Freedom From Religion Foundation to Air Ad on CBS

Given the amazing success of the Reason Rally this weekend in Washington, DC (roughly 20,000 secularists/atheists/non-religious people showing up in the rain is a success to me 🙂 ), it seems more than appropriate that the Freedom From Religion Foundation runs an ad which will receive a nationwide airing on CBS on Sunday and Monday.  The ad opens with President John F. Kennedy’s famous remarks about an absolute separation between church and state.  Here’s the ad:

Wonderfully done, and well-timed.  This is an especially important time for those of us in the non-believing community to step up and be counted, given the preponderance of religiously-oriented stupidity on display in election-year politics these days.  If we hope to uphold church-state separation and fight back against those who would turn our secular republic into a theocracy, we need to get vocal and get active!

Hat tip to The Friendly Atheist for bringing this to my attention! 🙂

Damn Lies & Statistics: Who’s Counting?

In the United States, tax day (April 15th) has just passed, and this year we had a rather interesting series of anti-tax events organized by Fox News called “Tea Parties”. The organizers of these events were, at one point, estimating perhaps millions of people in attendance.

To me, the interesting thing about events like this is the numbers of people that are reported to have attended. In an attempt to apply a version of the argument from popularity, organizers of such events will tend to over-estimate attendance while those in opposition to such events usually try to downplay those same numbers.

Sometimes, when we see polls or statistics being reported in the media or by some interest group, the numbers are presented to us as what Dr. Joel Best (author of “Damned Lies & Statistics”) refers to as “little nuggets of truth”. However, a deeper analysis of such reports often presents a very different picture.