Cultures of constraint; Islam, India and Marxism
Pew has a new report, Global Restrictions on Religion (HT JohnPI). It illustrates rather clearly some general trends which I’ve been mulling over for several years looking at cross-cultural data. Here’s a 2-dimensional chart which plots the 50 most pop…
Religious identity vs. religious activity (and God is not back!)
One of the more irritating things which seems to crop up in popularizations of international trends is the idea that religion is reviving all over the world. It is probably not as plainly false as the idea in common currency from the Enlightenment down…
On insults and religion
When I was a younger man I recall watching a documentary on missionaries in Mississippi. They were Southern Baptists who were on a mission to “save” everyone (this included Roman Catholics and Protestants who had not had a “Born Again” experience). At …
Fake fact, America is not secularizing
How Will Religion Evolve?, asks John Tierney. He notes:If there is a religious instinct, how do we make sense of the declining church attendance in western Europe? As an agnostic myself, I’ve tended to see the European trend as a harbinger of a general…
My review of The Faith Instinct
Over at ScienceBlogs now. It’s a dense book and I only focused on a few major elements. Like the God of the philosophers sometimes it seems like attempts to analyze religion always have to face up to the fact that the phenomenon is awesomely complex, a…
The Netherlands & SDA
In case you didn’t know, the SDA Archive has more than the GSS. For example, something called the Dutch Prejudice Survey 1998. Poking around, I confirmed a general trend you see in the GSS, more educated people tend to be ideologically polarized:Though…
The Faith Instinct in National Review
John Derbyshire has review of The Faith Instinct up. He hits the major points well. I should elaborate on something. In Darwin’s Cathedral David Sloan Wilson outlines two dimensions of religion, the horizontal and the vertical. The vertical is pretty s…
Faith as an adaptation
Nicholas Wade has an article up in The New York Times, The God Gene, which serves as a precis of the central arguments of The Faith Instinct, his new book. The title is catchy, but it should really be “The God Phene.” Depending on how you measure it, r…
The nation-state as idol
Rod Dreher & Daniel Larison discuss the intersection of religion and patriotism. The issue of course isn’t adherence to a higher law vs. the nation-state; even those without explicitly religious motivations can reject loyalty to a state whose actions they feel to be illegitimate. Rather, the bigger issue are multiple loyalties. Religion is an […]
Razib Khan: Unlike Singer, Confucius recognised the natural impulse to impose a heirarchy on the value of human life
Unlike Singer, Confucius recognised the natural impulse to impose a heirarchy on the value of human life – and his ideas endured
No one will deny that Peter Singer can provoke. Most recently, in The Life You Can Save, Singer lays out a utilitarian argument for attacking world poverty, extending ideas from his 1971 essay, Famine, Affluence and Morality. Certainly the facts are indisputable, and the logic crisp.
Razib Khan: Darwinism provides a deductive tool, but many of the inferences leave much to be desired in explaining the world as it is
Darwinism provides a deductive tool, but many of the inferences leave much to be desired in explaining the world as it is
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” So asserted Theodosius Dobzhansky, to which one might respond that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of physics. But what has quantum mechanics to do with behavioral ecology? The enthusiasm of many social scientists for the Darwinian paradigm resembles this ontological leap. An evolutionary psychologist may contend that a preference for blondes is the outcome powerful adaptations, how powerful can it be if only a small minority of humans are blonde? Darwinism provides a deductive tool, but many of the inferences leave much to be desired in explaining the world as it is.
Razib Khan: Polygamy may be the natural, though unfair, order of things
Some religions accept polygamy; others abhor it. But in nature, it’s often a case of winner-takes-all-the-wivesAmong mammals a larger proportion of females than males reproduce, the extent of the imbalance signalled by gender differences in size. Eleph…
Razib Khan: Prophecies of the extinction of religion, or its triumph, fall prey to the weaknesses of linear prediction
Prophecies of the extinction of religion, or its triumph, fall prey to the weaknesses of linear predictionConservative commentator Mark Steyn declares that Europe will soon be dominated by Muslims. The polemicist Sam Harris observes that half of Swedes…