Being wrong is good
I’m re-reading Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity now that I know a lot more American history than I did when I first read it in 2004. The book was probably written in the early 2000s, so it’s interesting to see what Samuel Huntington get’s wrong. In the early chapters he wishes […]
Fake fact: America is not secularizing
The whole post is at Gene Expression, but the chart to the left is the core of it. 1980-2008 can to a great extent be labelled a conservative era, when the New Right set the terms of the national debate on politics and culture. And yet concomitantly there was a massive secularization process, as 1 […]
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…
Hagarism, revision, and everything we think is wrong (?)
This is more a question for readers who know this stuff, what do you think about Patricia Crone & company in their revision of the early history of Islam? I’m more of a Hugh Kennedy guy because I don’t know much about this field and would prefer to…
Reviews of The Faith Instinct
Awhile back Mr. Bradlaugh mentioned he was going to review The Faith Instinct. His alter-ego has now put up a review. And so have I. Unbelievers have much to say about God on High.
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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…
Against infotainment
Steve has an interesting column up this week:Who will win the Super Bowl? Well, two minutes on Google leads me to a betting site that says the New Orleans Saints are +360, while the Indianapolis Colts are +385. (I don’t even know what those numbers are…
Creationism in the Muslim world
A ScienceBlogs I have a post on Muslim Creationism data up. The paper, On being religious : patterns of religious commitment in muslim societies, has lots of information. You can download it at the link. Here are the topline results for evolution:
It isn’t a representative sample:
About 45% of American Muslims exhibit some level of belief […]
The rise of McChurch, but not Old Time Theology
Mr. Bradlaugh’s post on the death of intellectual Protestantism, the highbrow aspect of what we normally term “Mainline Protestantism,” prompts to revisit some data which I’ve reported before, but want to reiterate.
First, the old Protestant denominations which have dominated our culture and set the terms of the debate in terms of what it means to […]
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…
Band of Brothers
At Cognitive Daily, Men often treat their friends better than women do:The researchers say these three studies show that men are more tolerant of their friends’ failings than women. Does this mean that men are more “sociable”? That’s less certain. Afte…
Elite ancient Egyptians had heart disease
Heart Disease Found in Egyptian Mummies:”Atherosclerosis is ubiquitous among modern day humans and, despite differences in ancient and modern lifestyles, we found that it was rather common in ancient Egyptians of high socioeconomic status living as muc…
South Park does its homework
Years ago there was a South Park episode which commented on the primitive nature of Canadian transportation. Turns out that there was some truth to the jibe (via Tyler).
Traditions and tribes; the genealogy of civilizations
A few weeks ago the socially conservative sociologist who blogs under the name “Inductivist” had an intriguing post up, Social conservatives and Muslims:
Social conservatives typically align themselves with the West against the Islamic world in the “clash of civilizations,” but it needs to be recognized that in some respects we have more in common with […]
Ross Douthat is back blogging
At The New York Times, Evaluations.
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Seeing 2012
Daniel Larison on Palin’s Extremely Long Shot At The Nomination. Daniel’s argument is persuasive, but, I would add that the probabilities one projects are extremely conditional on local temporal circumstances. Even in the recent past John McCain’s candidacy went from being the clear favorite, to dead, to an unlikely win through capturing the largest segment […]
The Isles in America
It’s easy to find maps of American ancestries, but I wanted to play around with the data, and in particularly the visualization myself. So I went to the Census and got the county level numbers. The first thing I wanted to do was look at non-Hispanic wh…
A simple framework for thinking about cultural generations
In this discussion about pop music at Steve Sailer’s, the topic of generations came up, and it’s one where few of the people who talk about it have a good grasp of how things work. For example, the Wikipedia entry on generation notes that cultural gene…