I always find it amusing when our British cousins, being a bit older and often wiser, look at the American scene and feel compelled to give us a gentle reminder or serious lecture. In this case it is a sage reminisce on the Founding Fathers, religion, and politics. The chiding was prompted by the usual [...]
Tags:American exceptionalism·Charles Darwin·Christian nation·Civil Religion·David Barton·evangelicals·founding fathers·Newt Gingrich·Republican Party·Rick Perry·Texas
Here are some last minute gift ideas for those who like inspiration with their daily carmelized bread:
The seller suggests that quality is beside the transcendent point: “Normal toasters are tamed and subdued by unfortunate limitations; but great toasters rise above them and become Jesus & Virgin Mary Toasters.” The Jesus toast looks disturbingly [...]
Although I can acknowledge that the world is a better place because Steven Pinker is in it, it is harder for me to acknowledge — as Pinker argues in his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature — that the world has gotten better because violence has progressively declined during the course of human [...]
Tags:Better Angels of Our Nature·biological determinism·biology·conflict·culture·eternal recurrence·eternal return·Milan Kundera·Nietzsche·peace·Peter Singer·sociobiology·Steven Pinker·The Blank Slate·Unbearable Lightness of Being·violence·war
Yesterday on NPR, Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan conducted a fascinating interview (Christians Divided Over Science of Human Origins) with Daniel Harlow, religion professor at Calvin College, and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The topic: Whether Genesis should be interpreted literally or metaphorically. NPR religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty [...]
Tags:Adam·Albert Mohler·Barbara Bradley Hagerty·bible·Calvin College·Christian·creationism·Daniel Harlow·DNA·evangelicals·Eve·evolution·fundamentalist·Garden of Eden·Genesis·genetics·Homo·literalism·Neal Conan·origins·progressives·Southern Baptist·theology
Everyone knows the experience: you happen upon a wreck and know you shouldn’t look but can’t help it. While there is a chance of seeing something disturbing, you look regardless. There should be a word for this and in the absence of one, I will call it car-wreck voyeurism. I felt something like this after [...]
Tags:adaptation·ancestral environment·ASD·Aspergers·autism·autism spectrum disorder·autistic·EP·evolutionary psychology·fantasy·fitness·foraging·gathering·hunting·Jared Reser·Just So Stories·maladaptive·orangutans·Panglossian·Panglossian Paradigm·parsimony·peer review·pleiotropy·Plio-Pleistocene·Psychology Today·Satoshi Kanazawa·sociality·solitary forager hypothesis·spandrels·speculation·Thomas Hobbes
I am not talking about theory of mind the concept but A Theory of Mind, a newcomer to the blogging community written by Erika Salomon. Erika is a graduate student in social psychology at the University of Illinois.
She is one of Jesse Bering’s former students, having earned a master’s degree in Cognition and Culture at [...]
Tags:A Theory of Mind·Erika Salomon·Gross Gods·Icky Atheism·Jesse Bering·Jesse Preston
At one elementary school in Germany, the fifth grade curriculum includes a unit on the “Stone Age.” As an anthropologist, I have to say this sounds great in theory. It was a bit morbid in execution.
As reported by Spiegel, the teachers invited a local farmer to provide instruction on killing and butchery. In years past, [...]
Tags:butchery·children·curriculum·Easter Bunny·elementary school·Germany·killing·rabbit·Stone Age·trauma
Every once in a while, I encounter studies that deserve a category of their own. If I were feeling churlish, I might place them in a “No Sh*t” file; if I were feeling humorous, I might place them in my Bart Simpson “D’oh” folder.
It is an uncontroversial truism that learning affects perception and experience. This [...]
Tags:cultural conditioning·cultural patterning·Dutch atheists·Dutch Calvinists·ESP·indoctrination·instruction·learning·paranormal·perception·precognition·psi·sweat lodge·teaching
Over at The New York Review of Books, Peter Brown covers Alan Cameron’s recently published tome The Last Pagans of Rome. For those of us who are not classicists, it appears that an abridged volume would be useful sometime in the future. I suppose I will read it before then but it looks a bit [...]
Tags:Alan Cameron·Bernard Lewis·Faith and Power·Fred Donner·Islam·Islamic history·Malise Ruthven·Muhammad and the Believers·Peter Brown·The Last Pagans of Rome
Let’s start with the lengthy story of Oscar winning Apostate, Paul Haggis and his life in Scientology. It appears in The New Yorker and is yet another expose of Scientology that will leave you baffled. When science fiction becomes science religion would be a good title for it.
Next we have Neil Strauss’ humorous piece, God [...]
Tags:apostate·Billy Ray Cyrus·Buddhist Ecclesiastical Law·Christopher Beam·David Miscaviage·God at the Grammys·Miley Cyrus·Mormons·Neil Strauss·Paul Haggis·Rupert Murdoch·Satan·Scientology·South Park·Sri Lanka·Super Best Friends·Theravada·Tom Cruise·Wickrema Weerasooria
