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Creationist-Leaning Texas Sets Textbook Agenda

By Lauri Lebo

…exas is not the only place where folks strive to foster ignorance in their students. While it’s been quiet there the past few months, Louisiana also continues to battle creationist attacks on the teaching of evolution. In 2008, state lawmakers passed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which specifically targets “evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” as subjects in which educators are required to “promote critical thi…

Hitchens Debates Conservative Evangelical: Nothing Happens

By Eric Reitan

…rly illuminating. Wilson clearly hopes that conservative Christian college students (and others), when confronted with intellectual challenges to their faith, will not treat these challenges as invitations to critically reflect for themselves on the merits of their beliefs. Instead, they ought to replay Wilson’s polemics in their heads. At another point in the interview, Piper asks Wilson about “copiousness,” which turns out to be something Wilson…

Upside Down Judaism: Why Are Progressives Studying Talmud?

By Aryeh Cohen

…hich culminates in doing a social project. (Canfei Nesharim was started by students at YCC.) This is truly a revolutionary change. What does it look like? What does it mean? Social Activist Jews Studying Talmud? On a Sunday morning in the Los Angeles Jewish Community Center, twenty people gather around a table to study Jewish texts. The texts are out of the classical canon: the Bible, of course, but also the third-century Mishnah and its sixth-cen…

Academic Freedom Bills

By Lauri Lebo

…knesses” of evolution. The bill says: “Teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of the theory of biological and hypotheses of chemical evolution.” State Rep. Robert Wayne Cooper (R-District 155), who has been behind a series of failed attempts to pass similar legislation, introduced the bill and has been joined by ten co-sponsors…

Academic Freedom Bill Season

By Lauri Lebo

…aknesses” of evolution. The bill says: Teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of the theory of biological and hypotheses of chemical evolution. State Rep. Robert Wayne Cooper (R-District 155), who has been behind a series of failed attempts to pass similar legislation, introduced the bill and has been joined by ten co-sponsors….

Creationism and Global Warming Denial: Anti-Science’s Kissing Cousins?

By Lauri Lebo

…troduced by state lawmakers around the country instruct educators to teach students about “both sides” of controversial issues—most notably on evolution. The Seattle-based, pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute is behind efforts to introduce many of these bills and has proposed sample legislation for lawmakers to follow. Since the Louisiana bill was passed (making it the only state to have actually passed an academic freedom bill into law), p…

Escalating Afghanistan: What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?

By Peter Laarman

…ctivists of the time never could persuade a majority of upper-middle class students to take to the streets against the Vietnam madness, though they made a valiant effort—and they understood the ugly race and class dimension of American imperialism. Thinking about Coffin’s legacy, I had to ask myself exactly what I have been doing during the current class war—a siege that is far more severe and ugly than the one that sent mainly working-class and r…

Are You There God? It’s Us, Googling

By Michael Schulson

…ion in “Google searches for churches,” yet more evidence of the increasing number of “nones,” or that “searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere.” Other patterns are more jarring: “Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell,” he writes. Each month, on average, 422 people in th…

Size Matters According to New Study

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ns of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us. There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim i…

Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

By Andrew Aghapour

…basal ganglia, and other brain regions have been proposed to accomplish a number of specific functions. Imagine, for example, working intently on some task until you notice that your stomach is rumbling and that the daylight has shifted. You think back to when you last ate, gauge how long you’ve been working, and give yourself five minutes to finish up before having a light snack, so as not to ruin your dinner. An MRI scan of this thought proces…