– Date – April 29, 2014
– Send your cool ‘SCIENCE!’ shout-outs to
.
– Theme song by Steve Seamans of the Daisy Dillman Band. Get the song HERE.
– Thank you to everyone who has been purchasing books, Skepticality stuff, or using our Amazon link to help us!

Wikipedia [3:30]
– Susan Gerbic
– Fringe ideas on Wikipedia.
– The Skeptic Wikipedia Project.

Unnatural Virtue [6:05]
– The Clustering Illusion.
– Doug Hagmann is a private investigator who claims several recent suicides are really murders and part of a conspiracy to keep people from talking about a plot to totally ruin the world economy.
– He lays it all out in the Canada Free Press: Exposing what lies beneath the bodies of dead bankers and what lies ahead for us.
– Hagmann also connects the case of missing Wall Street Journal reporter David Bird to the conspiracy.
– The New York Post doesn’t promote the conspiracy idea but it thinks there’s some sort of mental health epidemic in the banking world.
– For a good read on what the banking folks got away with see The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi.
– Responsible journalists recognize the clustering illusion.
They point out that a similar kind of story ran not long ago involving lawyers rather than bankers: Why are lawyers killing themselves?
– The pattern seen for bankers and suicide isn’t real: Headlines See a Pattern of Banker Suicides. The Data Don’t.
– See Bob Carroll’s author page for more about The Skeptic’s Dictionary and The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary.

Skeptical Humanities [14:15]
– Shakespeare’s Beehive.
– Review of Shakespeare’s Beehive, Part 1
– Review of Shakespeare’s Beehive, Part 2
– Skeptical Humanities.

The Odds Must Be Crazy [21:35]
– The Odds Must Be Crazy.
– This week’s featured stories are, “Superbowl and a different kind of bowl” and “The Coincidence of the Twelfth Man“.
– Submitted by blog reader John Hordyk, and blog reader Seattle Seahawks season ticket holder Bill Young.
– Please visit the story link for a more detailed analysis and to add your comments.
– Additional thoughts and considerations provided by Barbara Drescher.
– Our theme music comes to us courtesy of Brian Keith Dalton, AKA Mr. Deity.
– Please visit The Independent Investigations Group Los Angeles.
– The Odds Must Be Crazy can be found on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
– Wendy Hughes is on Twitter.
– John Rael is on Twitter.
– Edward Clint is on Twitter.
– Barbara Drescher is on Twitter.
– Brian Keith Dalton is on Twitter.
– Thanks to our friends Emery Emery, and Heather Henderson for hospitality and support for the production of the segment. Visit them at http://skepticallyyours.net/.

Atlanta Skepticamp 2014 [28:35]
– Get all the details at the Atlanta Skeptics website.

Interview: Raphael Lantaster [29:55]
– Raphael Lataster is a Religious Studies researcher.
– New book ‘There Was No Jesus, There Is No God‘.
– He studies and writes about various topics including Bayesian reasoning, and pantheism.
– There tends to be a academic bias toward only focusing on theism and the ‘well known’ religious ideas.
– He is attempting to ferret out the most plausible God ideas which people tend to believe in.
– Pantheism sounds like Polytheism, but it isn’t.
– Pantheism reminds Derek of the Dr. Bronners Soap bottle sayings.
– Pantheism is about the Universe/Cosmos itself being ‘God’.
– The film ‘Avatar’ uses the idea of Pantheism as the basis for the religion in that movie.
– Richard Dawkins claims that Pantheism is just a ‘sexed up Atheism’.
– Carl Sagan talked about an eventual religious idea that many would all end up embracing, that sounded a lot like Pantheism.
– Even though much of academia accepts the idea that there was a, real, human Jesus.
– However, there seems to be no logical evidence for Jesus when it comes down to it.
– William Lane Craig is one example of a scholar who firmly believes in the historical Jesus.
– To break up the book he created an ‘interlude’ which used mathematics to demonstrate the implausibility of divine ideas.
– He uses the basics of Bayesian reasoning to show what ideas are worth putting effort or trust in.
– The book concludes that it is reasonable to doubt the historical nature of the man known as Jesus, even though many scholars seem reluctant to see it that way.
– One of the big elements that most historical Jesus believers point to is the idea that the believers wouldn’t have said things which were embarrassing.
– Since there are zero records or writings which come from the time while Jesus was alive it is quite reasonable to doubt that there was a historical Jesus.
– Something quite contemporary to Jesus while he was alive, Julius Ceasar, who never wrote about, or mentioned Jesus, nor did his fellow contemporaries.
– Even though it went way too far, the Zeitgeist movie touched on some things that are true when it comes to similarities between Jesus and other/older religious figures.
– Many religious scholars who think that there *must* have been a historical Jesus is all the detail and amount of writings about Jesus.
– You can check out Raphael and some of his writings about William Lane Craig and his claims, as well as much of his other work as his website.

Outro Music [31:45]
– Outro music donated by Trent Brusky of Dropfox.

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