As I noted in A Tale of Two Religion Scholars, Dr. Michael Blume’s research (which you can find at Homo religious) shows that religious groups out-reproduce their secular counterparts. The data are solid and correspond to the commandments of most religions: “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Given that religious people make more babies than secular people, Blume [...]
Tags:agnosticism·atheism·carrying capacity·confirmation bias·Darwin·extended lactation·fertility·fitness benefits·Freud·group level selection·group size·ideological causation·infanticide·John Hawks·Marx·Michael Blume·Nietzsche·Paleolithic shamanism·religious·reproduction·Rodney Stark·secular·secularism
Over at Seed, the clinical physician David Weisman weighs in on the centuries old debate regarding the existence of souls and suggests that the widely held notion of a soul is inextricably linked to an erroneous sense of unified mind. This debate was famously framed by Descartes, who proclaimed — as a first principle and [...]
Tags:A Mind So Rare·aphasia·Beyond Good and Evil·Cartesian dualism·cogito·commonsense dualism·consciousness·David Weisman·Descartes·Divided Minds Specious Souls·evolutionary psychology·How the Mind Works·ischemia·Merlin Donald·mind·modular·modularity·Nietzsche·soul·soulists·souls·spirit·Stephen Pinker·subconscious·subjectivity·unified mind
I just finished reading David Swartz’s superb article, “Bridging the Study of Culture and Religion: Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Symbolic Power” (open access), and must recommend it not only to cultural theorists but to archaeologists as well. Several aspects of Bourdieu’s thought lend themselves readily to novel interpretations of what otherwise might appear to [...]
Tags:archaeological theory·behavorial modernity·Bridging the Study of Culture and Religion·cultural theory·David Swartz·embodiment·Foucault·Marx·materialist history·Nietzsche·paleolithic hominids·Pierre Bourdieu·political economy·ritual objects·sociology of religion·spiritualist history·symbolic power·symbolism·Weber
How we perceive the external world is a fascinating subject that has long attracted the attention of great thinkers from Kant to Nietzsche. Kant knew that we possessed some sort of interior filter that enables us to perceive the world and Nietzsche knew that this filtered perception was always an interpretation of the world. Modern [...]
Tags:aesthetics·Altamira·altered states of consciousness·American Indian·Ansel Adams·cave paintings·color symbolism·dichromatic·Edge of Perception·Edward Curtis·exteriority·external world·Greg Boustad·interiority·internal world·Kant·Lascaux·Luke Jerram·Nietzsche·perception·perspective·plant acoustics·scientific constructions·scientific perceptions·sensory perception·the art of science·tobacco·tobacco shamanism
In my last two posts (The “Sin” of Sodomy and “Natural Moral Law“), I have been considering the naturalness of sexual physiologies and preferences. By serendipitous accident, yesterday I read Bob Plant’s (2006) article, “The Confessing Animal in Foucault and Wittgenstein,” in which he observes that these famous philosophers are connected by their shared suspicion [...]
Tags:Bob Plant·dogma·expertise·Foucault·gender ambiguity·genealogy·history·homosexuality·human nature·moral law·natural·natural science·Naturalization·naturalizing·Nietzsche·opinions·sexual physiology·sexual preferences·sexuality·social construction·sodomy·the body·The Confessing Animal·Wittgenstein
While doing some background research on the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), I discovered that he had been much influenced by Lucretius, who lived in the first century BCE (around the time of Julius Caesar) and published a six-volume treatise titled On the Nature of Things. As if writing philosophy in narrative form were [...]
Tags:ancestor worship·atomic theory·Charles Darwin·Christianity·classics·cultural evolution·David Hume·David Sedley·Epicurean·Epicurus·evolution·Greco-Roman·Herbert Spencer·Julius Caesar·Lucretius·materialism·naturalism·Nietzsche·On the Nature of Things·Plato·Platonic philosophy·prehistory·Scottish Enlightenment·skepticism·survival of the fittest·Thomas Hobbes
Over at HuffPo Religion, Dr. Rustum Roy — a geochemist — accuses the media of criminal conduct in its reporting of the non-existent war between science and religion. In the course of doing so, Roy tilts at several windmills and claims special authority for “hard” or “classical” science.
Roy begins by touting his credentials as a [...]
Tags:Christopher Hitchens·classical science·cosmology·Daniel Dennett·Darwin·experimental science·facts lab science·geochemistry·hard science·Harvey Whitehouse·Ian Stevenson·Jeanne Achterberg·Jesse Bering·Justin Barrett·Larry Dossey·Nietzsche·Pascal Boyer·placebo·positivism·Richard Dawkins·Rustum Roy·Sam Harris·Scott Atran·shamanic healing·Stephen Hawkins·Stephen Weinberg
Another nice article in Slate today from William Saletan on memory researcher Dr. Elizabeth Loftus. As has been the case with the previous articles, the most recent entry — “Truth or Consequences?” — is relevant to supernaturalism and religions:
[Dr. Elizabeth Loftus] wrote with dismay of the “horrifying idea that our memories can be changed, inextricably [...]
Tags:brainsoothing·Elizabeth Loftus·false reality·Freud·Future of An Illusion·God's Brain·Lionel Tiger·memories·memory·Michael McGuire·Nietzsche·truth·William Saletan·wish fulfillment
The First Amendment Center reports that a high school senior believes his speech has been censored by school authorities:
Once a week, Surber wears a black T-shirt featuring the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s take on religion. In block letters, the shirt reads “GOD IS DEAD.” No one has told him he can’t wear the shirt to [...]
Tags:Catholic scholarship·First Amendment·John Haught·Nietzsche
Any comprehensive account of religion must include an assessment of the circumstances under which supernatural and religious beliefs either do not exist or have been rejected, often forcefully. Because belief in the supernatural or religious is nearly universal, those who harbor no such beliefs are interesting cases — outliers if you will. Posts in this [...]
