Heap 2001 - 2002   Heap 2003

Title:	What Is Alternative Medicine?	Author:	Stephen Barrett
Subject:	Alternative Therapies	Published:	10/13/2000
"Belief in the treatment is not essential, but the placebo effect may be enhanced by such factors as faith, sympathetic attention, sensational claims, testimonials, and the use of scientific-looking charts, devices, and terminology." Read more...

Title:	Human Sacrifice: Is It Legal?	Author:	Edward K. Lankford
Subject:	Quackery	Published:	10/13/2000
"Faith healing is a practice common in most cultures and persists even in the light (or in spite) of current medical knowledge and procedures. While there are many types of faith healing, the most common mean is through basic prayer." Read more...

Title:	The Battle For Your Mind	Author:	Dick Sutphen
Subject:	Skepticism, Brainwashing	Published:	08/28/2000
"In most revivalist gatherings, "testifying" or "witnessing" usually follows the fear-based sermon. People from the audience come up on stage and relate their stories. "I was crippled and now I can walk!" "I had arthritis and now it's gone!" It is a psychological manipulation that works. After listening to numerous case histories of miraculous healings, the average guy in the audience with a minor problem is sure he can be healed. The room is charged with fear, guilt, intense excitement, and expectations." Read more...

Title:	An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: Section X - Of Miracles	Authors:	David Hume
Subject:	Skepticism	Published:	07/17/2000
"A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined." Read more...

Title:	Women and Skepticism	Authors:	Mike Sofka, Amy Bix and Beth Wolszon
Subject:	Skepticism	Published:	07/13/2000
"Know-it-alls are not popular, but men are much less likely to regularly receive negative feedback from speaking in authoritative tones. Women often notice a strong aura of disapproval, sometimes even hostility, if they do so. It's not only men who react this way, and I think people often don't realize they're doing it." Read more...

Title:	Randi At Caltech: A Report From the Paranormal Trenches	Author:	James Randi
Subject:	Skepticism	Published:	05/04/2000
"As I was up against the ceiling I noticed that the room was lit in sort of a grayish light. I looked down toward the television set and saw nothing but static on the screen and heard nothing but white noise. What I saw was startling. I saw myself, in bed, scrunched over to one side, a chartreuse bedspread on it, with Alice the cat in the middle. I noted that as she opened her eyes they were green. It almost looked like two holes punched through her head. She looked at me and went, 'hmmph' and went right back to sleep." Read more...

Title:	On the Edge of Reality	Author:	Susan Blackmore
Subject:	Out-of-Body Experiences, Parapsychology, Skepticism	Published:	05/04/2000
"For many years now I have been collecting accounts that people send me. The results have surprised me. Far from being the oddities you might think, these strange states are extremely common. Most of us talk as though we are absolutely sure we know reality from imagination - we’re not going mad - we have our feet firmly planted on the ground. But dig just a little deeper and most people will admit that, just sometimes, they have not been so sure." Read more...

Title:	Parapsychology and The Paranormal	Author:	Christopher C. French
Subject:	Parapsychology, Paranormal, Skepticism	Published:	05/04/2000
"Can the critics of the paranormal really be justified in rejecting this almost universal belief in psi? The short answer is that at the moment we simply do not know whether or not paranormal forces exist and a truly scientific and open-minded approach must be one that allows for the possibility that they might. What we can be sure about, however, is that even if such forces do not exist, human nature is such that many people would still believe in the paranormal." Read more...

Title:	The Relativity of Wrong	Author:	Isaac Asimov
Subject:	Statistics, Skepticism	Published:	05/04/2000
"The correction in going from spherical to oblate spheroidal is much smaller than going from flat to spherical. Therefore, although the notion of the earth as a sphere is wrong, strictly speaking, it is not as wrong as the notion of the earth as flat." Read more...

Title:	The Burden of Skepticism	Author:	Carl Sagan
Subject:	Skepticism	Published:	03/25/2000
"It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you're in deep trouble." Read more...

Title:	The Truth Will Make You Free	Author:	Farrel Till
Subject:	Skepticism against Religion	Published:	03/12/2000
"Bibliolaters delight in throwing at us some variation of Pascal's wager. "If we are right and you are wrong, what then?" Well, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so we also have the right to ask, "What if we are right and you are wrong?" If that should be the case, the damage that religion has done to mankind becomes impossible to assess." Read more...

Title:	Crop Circles and Aliens: What's The Evidence?	Author:	Carl Sagan
Subject:	Crop Circles	Published:	03/05/2000
"Farmers or passersby would discover pictograms impressed upon fields of wheat, oats, barley or rapeseed. Beginning with simple circles, first reported in southern England in the middle 1970s, the phenomenon progressed year by year." Read more...

Title:	James Randi and The Great Carlos	Authors:	James Randi & Paul Willis
Subject:	Skepticism; Charlatanism	Published:	07/08/1999
"Sentences weren't complete, grammar was bad, things were not continued on the next page and such, but that didn't make any difference to them; they excused any errors, anything was accepted because it was the words of Carlos." Read more...

Title:	Magician Urges Atheists to Teach Kids Critical Thinking	Author:	Swapna Venugopal
Subject:	Skepticism	Published:	07/08/1999
"Critical thinking should be taught particularly to young children," Randi said, "because they are going to run the world after we are gone." Read more...