Subscribe to and Contact HDC

 HDC Feed

 HDC Comments Feed

HDC by Email

HDC Comments by Email

HDC on Facebook

~~
Email Heaving Dead Cats to share news, personal stories, ideas, information and more. I'd love to hear from you.

Our Cats

Dead Cats Archive

Ooh, Shiny!

You can support this site by making your Amazon purchases via the links below even if you don't buy these books! (it costs you nothing extra)

What I'm reading now:
The God Virus: How religion infects our lives and culture
God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible by CJ Werleman
Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life (this is excellent. Well written and fascinating. Highly recommended)
God Is Not Great (Hitchens is extremely erudite but I agree with him a lot here. Excellent so far)
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Listening to the audio version. Excellent!)


What I just finished:
Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language
Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism (Recommended. The first half is a great read. Thorough and detailed but easy to understand.)
Letting Go of God (I listened to the audio version. It was poignant and funny. Highly recommended!)
His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass) (best trilogy I've ever read!)

Series

Happy Atheist Love

Sometimes It Sucks To Be A Skeptic

a-rescue-mission

I think I understand what it’s like to be lost in a world of woo thinking. Maybe even an inkling of what it’s like to believe in Jesus as your personal hero.

Butch, my awesome husband, came home Friday night and told me he felt awful. He and I both got a cold about 3 weeks ago and he shook if off in about 4 days while I suffered with a nasty chest cold, congestion and laryngitis until just the other day. I didn’t want to hear that he was sick again. It was my birthday weekend, we were supposed to go out to dinner on Sunday (last night), and I was hoping we’d both be feeling well for a change.

Alas, it was not to be. He had a fever, the chills, and was completely miserable. And here’s where I realized I felt totally helpless. I can’t [...]

Main Features of Pseudo-Science

Yesterday I confessed my addictions to woo and how I realized it was all a pack of lies and nonsense. It’s been hard to learn to think more critically and skeptically about pseudo-science (the fancy grownup term for woo). Unless someone teaches you how to think critically, there’s really no way to easily pick out the slick pack of lies and shiny bullshit for what it is.

For instance, I just found out last month that Airborne is not only pseudo-scientific and completely useless, but can also be harmful. And here I was, just the day before, trying to get my husband to take it for an oncoming cold. Sigh…. The battle never ends.

For me, my bullshit radar with religion is very sensitive. Then again, if it’s about an invisible man in the sky, it’s complete nonsense, so that’s pretty easy. But when it [...]

Confessions Of A Recovering Woo Addict

Lately I’ve been talking to Jane. (not her real name) I am having trouble talking to her, and I think I figured out why. We knew each other about 10 years ago in a state far, far away. We were acquaintances, but we had a lot in common. (here’s where I tell you some dark secrets) We were into many different kinds of woo.

Woo: (n or adj) when you uncritically believe unsubstantiated or unfounded ideas. Short for woo woo, according to the Urban Dictionary, definition 4.

I was into reiki, divination, numerology, you name it. While I was an agnostic back then, I still clung to the idea of a kind of Universal Energy. Not really an intelligence, but kind of “magical” principles to energy that science just hadn’t quantified or qualified yet. I held to the beliefs that ancient societies knew secrets that had [...]