nyuuzyou/wikis huggingface dataset:
Earthdance

Earthdance International bills itself as "the world's largest synchronized music and dance festival for peace" and is held annually in various cities across the world. It started in 1997 and has since grown into an annual festival for aging hippies and various other New Age practitioners. Earthdance was conceived in 1996 by event producer/musician Chris Deckker, with a vision to unite the whole world in peace through the universal platform of dance and music. They are a California-based non-profit organization (501c3) dedicated to "Building a Culture of Peace" by fusing the elements of festival culture and conscious entertainment with the worldwide movements of peace and sustainability through music, art, dance and synchronized prayer/meditation practice.
The highlight of each event is the simultaneous playing of the Earthdance "anthem" at midnight (GMT) at all the various parties worldwide. The organisation is aligned with the United Nations International Day of Peace on September 21, and thus the parties take place on, or around, these days.
Each year, Earthdance focuses on a specific cause or charity. In 2010, they focused on "Embracing All Traditions" and participated in a worldwide synchronized "Prayer for Peace" in the Holy Land. Previous years have focused on Drums of Peace (2004), Honoring the Wisdom of the Elders (2006), Honoring the Water (2007), Honoring the Earth (2008) and Blessing the Children (2009).
It's also a perfect opportunity for the aging hippies to indulge in recreational pharmaceuticals.
==See also==
*Psychedelic trance
*Burning man
==External links==
*Earthdance homepage
Category:California
Category:Music
Category:New Age
Earthing

Earthing is an alternative medicine therapy where individuals "connect" with the Earth's negative surface charge. Apparently this is supposed to help you "balance" your internal circuitry and restore a lost electrical charge.http://earthinginstitute.net/about-us/ On the Earthing Institute's website they claim Earthing can help improve blood flow, reduce inflammation, reduce pain, and allow for deeper sleep.
==How to do it==
To establish a connection to the ground it is suggested one can simply walk around barefoot.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4F8mterVGE Unfortunately if you're a crank conman you'll find it hard to charge people for walking outdoors. So the solution is to charge people for special mats they can plug in to their walls and rest their feet on.http://www.earthing.com/ Presumably the electrical design is fairly simple, just involving a dummy plug with a connection to the mains safety ground.
==Efficacy==
Of course it's not a bad idea to try and get outside on a regular basis, but it's unlikely that walking barefoot would be better than walking in shoes, particularly in cold weather or other conditions where exposed skin could be dangerous. In particular, walking barefoot outdoors can sometimes lead to parasites (plantar warts or hookworm). The mats, on the other hand, could have no conceivable benefit beyond the placebo effect. Of course an advocate of Earthing will tell you a different story, about how supposedly because the nervous system uses electric signals to communicate literally grounding oneself electronically will help your nervous system function.
==See also==
*Barefoot running
==References==
Easter Bunny

