Reading Time: 9 minutes Jordan Peterson is one of the world’s foremost dividers of opinion. And recently he quit Twitter, much to the sadness of his 2.7 million followers, after a foray into the world of sporting swimwear and beauty. Or beauty in swimwear. Or, for him, not beauty in swimwear. The New York Times once described Peterson as “the […]
Science
Science stories that matter, reported from a secular perspective at OnlySky, a secular community for nonreligious Americans.
Posted inBiology
Uterus 101: On menstruation, miscarriage, and mifepristone
Reading Time: 10 minutes When my Grade 5 class went through Ontario’s reproductive health curriculum in the mid-1990s, the boys and girls were separated, and received remarkably different lessons. Along with the basics of our changing bodies, I and the girls were shown how to use condoms through a banana demonstration, and told how important protection would be when […]
Posted inHealth
Naomi Judd, guns, and suicide: Public health and the 2nd Amendment
Reading Time: 3 minutes America loves its guns, even though that love affair is killing us. If you own a gun, don’t worry. I’m not coming after them. I know of many non-religious folks, like Seth Andrews, the popular Thinking Atheist podcaster, who own firearms. But as a secular humanist, don’t you want to live a life guided by […]
Posted inHuman Story
Life lessons from the death of a bumblebee
Reading Time: 5 minutes In the grand scheme of things the death of a single bumblebee is of little consequence. Or it would have been but for the intervention of a bunch of wild-eyed animal rights activists who targeted the manager of a U.K. store specializing in amazing hand-crafted silver jewelry. I first got to know the kindly and […]
Posted inTech
Musk will bring Trump back to Twitter, calls the ban ‘foolish in the extreme’
Reading Time: 6 minutes Organisms generally need oxygen to survive and flourish. Certain organisms require more oxygen to reach their peak. In the social media ecosystem, whose habitats include the undrained swamps of the American elite, one apex predator once reigned supreme. And in the misinformation mudslinging and disinformation data-dumping, Trump’s famed Twitter rule came to an abrupt end. […]
Posted inBiology
A biologist explains why ‘heartbeat laws’ are nonsensical
Reading Time: 5 minutes The proliferation of anti-abortion ‘heartbeat laws’ cynically conflate the spontaneous pulsing of cardiac cells with the beating of a heart, and the beating of a heart with the presence of a soul. Such magical thinking belongs nowhere near the laws of a secular democracy.
Posted inEducation
A teacher tore down a non-Christian verse on her classroom ‘prayer wall’
Reading Time: 3 minutes A Christian teacher at a public high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma is using her position to preach to students. There’s anecdotal evidence she’s doing this, it’s not the first time she’s been caught promoting her radical views to students, and she’s openly admitted suggesting that all teachers should follow her lead. Somehow, though, she’s faced […]
Posted inResearch
A bridge too far: The failure to capture ‘spiritual fitness’ in the US military
Reading Time: 3 minutes After massive resources have been spent trying to assess spiritual fitness in the military, scholars now admit it is not a meaningful concept.
Posted inTech
CounterSocial isn’t the ‘new Twitter’: It’s something much better
Reading Time: 13 minutes There’s a popular myth about a frog that stays in a pot of gradually heating water until it boils to death. It’s not true. The original frog takes a bit longer, but it does hop out. And yet, our fatalist belief in the myth of the dead frog makes a lot more sense after my […]
Posted inTech
Is social media the cigarette of the 21st century?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Like tobacco companies that made their products addictive on purpose, the drive for ever more “engagement” on social media pushes it to appeal to our worst tendencies.