America has had ‘non-Christian’ presidents!
A few weeks ago over at Slate Dave Weigel stated that “Electing Mitt Romney in 2012 would mean electing, for the first time, a president whose religion is not part of orthodox Christianity.” I tweeted to Weigel that this was just plain wrong. There have been plenty of presidents who rejected orthodox Christianity, the last […]
Being human is important because we’re human
There’s a rather vanilla piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer which reviews the ideas of how humans became human. I say vanilla because the headline is somewhat more sensational than the text itself, which seems sober and accurate. But this paragraph jumped out at me: A main source of the idea that we humans are above […]
The enemy of my enemy
Borneo Tribe Practices Its Own Kind of Hinduism: In this village near the heart of Borneo’s great, dissolving rainforest, Udatn is regarded as a man of deep spiritual knowledge. Of all the people in this tiny settlement, he speaks better than any other the esoteric language of the Sangiyang, the spirits and ancestors of the […]
God is intuitive
Update: An ungated version of the paper. I used to spend a lot more time talking about cognitive science of religion on this weblog. It was an interest of mine, but I’ve come to a general resolution of what I think on this topic, and so I don’t spend much time discussing it. But in […]
What atheism and autism may have in common
My post below on atheism and autism caused some confusion. I want to quickly clear up some issues in regards to the model which I had in mind implicitly. In short I’m convinced by the work of cognitive scientists of religion (see Religion Explained and In Gods We Trust) that belief in gods and spirits […]
Atheism as mental deviance
Tyler Cowen points me to a PDF, Religious Belief Systems of Persons with High Functioning Autism, which has some fascinating results on the religiosity (or lack thereof) of people with high functioning autism. I’ve seen speculation about the peculiar psychological profile of atheists before in the cognitive science literature, and there’s a fair amount of […]
Being an atheist with a “Muslim name”
I was sent off to purchase some cheap white wine yesterday to further the production of a very tasty tuna pasta. So I quickly ran over to the neighborhood mini-mart. Actually, this was my first visitation to the mini-mart. The woman behind the counter was brown. Going by the numbers she was probably an Indian […]
Religious “vs.” secular terror
The decline of political terrorism & the rise of religious terrorism.
The decline of political terrorism & the rise of religious terrorism
The media has been reporting a lot about Anders Breivik. I’m curious about the tendency of some to label Breivik a “Christian Extremist”. Additionally, there is widespread repetition of the Norwegian official deeming him a “Chr…
Moderate Muslim = Bad Muslim
Egypt’s Fundamentalist Summer: “Once the discussion turns to religion and the [religious] text, it’s a discussion that the Salafis are well-positioned to win. So that’s the danger—that even though Salafis don’t represent many Egyptians, they have a disproportionate effect because of their ability to frame the contours of the debate,” Hamid added. Their influence is […]
Kids, satisfaction, and scriptural literalism
Bryan Caplan* found something interesting in the GSS:
People who believe in the Bible’s literal truth (BIBLE=1) are much more satisfied with their jobs than people who believe it’s just a book of fables (BIBLE=3)….
Relatively speaking…
In thrall to Abraham’s God
In reading Strange Parallels I am struck by the broad cross-cultural tendencies in mainland Southeast Asia to transition from a Hindu sacral state to a Theravada Buddhist sacral state. Granted, the latter does not seem to be at great rupture with the former, as is evidenced by the “Hindu” aesthetic resonances of Thai and Khmer […]
Dharmic without Islam
I am currently reading Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830. The author is a scholar of Burma, and his focus is on analogies between the rise of mainland Southeast Asian nation-states and other zones of Eurasia (or, lack thereof). […]
More curiosity about atheists?
Josh Rosenau has a post up discussing the impact of “New Atheism” on public perceptions of atheists. He mentions offhand that “New Atheism” as a movement really only crystallized in the mid-2000s, which made me wonder: what does…
The Shadow of Persia
I made a quick comment below wondering about the lack of acknowledgment of the influence of Persian culture, specifically the set of religious ideas which became Zoroastrianism, upon the “Abrahamic” religions. This influence is particularly important during one stage of the “evolution” of this religious tradition: the 6th century Babylonian Exile, during which the Jews […]
Camping’s Wager
I’ve had to deal with vulgar* expositions of
Make money first, then find your church
The New York Times has a weird article up, Is Your Religion Your Financial Destiny?, which digests the Pew Religious Landscape Survey descriptive statistics on the demographics of American religious denominations. It’s kind of a strange piece be…
Spiritual scientists without God
I’ve mentioned Elaine Ecklund’s research before on ‘spiritual atheists.’ Though I had a hard time understanding the thrust of her conclusions or inferences on occasion I could grapple with her raw quantitative results. But now s…
George R. R. Martin in The New Yorker
A friend mentioned last night that he was watching a bit of A Game of Thrones, the new HBO series based on George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. I’ll probably wait until after the DVD version comes out, if I watch it at all. …
Bravo for Mormons!
Trying to Relish the Big Time, Even When It Brings a Cringe:
The house lights came up and it was intermission at “The Book of Mormon,” the new Broadway musical about a pair of innocent young Mormon missionaries sent to Uganda to spread the faith. …