The Easter Bunny is a rabbit who delivers eggs to people (primarily in North America and certain parts of Europe) on Easter. The eggs may be real ones that have been painted, chocolate ones or colored plastic ones that may or may not contain candy.
==Pagan?==
The Easter Bunny enters history in the year 1682, when an Alsatian German professor at the University of Strasbourg, Georg Franck von Frankenau, wrote Disputatio ordinaria disquiriens de ovis paschalibus, a Latin-German essay about Easter eggs that no doubt seemed very clever at the time (and rose to #4 on the New York Times bestseller list for 1682.) 
Notwithstanding the fact that the rabbit's association with Easter appears first in Alsace in the seventeenth century, various nineteenth century folklorists and their followers just knew that the Easter Bunny had to be a "pagan survival". The usual reasoning process to arrive at this conclusion was given an unusually frank treatment in Holtzmann's German Mythology: "The Easter Hare is unintelligible to me, but probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara". The existence of the alleged goddess Ostara is likewise dubious. 
Elsewhere in Germany, the Easter Hare was eaten. This was said to "openly bear the marks of the original paganism;" none but a heathen bold would make a dinner of hassenpfeffer, it seems. And: 
This too, apparently, counted as pagan; if eating a calf's head for breakfast doesn't make you pagan, we don't know what will. It is understood that the offer still stands.Billson, Charles J. "The Easter Hare, in Folk-Lore, Volume 3, Number 4 (December 1896). 
As rabbits don't have anything to do with Christian theology, and play only a slight role in pagan theology as well, why this continues to be accepted by some fundamentalists remains a mystery. The pagan survival folklorists had to go as far as the Menominee god before they could find pagans actually worshipping rabbits. The poet , a genuine pagan, knew nothing of the Easter Bunny, but he did mention a belief that eating rabbit for seven days straight would turn any woman beautiful.Si quando leporem mittis mihi, Gellia, dicis:
'Formosus septem, Marce, diebus eris.'
Si non derides, si verum, lux mea, narras,
Edisti numquam, Gellia, tu leporem.Martial, Epigrams 5.29
Should the Easter Bunny arrive at your house, and you are feeling humane, trap it and steal its eggs. If not, kill it and steal its eggs. You are upholding the authentic tradition that way.
ChickBunny.jpg|The Easter Bunny died for your sins.
Easter-Bunny-loves-children.jpg|The Easter Bunny loves children.
Easter bunny hops through Incirlik 120404-F-BS505-041.jpg|He really does.
Easter-Bunny-loves-animals.jpg|He loves animals too.
Easter Bunny (2898504947).jpg|And little old ladies.
Easter-Bunny-from-Hell.jpg|Sweet dreams . . . I'm always watching you
==See also==
*Rabbit's foot
*Santa Claus
*Tooth fairy
==Further reading==
*Devereaux, Robert. Santa Steps Out. (Leisure Books, 1998; )
==References==
Category:Animals
Category:Folklore
Category:Food
Category:Paganism
Eastern Bloc

The Eastern Bloc — also known as the Communist Bloc, Soviet Bloc, and the Iron Curtain — were the Soviet-aligned nations during the Cold War. It is often confused with Eastern Europe (geographical term), where the USSR was located, hence the vague and incorrect term Eastern Europe came to usage. The Eastern Bloc consisted of countries of eastern Europe and allied countries of central Europe, the Balkans, as well as the Baltic states in the crossroads of central and northern Europe that were once under the domination of the Soviet Union, and other nations mostly in Asia and Africa. All of these nations were governed by communist totalitarian dictatorships.BRIA 19 1 a Life Under Communism in Eastern Europe, Constitutional Rights Foundation
==History==
The Soviets had little trouble establishing dominance over the European Eastern Bloc nations, having invaded them at the end of World War II in pursuit of the retreating armies of Nazi Germany, then stuck around for decades after the war ended. It became closely affiliated with Communist governments that popped up in revolutions around the world, heavily influencing them and providing them support.
==European countries==
*Bulgaria
*Czechoslovakia
*East Germany
*Hungary
*Poland
*Romania
==Asian countries==
*Afghanistan
*Cambodia
*Laos
*Mongolia
*North Korea
*South Yemen
*Vietnam
==African countries==
*Angola
*Benin
*People’s Republic of the Congo (Now the Republic of the Congo)
*Ethiopia
*Mozambique
*Somalia
==North American countries==
*Cuba
*Grenada, shortly had a Communist government come to power in a coup, but it was quickly suppressed by the United States and the original government.
==Countries that became autonomous==
Three other nations were originally aligned with the Bloc, but later established their autonomy:
*China (autonomous after 1961)
*Albania (autonomous after 1960)
*Yugoslavia (autonomous after 1948)
==See also==
*Soviet Union
*Communism
==References==
==External links==
*
Category:Geography
Category:Communism
Category:European history
Category:History of communism
Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes is the most optimistic nihilistic book in the Bible. It is presented as a book of wisdom by a man, known in Hebrew as Qohelet (often translated as "preacher" or "leader of the assembly"), and rumored to be an early incarnation of Roger McGuinn Pete Seeger — who has realized that everything is worthless, and life has no meaning, so one should enjoy simple pleasures. In this respect, his ideas resemble Epicurean philosophy. It has a certain eerie beauty born of desolation and tells you to enjoy life while you can. Christian exegesis bends over backward to explain how the book's message is that we should focus ourselves on God and that the author is trying to point out that life without God is meaningless. The majority of it is pretty much the direct opposite of that sentiment, though the concluding passages do emphasize following God's commandments.
Eric Dodson described the book as being precursor to existentialism.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HohAXI6YpGU
==See also==
*RationalWiki:Annotated Bible/Ecclesiastes
==References==
Category:Old Testament Wisdom
Category:Old Testament
Category:Blasphemy (probably)
Eckhart Tolle

