These may not be the posts for you, but I hope you read them and take no offense. People do weird shit and it’s funny.

I’ll select terms relevant to the beliefs, deceptions, and delusions many of us face along with some I think too unusual to pass up. I hope to provide explanations that expand the various thoughts and ideas, some of which may be new to you. I’ll keep it as simple as possible.

I use some references, but these are mostly my ideas. I’ll be as real, accurate, true, or humorous as possible given my personally sober, eye rolling, skeptical observations, with a dash of the ironic.

I’m told controversy is interesting and I want to be interesting. I may permit the cloud of adult language to shade some posts, but if I use too many of George Carlin’s seven dirty words, (<—adult content) the A-Z Admins may act. I have no such plans. They’ll have enough to do.

The theme, or purpose, is to address terms and issues related to human beliefs, deceptions, delusions, and pseudoscientific phenomena (pronounced woo-woo) from this skeptic’s point of view, for which I expect to be corrected by believers and skeptics alike.

One man’s woo-woo, of course, is another’s deeply held belief system. ~ Julia Moskin

Do you recall The Penn & Teller series titled Bull Shit? My vision is a little bit like that, only without all the effort, accuracy, expertise, or time devoted to a single issue – mostly it’s my written opinion. Capisce?

Examples of what the A to Z words could be like are:

1. Agnostics: are soft atheists who do not want to piss anyone off.
2. Godless Heathen: is a very specific way to identify an atheist with attitude.
3. Demonic Possession: is something that never seems to happen to an atheist.
4. Nones: are people who, when getting to the question of what religion they are, check mark none. They may be nothing, anything (even atheists), or undecided. Not the same as no preference. The opposite of a nun.

I won’t reuse these. My definitions and explanations will be longer and maybe more serious, but I’ll keep them short enough for a quick read.

This TED talk by Michael Shermer is about 15 minutes, but he gets my (his) point across better than I ever could. Watch it if you can.

Hope to see you on Monday, April Fools Day (how apropos!) for A to Z, but I will be posting up some stuff between now and then.

***Bill

Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion. ~ Michael Shermer