Skeptics face the difficulty of creating a like environment. In matters of critical thinking, skeptics vary wildly in degree of application. There is the crowd inspired by Phil Plait’s catchphrase – ‘Don’t Be A Dick’. Some segments, on the other hand, believe in foisting critical thinking onto every conversation. No matter how casual the conversation may be, if a person says something that is “wrong”, it must be addressed immediately and with fervor. Even in our own community, we are divided as there is no dogmatic umbrella under which we all entirely fall.

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On 19 April 2008, Singh wrote an article in the UK based newspaper The Guardian, which resulted in him being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association. Fortunately, Simon Singh is fighting this, with the help of an increasing number of supporters. Many have reprinted the article, and SkepticReport is one of them.

The Amazing Meeting, an annual conference hosted by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), is more than just a get-together for skeptics. It’s the basis for a community of like-minded people from all over the world who are often excluded, and sometimes shunned, for their convictions.

The story of Sharon Sifford, and how she went from numerologist and tarot reader to ex-numerologist and ex-tarot reader.

A foggy morning in October, around 500 skeptics waited outside the Congress Theatre “Pietro d’Abano” in order to be registered for the 5th World Skeptics Congress.

A diligent channel surfer should notice a new trend in TV talk shows: psychic guests supposedly channeling the dead relatives of audience members, often conveying information they could not possibly have known in advance. Can psychics really divine the future by speaking to the dead, or do they, as skeptics insist, just use an old magician’s parlour trick called “cold reading”?

Scientific reasoning is not something that is reserved for scientists, and it should not be. A public understanding of the scientific method is as important, if not more important, than knowledge of scientific facts. But certainly the facts are of interest, and if we are not able to check the facts for our selves we rely on others to do it for us. But whom can we trust with such important work as to tell us how things really are?

In 1988, an article appeared in the alt.paranormal newsgroup of the Internet. It was critical of the tools used by skeptics in discussions with non-skeptics and in evaluating the extraordinary claims made by proponents of the paranormal. This article is a point-by-point response to each of the criticisms in the article.

Some times it happens that the lives of two people are linked to each other by Fate. The odds in this story are 1 to 8,294,400,000 that a friend of mine and myself are destined to have our lives intertwined. Or are they?