Eckhart Tolle (born Ulrich Leonard Tölle) is a New-Age-guru, and garden-gnome-lookalike, promoted by Oprah Winfrey.Video of Oprah bigging-up Eckhart. Eckhart, is the author of the mumbo-jumbo bestseller, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle (1997) Namaste Publishing. ISBN 0968236405.
Apparently Eckhart suffered from manic-depression: he writes:
(now comes the manic-euphoria bit):
But like David Icke, Eckhart has luckily managed to turn his mental breakdown into a lucrative publishing career.
==Education==
Before and during his period of park-bench hopping and proselytizing to strangers, Tolle studied at London University. He was offered a scholarship to do postgraduate research at Cambridge University, which he entered in 1977 but dropped out soon after. In addition to speaking English, Tolle taught classes while speaking Spanish and German. 
Despite his education, he became a self-help guru utilizing his knowledge in philosophy, religion, and psychology. There is evidence in his talks that he is widely read, however he often misquotes Descartes, Nietzsche, and Sartre. For example, he erroneously states in his book A New Earth:
Despite Descartes's quote being taken completely out of context, and having wrong meaning attributed to it, it makes for good self-help filler.
Tolle states in his books and talks that he is not smart, but it does appear he was learned enough to create a multi-million dollar empire by using pop psychology, philosophy, Buddhism, New Age woo, and other sources.
==Danger==
It's easy to underestimate gurus like Tolle. On the surface, he is a calm unassuming man with a German accent, but even a cursory glance at his teachings will show them to be potentially harmful.
===The Ego===
Eckhart Tolle's definition of the word Ego is different than most psychologists and dictionaries understand the word to be. Regardless, Ecky's position is that the ego should be removed from oneself to avoid suffering:
Because fuck your family, your knowledge, and anything that makes life worth living. Meditate on this and be free of suffering!
Focus on consciousness as much as you can, and don't think about what I am saying. Just realize the truth of it.
By "evolve", he means "become enlightened", which means "empty your mind of thought and resistance". The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh cult also used this formula to great effect.
Read The Power of Now chapter on the ego and substitute the word "ego" with "rationalism" or "rationalist". Better yet, read something else. Don't read this shit at all.
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Living people
Category:New Age
Category:Authors
Eclipse of Darwinism

The eclipse of Darwinism is a phrase to describe the state of affairs prior to the modern synthesis when evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles but relatively few biologists believed that natural selection was its primary mechanism. From the 1880s through to the first couple of decades of the 20th century a number of non-Darwinian alternatives to natural selection were developed and explored, as many biologists considered natural selection to have been a wrong or only of a minor importance to evolution.
Some of the alternatives to natural selection include:
*Theistic evolution
*Spiritual evolution
*Vitalism
*Orthogenesis
*Neo-Lamarckism
*Saltationism
*Directed mutation
*Zoogenesis
These mechanisms were rejected by the neo-Darwinian synthesis theorists in the 1940's as evidence had proven the role of natural selection in evolution; however there has been a recent interest in Lamarckism due to epigenetics and in saltational evolution. Spiritual, theistic and vitalist evolution have largely disappeared from the scientific literature at the beginning of the 20th century as direct appeals to supernatural causes came to be seen as unscientific.
Henri Bergson, a philosopher and proponent of élan vital, was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 1927.
Ironically, the name Social Darwinism was chosen for a political and social movement that arose during the period of the eclipse of Darwinism.
==References==
*Bowler, Peter J. (2003). Evolution:The History of an Idea. University of California Press.
*Bowler, Peter J. (1983). The Eclipse of Darwinism: anti-Darwinian evolutionary theories in the decades around 1900. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Category:Evolution
Category:Biology
Ecological fallacy

