In her latest book, The Memory Code, science writer Dr. Lynne Kelly details her thesis that the primary purpose of monuments ranging from the statues on Easter Island to Neolithic Stonehenge was not as tributes to the gods but rather as extremely effective memory technologies used by oral cultures to encode many hundreds of facts crucial to survival.
Torture is in the news again, sadly, as Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan made a public declaration that Canada will never use torture or be party to [it], a day after his meeting with US Defence Secretary James Mattis. That sounds decent, but there’s a lot of grey space around his words that needs to be… Read more »
I am not much for conspiracies, never attribute to maliciousness that which can more easily be explained by stupidity, but sometimes they end up being one and the same. A Canadian climate change denial group has popped up in a U.S. coal giant’s bankruptcy proceedings that have lifted the curtain on the funding of a… Read more »
![[Photo of Joseph Watts]](https://www.canadianatheist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/joseph-watts.jpg)
In a strange case of synchronicity, two curiously related news stories have been making the rounds the last week. One is the story of the Panama Papers, a leak of 11.5 million documents – 2.6 terabytes – from the law firm Mossack Fonseca that details evidence of how the ultra rich hide their wealth in… Read more »
I’ve received emails and read many a tweet and Facebook post from gleeful atheists about this study. I can’t really blame them for their excitement, for we are continually confronted with assertions from believers that we just aren’t very moral without religion or that we our default disposition is “sad sack”; for example, Friday’s Real Time with… Read more »
I am not a physicist. I am not even a Trekkie. And I am guessing any space travel I ever get around to doing would probably be a horrible stomach emptying experience. Happy to leave that sort of thing to the robots we create in our image. Still, the idea of other people doing it,… Read more »