English: Many know him as one of the world's top science authors. We were gathered for his non-profit, the Center for Inquiry (CFI), the “only organization in the country that promotes secularism and skepticism to apply critical thinking and the scientific method to all claims about the true nature of reality.”

Some of their activities and concerns: • Secular rescue: like the underground railroad for the thirteen countries where being a non-theist is punishable by death

• Battling fake medicine: suing Walmart and CVS for putting poorly-labeled quack homeopathic remedies that lack any active ingredient alongside real children’s medicines on their shelves. Homeopathy is a $3B business in the U.S., and the FDA just ignores it. Here's a punchy video summary.

• The decline of critical thought: 40% of Americans think God created the Earth and anatomically modern humans less than 10,000 years ago. Psychics bilk the gullible of $1B per year. Psychics bilk the gullible of $1B per year. “A new age has dawned for pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, religious zealotry, medical quackery, and plain old lies. When no one can trust anything they hear, they will believe what they want, regardless of whether it’s true.”

• Of their many programs, my favorite is the CFI Investigations Group, the largest paranormal investigations group in the world: cfiig.org They offer a $250K prize to anyone who can prove anything paranormal or demonstrate anything supernatural. Next time someone prattles on about crystal healing, or homeopathy, or speaking with the dead (1/3 of Americans believe in this!), or telepathy or astrology, and you just can’t anymore, you have a new tool — suggest they go collect the $250K that’s just waiting for them. Why not? If it’s a lack of faith, perhaps they should keep their delusions to themselves.

For over 40 years, CFI has advanced reason over fantasy and science over myth. The co-founders, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, B. F. Skinner and James Randi were deeply worried back in the 1970s, that many Americans looked to horoscopes, mystical gurus, spirits of the dead, aliens, and countless other forms of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and the paranormal.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Thank you to last night’s host David Cowen, and for his support of the rescue of freethinkers, such as the Afghan girls robotics team, after the fall of Kabul. You can donate to CFI too.