Season of Reason

lieving in nonsense hurts people, and that's why James Randi and The James Randi Educational Foundation work hard to promote critical thinking and skepticism as a form of intellectual self defense.

2013 — the last twelve months were our most productive ever — is quickly coming to an end, and as you would expect, we are busy with our plans for 2014. But only with your help will we be able to continue battling unreason into the New Year.

We have only a few days left in our Season of Reason campaign to raise the support we’ll need to continue fighting the fakers and enabling people to defend themselves from paranormal and pseudoscientific scams. Please join with Randi and our team at the JREF as we stand up for reason and continue battling for you and other science-minded folks in the coming year.

Your contribution will enable us to:

• Continue exposing paranormal and pseudoscientific frauds. Uniquely among organizations who oppose unreason, we challenge the James Van Praaghs and the quacks with our $1 Million prize for anyone who can prove a paranormal ability under fair conditions. And we put the million dollar prize on the line at live events like at TAM 2013.
• Produce more free courses on scientific skepticism such as our 10 part video lecture series by Ray Hyman titled "How To Think About Dubious Claims" and companion course guide released in 2013.
• Create and inspire the investigative spirit in a new generation of critical thinkers by providing more grants and free teaching resources to educators, scholarships for students, and free resources for the classroom and parents. In 2013 alone, the JREF published four new hands-on classroom educational kits available free for the asking.
• Organize the world's leading annual skeptics conference, The Amaz!ng Meeting (TAM) in Las Vegas, featuring the brightest thinkers and skeptics from around the world, in addition to numerous activist and educator training workshops. Nearly two million people viewed videos of JREF’s free educational sessions online from TAM and other JREF events in 2013.
• Support the skeptical community and important grassroots consumer advocates who fight for the public’s right to know the real facts by producing workshops such as 2013's "Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia" featuring Susan Gerbic, and providing activist resources to promote skepticism at the local level.
• Publish more books for the public on skepticism, such as the more than a dozen titles the JREF published in 2013 on Science Based Medicine topics like Homeopathy, Chiropractic, Acupuncture and "Eastern" Medicine, and more.
• And spread the "good news" of critical thinking through educational and digital outreach initiatives including podcasts, online articles, videos, special reports, and mobile apps.

But we can only do all of this and more with your help today.

And I’m very happy to say that thanks to long-time supporter of the JREF’s important work, someone who recognizes that Randi and the JREF team are uniquely positioned to respond to harmful claims made by peddlers of paranormal nonsense plaguing society, all donations up to $100,000 through the end of the end of the year will be matched – dollar-for-dollar!

For a limited time, you have an opportunity to take your support of the JREF’s unique and valuable work and give it a boost — to make your end-year gift go twice as far. Make a donation today, and your impact will be doubled — but only if you contribute now.

For these reasons and more, I’m asking you to support the JREF at this critical time. I’ve been working since the late-1990's to help make the world a little saner, and inspired by Randi’s decades of successes, all of us at the JREF are dedicated, more than ever, to promoting skepticism to the public, and to providing reliable information about psuedoscience and the paranormal. I’ve honestly never been more optimistic about the future of this project in the public interest, and with your help I know we can continue to do amazing things for scientific skepticism.

Sincerely,

D.J. Grothe
President, The James Randi Educational Foundation

P.S. – Please make your most generous donation today in order to double your gift to the JREF.

P.P.S. – We still have a very limited number of Randi’s special gift to especially generous supporters of the JREF this year -- a rare poster from his personal collection. Don't miss this very chance to have a very special gift from Randi – and to help the JREF keep going strong in the process!