SkepSun #35 (04_21_2013)

We get Skeptical Sunday underway this week as we always do, with Freethought Radio. We’ll hear about FFRF’s victory in Kentucky schools that are now removing the Ten Commandments after complaints from students and FFRF attorneys. Then Annie Laurie and Dan talk with Australian singer/songwriter Shelley Segal — the new poster girl for the international atheism movement — and play some of the songs from her CD, An Atheist Album. On the podcast “Reasonable Doubts” we here an interview with Candida Moss about her new book “The Myth of Christian Persecution” in which she argues that contrary to popular accounts of church history there never was any widespread systematic persecution of Christians in the first centuries of the common era and that the stories of martyrdom from that period have been exaggerated or even completely fabricated. In the final segment of Skeptical Sunday, we hear Sean Carroll’s 2012 TAM address. We are made of particles, interacting according to the laws of physics that are completely understood. That doesn’t imply the end of physics but it does imply the end of telekinesis, astrology, and life after death. Carroll explores what it implies for our understanding of consciousness and the meaning of life.  Should taking the laws of nature seriously make us seriously depressed, or does it open new vistas of possibility?