The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

Drawing on innovative sociological research, Dr. Zuckerman—a Pitzer College professor who founded a Department of Secular Studies, the first of its kind—illuminates this demographic shift with the moral convictions that govern secular individuals, offering crucial information for the religious and nonreligious alike. Living the Secular Life reveals that, despite opinions to the contrary, nonreligious Americans possess a unique moral code that allows them to effectively navigate the complexities of modern life.

Donald Prothero reviews an explosive new documentary film about the controversial Church of Scientology.

Some might characterize the faith-inspired murder of satirical cartoonists as shocking. But the prospect of violent reprisal for religious criticism was hardly inconceivable to the now-deceased artists of Charlie Hebdo. In this week’s eSkeptic, Kenneth Krause describes potential relationships between religion and violence, and questions whether these murders would seem possible in the absence of religious devotion to an allegedly all-powerful god.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Sigfried Gold reviews Sam Harris’s new book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Donald R. Prothero, reviews Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason, by Seth Andrews.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Donald Prothero reviews Karen Stollznow’s book, God Bless America: Strange and Unusual Religious Beliefs and Practices in the United States.

In this week’s eSkeptic, we present Michael Shermer’s answer to the Edge.org Annual Question for 2014: “What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?” Shermer was one of 174 contributors this year.

All scientists are naturalists, taking for granted that we live, experiment and study nature in a closed universe where God never intervenes. This is a first principle of science. But Alvin Plantinga says that there is deep conflict between naturalism and science but deep concord between theism and science. In this week’s eSkeptic, William S. Moore reviews Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.

In this conversation with Michael Shermer, based around his book, An Appetite for Wonder, Richard Dawkins shares a rare view into his early life, his intellectual awakening at Oxford, and his path to writing The Selfish Gene. He paints a vivid picture of his idyllic childhood in colonial Africa, peppered with sketches of his colorful ancestors, charming parents, and the peculiarities of colonial life right after World War II…

Jim Lippard reviews two books: Janet Reitman’s book Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, ISBN 978-0618883028) and Hugh Urban’s The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton University Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0691146089). This article was published in Skeptic magazine 17.1 in 2011.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Rachel Pridgen reviews two books: Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans by David Niose (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012, ISBN 13: 978-0-230-33895-1) and Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton (Pantheon, 2012, ISBN 13: 978-0-307-37910-8).

Recently, global headlines have resurrected the decades-old case of the Shroud of Turin in response to a group of Italian researchers who have studied its authenticity and claim that the image it bears (ostensibly of Jesus) was not faked. Though the case for fraud has indeed been strong since the 14th century, skeptics know all too well that some topics just never seem to get laid to rest. In this week’s eSkeptic, Daniel Loxton responds to the media hype.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Tim Callahan reviews Alvin Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (2011, Oxford University Press).

In this week’s eSkeptic, Tim Callahan reviews Derek Murphy’s book Jesus Potter Harry Christ.

In light of the final installment of the ubersuccessful Harry Potter series hitting theaters in two days, we present Ari Armstrong‘s examination of religion in J. K. Rowling’s novels.

A review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (Bantam Books, 2006, ISBN 0618680004). This review was originally published in Science, January 26, 2007.

In this week’s eSkeptic, Bob Conrad reviews Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God by Greg Graffin and Steve Olsen.

Skeptic is a science magazine, and as such we only deal with non-scientific issues when they come into contact with science. Foremost in this category, in our culture during the past decade, is the intersection of science and religion; in fact, science and religion studies have become something of a cottage industry in academia, with conferences, journals, magazines, and books on the subject being generated at a prodigious rate. Our primary focus in this area has been on evolution and…

In this article, we report the results of a study examining the relationship between a nation’s religiosity and its “moral health.” The received wisdom would lead one to predict a positive correlation between national religiosity and national moral health — as one goes up the other goes up. In fact, that appears not to be the case, and the example of the United States is most striking; Americans are among the most religious people in the Western world, and yet…

In this week’s eSkeptic, we present an article from Skeptic magazine vol. 2, no. 2 (1993) wherein physicist Milton Rothman examines the relationship between science and religion and the extent to which a scientist should apply his belief in realism to all aspects of our knowledge of the universe.