Young Australian Skeptics

Seasons greeting to all pagans on this glorious Friday. To honour Christmas in July we are treated to two amazing stories to warm your cockles (or boobles for the ladies).

Have you ever wondered if your favourite pet or t-bone steak gets an afterlife? Will we truly get to meet up with them in the Christian, Muslim or Atheist heaven?

Well the wait is over, because the tale, I mean tail, actually I think it’s the first one. Anyway the story of Jeshua Cottontail will provide comfort and closure to this important question.

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We’ve got a wonderful opportunity – and we need your help, skeptic, atheist, humanist and agnostic listeners!

Earlier this year, Richard and Rachael presented at the University of Melbourne, thanks to the generous patronage of the Young Australian Skeptics and their first-class podcast ‘The Pseudo Scientists‘.

Now we’d like to go across country to help bring skepticism to a town that can really benefit from a skeptical-boost!

The University of Western Australia is holding an Open Day in early August (August 9th) and the plan is to have a presentation on the 8th August – thanks to the efforts of the Atheists and Agnostics Society of UWA.

A repeat performance of the highly-successful Richard Saunders‘ talk ‘Skepticism 101‘ and the dedicated Dr Rachael Dunlop with ‘Dr Rachie Reports: Adventures of a Scientist in an Alternative Medicine World‘ is on the cards – along with a possible student-led activity beforehand, to help raise the profile of the Atheist and Agnostic Society on campus. It’ll be fun, it’ll be informative and it’ll be a don’t-miss show!
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About two weeks ago, I wrote up an article about wine that got a few comments I’d like to address. First up, Jason said:

“…I have to add that Wine is also something White People Like. “

This is, in fact, not true. White people love wine. Especially foreign wine, with hard to pronounce names. Read more »

I was just watching an episode of Judge Judy because it just happened to be on.
I used to think that she was just an angry old lady for no reason and never watched the show, but upon watching it just now I realise that I get pissed off for the same reasons she does.

People aren’t logical. (or simply don’t listen )
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Holy Toledo, that was a busy few weeks! Apologies to all for my lack of blogging over that time – especially the past week – but I promise to make it up to you all over the uni break.* Right now though, it’s party time, and you know what that means - it’s time to ROCK AND ROLL!!!

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Okay so I post about some pretty serious topics but I thought it would be fun to post some of the crazy stuff I have read in the Bible. This is the type of stuff that one would almost certainly have not read in church, unless an ‘enthusiastic about the communion wine’ priest clumsily flips the pages using drunken ignorance as a guide to pick his next scripture. Let’s start with the gross death of King Eg´lon of Moab! Eg’lon was a fat man and in Judges 3:15 God chooses an Israelite named E’hud, to deliver the Children of Israel from the yoke of King Eglon.
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I’m going to assume that a sizable number of people who read this blog are new to skepticism, or at least new to the skeptical scene on the Internet. For those of you without a blog of your own, you may not be familiar with the Skeptic’s Circle, a blog carnival that occurs every two weeks, which highlights great recent posts on blogs with skeptical themes from all over the Internet.

A blog carnival, in simple terms, is a collaborative event that happens when multiple blog authors get together to share content with each other via the medium of a single post on a hosting author’s blog. The host will receive the URLs of each post, usually via email, and put together a single post with information about each post he/she receives. Sometimes, this is done in a creative and ingenious way, such as the 107th edition of the Skeptic’s Circle, which was in podcast form, and the 108th edition, which was in video form. However, most of the time, it is done in a straightforward list/descriptive fashion, emphasising the content as much as possible.

Why am I telling you all this? Why yes, cynical reader, it is to promote something on my own blog. You know me too well. Homologous Legs will be hosting the next edition of the Skeptic’s Circle on the 2nd of July, and I want to see multiple posts from the Young Australian Skeptics blog contributors! Yes, that means you, Richard, Luke, Dan, James and all you other wonderful writers!
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Here’s a look at a subject that I thought might be timely.

I have a shocking cold/flu at the moment*. It’s really not fun. So, today, I went out to grab some of ye olde decongestant tablets, and take them… only to realise that, eight hours and six tablets later, my nose is still running as much as ever.

Checking the packet in detail, I realised that I have, for the first time, fallen victim to pharmacology’s answer to the dodgy used-car lemon that doesn’t work as advertised. This dodgy lemon is lurking in every pharmacy and supermarket under the guise of medicine – but it’s not homeopathy or bogus herbal medicine. This is actually something which is ostensibly a good, science-based pharmaceutical, but in fact it has not, and it has only become widely used due to politics getting in the way of good science-based medicine.

(* I actually originally wrote this last year, but never mind.)
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His face would have been thirteen in November.

Language twists and turns like (to borrow a Blackadder simile) a twisty turning thing. Words and their meanings flow, merge and separate over the long years of human discourse, as new generations come along and take ownership of the language of those who came before, changing it to suit their own needs and to reflect their own time.

Lol, so random.

Those who stand as guardians of language and protectors of the past are, more often than not, seen as faintly ridiculous – rapping people over the knuckles for misusing “their”, “there” and “they’re” in a bluster of outrage. Although they’re right (note the correct usage there… ooh, and there again), use of language is the ultimate arbiter and perhaps we’re witnessing a slow and inexorable evolution to a fully interchangeable “ther”….a Ther For All Occasions, mayhap.

It’s probably not worth getting too worked up about this… But sometimes words and their meanings twist in such a way as to obscure rather than to illuminate, and that’s a definite problem.
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