I wondered as soon as I read or heard (I forget which) that the coma guy was communicating by typing with the help of his caregiver. Uh oh, I thought. No he isn’t. If he’s doing it with someone else’s ‘help,’ then he’s not doing it. This has been tested. It’s the clever Hans effect. The ‘helper’ or ‘facilitator’ does the typing.

James Randi had the same thought, and he saw some video which further gave the game away. He finds it all very irritating.

From the Frontline documentary:

NARRATOR: The facilitator and autistic individual sat side by side, with a screen dividing their visual field. Sometimes they were shown the same picture, sometimes different ones.

Doesn’t the BBC ever want to puke on itself? Seriously. Doesn’t its gorge ever rise until it can’t stand it any more and it has to shout rude words in a hoarse voice and pour beer over its head and kick the table over? Doesn’t it ever get sick of talking babyish cant?

Secondary schools run by faith groups are better than non-religious schools at building community relations, research in England suggests. A study funded by the Church of England found faith schools were rated higher than others by Ofsted inspectors on what is called “community cohesion”. The church says its schools take all faiths seriously and look for common ground while respecting difference.

What is called by whom… Read the rest

Greta Christina puts it well.

Religion is a hypothesis about how the world works, and why it is the way it is. Religion is the hypothesis that the world is the way it is, at least in part, because of immaterial beings or forces that act on the material world.

It’s other things too, but the significant bit is this hypothesis of an immaterial world acting on the material one. ‘The hypothesis that there is a supernatural world, and that the natural world is the way it is because of the supernatural one.’

Quite so. And a hypothesis of that kind makes a difference to how people think and act, and it does have to be open to discussion … Read the rest