My better half has a piece in the Wall Street Journal today on why religious people are often more skeptical and rational than atheists and the irreligious:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.
“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

And as an added bonus, in her column she proves her point by exposing Bill Maher — who’s coming out with a documentary soon which blames all the world’s ills on religion — as a fervent advocate of pseudoscience.