The ecological fallacy, sometimes referred to as the ecological inference fallacy, describes a fallacious inference made about a particular individual/group from aggregate statistical data in reference to whatever population that individual(or group) is part of."Ecological fallacy" - Encyclopedia Britannica. It's a fallacy very similar to the fallacy of composition/division or category mistake. It can also be said to apply in contexts where someone assumes that a statistical property for a population applies to subgroups of that population. It would be similar to making a mathematical error in assuming properties of an entire set also apply to subsets within the set, and/or particular elements within said set. 
==Form==
The ecological fallacy can take several forms:
Alternatively:
==Examples==
This is a fallacy because the inference about an individual doesn't necessarily follow from the group generalization. In statistics, the average is the sum of all the scores in a given set divided by the number of scores."Arithmetic mean" - Wolfram Mathworld Sarah's true score does not need to reflect or even be close to the average in order for the population average to hold. So it doesn't necessarily follow that Sarah will be better at math than Jack. Similar reasoning applies to the two examples that follow. 
Again doesn't necessarily follow. 
In the hypothetical case that New York City had a high crime rate overall it doesn't rule out the possibility that Jane lives in a part of the city that experiences a much lower crime rate than the overall average for the city.
In each of these examples given the inference is logically invalid this makes the ecological fallacy a formal fallacy.
==See also==
*Correlation does not equal causation
*Simpson's paradox
*Association fallacy
==References==
Category:Fallacies
Category:Statistics
Ectoplasm

Ectoplasm is a physical substance supposedly created paranormally on the bodies of psychic mediums for spirits to take form in. Since World War II, reports of ectoplasm have declined and science has shown that the substance turned out to be a hoax, made of natural substances such as cheesecloth or fabric. 
==Definition==
The term derives from ecto- (from Greek for outside) and plasm (from Greek for a molded thing), or more in other words something molded outside, i.e. something physical being "molded" externally to the body by use of psychic power. Sometimes the synonymous term exteriorization is used instead. Charles Richet (1850-1935) who had coined the term ectoplasm, did not actually believe the substance had anything to do with spirits. Similar to other psychical researchers who studied mediumship in the 19th century such as Camille Flammarion wrote that it was a mysterious force that could emanate from the body of the medium during seances.
The view that ectoplasm was an actual force or fluid was later dropped due to investigations into ectoplasm by scientific sampling. Evidence had shown from samples that ectoplasm was the result of fraud and trickery of the medium made from chewed paper, cloth, egg white or butter muslin. The photographs of ectoplasm show it to closely resemble cheesecloth and natural substances. Most modern paranormal researchers accept that ectoplasm as spirits has been refuted by science. The only modern-day supporters of ectoplasm being genuine are some spiritualists.
==Gallery==
File:Mina Crandon ectoplasm face.png|Mina Crandon's ectoplasm face
File:Mina Crandon Fake Ectoplasm.jpg|Mina Crandon's Mina Crandon hand
File:Eusapia Palladino with ectoplasm hands.png|Eusapia Palladino's ectoplasm hands
File:Eva C ectoplasm face.png|Eva Carrière's ectoplasm face
File:The fake ectoplasm of Mary Marshall.jpg|Mary Marshall's ectoplasm: she should have had a doctor look at her sinus
File:Mary Marshall ectoplasm.png|Mary Marshall again
File:Kathleen Goligher fake ectoplasm.jpg|Kathleen Goligher with ectoplasm
File:Helen Duncan fake ectoplasm.jpg|Helen Duncan with ectoplasm
File:Helen Duncan with roll of cheesecloth.png|Helen Duncan again
File:Gordon Higginson spiritualist medium.jpg|Gordon Higginson with ectoplasm: must have been something he ate
File:Ectoplasma10.jpg|Ronald Edwin Cockersell with ectoplasm
File:Franek Kluski medium.jpg|Franek Kluski with ectoplasm
File:Magician Heredia with fake ectoplasm.png|Carlos María de Heredia demonstrating fake ectoplasm
File:Houdini demonstrating fake ectoplasm.png|Harry Houdini demonstrating fake ectoplasm
Ecumenism

Ecumenism (aka Ecumenicalism or the Ecumenical movement) refers to the beliefs and practices of certain religionists who have the crazy idea that disparate religions — i.e., Baptists, Mormons, and Catholics or Christians, Muslims, and Jews — should set aside their ungodly hatred for each other differences and work together for world peace and social justice. It also refers to movements specifically within Christianity to unite different denominations under an umbrella body, or even to merge them into a single denomination. The latter has been notably successful in Canada, with its largest Protestant denomination being the United Church of Canada, a merger of the Methodist, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Local Union, and Evangelical United Brethren churches.
Ecumenism had its roots in the Christian missionary field, where missionaries of different sects found themselves together in the field and had to reconcile some of their differences in order to get the job done. The first notable step towards ecumenism came in 1910 with the gathering of differing Protestants at the International Missionary Conference. Today, there exist churches that unite splintered sects, such as the United Church of Christ and Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. The National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States, and the World Council of Churches, are two major Christian ecumenical organizations.
==Fundamentalist reaction==
Fundamentalist Christians view ecumenism as a movement of liberal denominations to compromise what they view as essential Christian doctrine such as creationism, the virgin birth, a literal hell, and the inerrancy of the Bible, all in the name of setting aside their differences. They may view it as a movement whose end result is muting the message of sin and personal salvation, and replacing it with a "social gospel" of secular political activism around mostly liberal issues such as social justice, ending poverty, opposition to war and the death penalty, etc. 
Those fundamentalists of an anti-Catholic bent often adhere to a conspiracy theory that the ecumenical movement is a plot by the Pope to merge all the Protestant churches back into the Catholic Church.
Fundamentalists obsessed with the end times likewise often adhere to a belief that ecumenism will be the vehicle through which the Antichrist establishes a world "superchurch", which denies all the essentials of the Christian faith while fooling most people into thinking it is a Christian church. (What the fundies don't realize is that they're really describing themselves.)
==External links==
*Answers: ecumenism
Category:Religion
Ed Brayton

Ed Brayton In Memory of Ed Brayton. Center For Inquiry Michigan, 2020.PZ Myers: Ed Brayton has died was a civil libertarian blogger and former comedian who wrote at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. He specialized in civil rights issues, particularly police misconduct, education policy, and transparency in government. He also had a soft spot for crazy ideologues, namely Joseph Farah and his menagerie.
Brayton's blog was the main ScienceBlogs political journal, but after National Geographic acquired the network, he founded Freethought Blogs together with a few other bloggers, including PZ Myers, and moved his main blogging activities there. In August 2015, he moved his blog once again, to Patheos.
Brayton and Myers were the two main founders of the Freethought Blogs collective. Though Ed and his readers had a brief feud with PZ Myers and his readers some time ago (mainly over framing issues), the hatchet has long since been buried in some concern troll's skull.
Brayton and Myers agreed the freethought movement should not have been dominated by aging white men like themselves. Both strongly supported the view that Freethought Blogs should have provided a platform for others, notably sex positive feminists. Brayton was willing to accept some controversy to achieve this.That’s not a “response”, Michael, it’s a “denial”
Brayton asked for financial help with a lawsuit he said was over a white supremacist objecting to being called a white supremacist.Please Help Me Fight a Lawsuit
== Critical Analysis of Evolution ==
According to Brayton, the critical analysis of evolution is the fourth stage in the development of the anti-evolution movement in schools, which he believes to be the creationism du jour following the failure of intelligent design in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. The first stage was censorship of evolution in schools (e.g., the ), the second stage Creation Science, and the third stage Intelligent Design.
==See also==
*Culture war
==External links==
* Dispatches From the Culture Wars at Patheos
* Dispatches from the Creation Wars, the old blog at Science Blogs, closed in 2011
* Ed corrects the record on his feud with PZ
* Ed Brayton on the anti-evolution movement
* Ed Brayton on the beginning fourth phase
==References==
Category:Atheists
Category:Bloggers
Category:Libertarians