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Even Richard Dawkins is Right Sometimes

By Paul Wallace

…hé, usually trundled out by those who wish to contrast the transparency of science with the supposed obfuscation of religion, carries some truth. Science actually is transparent in a way that religion is not. That’s because, in science land, there is nothing but to follow the evidence. It’s out on the table, after all, able and willing to be poked and prodded and analyzed and figured out and held up and turned around and looked at from new angles….

Catholic Bishops End Family Synod With Little To Say To Gays; World Congress of Families Has Plenty To Say, None of it Good; How Same-Sex Marriage Came to a Buddhist Temple in Japan; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…day, the day before WCF officially convened. BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder wrote about efforts by conference organizers to soften their anti-gay image, which exposed divides within the movement about what kind of anti-gay rhetoric to use. Not surprisingly, there was a significant Mormon presence at the conference, including an opening keynote rom Elder M. Russell Ballard, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the LDS. Ballard praised this yea…

Public Prayer Verdict Shows Its True Colors

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…to rely on a “higher spiritual authority” gets very dicey, very fast. What about Buddhism? Although generally considered a religion, it does not rely on belief in a specific “deity” or higher authority. Buddhism, writes theologian William H. Harrison in his recent book In Praise of Mixed Religions: The Syncretism Solution in a Multifaith World, is a “category-bender” that forces us to reconsider our criteria for what is a religion. Harrison would…

What Does Heidegger’s Anti-Semitism Mean for Jewish Philosophy?

By Aubrey L. Glazer

…hing of his own or whose own essence is not to have one.” You have written about and reflected at length about the possibility of Jewish philosophy and its canon. What inspired your current engagement with theomania and apophasis, and what implications does it have for philosophy of religion at large? My interest in apophasis, or negative theology, is long-standing, going back to my early studies of Neoplatonism and its impact on the philosophical…

Creating a Cell: Science Plays God

By Arri Eisen

…me’ is the title of the paper. It was published in the prestigious journal Science and came out of the Craig Venter Institute. Venter is the scientist whose name always comes connected to the word ‘maverick’—he’s the one who first made his name by bringing big private dollars into molecular biotechnology to compete with the federal government and speed up the sequencing of the first human genome (that is, the determination of the identity and orde…

The Promise of Immortality in a Tech-Enhanced Heaven

By Lisa Webster

…ings are likely to be possible but they lack certainty, then they are just science-based optimists or commoners deciding to accept someone else’s science-based optimism. Jay: I agree with what R.U. said. I do see some of what could be called cultish or religious energy in transhumanism, but that doesn’t make it a cult or a religion. That sort of energy manifests in many human endeavors: partisan politics, followers of boy bands, the seemingly eter…

Just in Time for Darwin Sunday, Washington Post Misses the Point

By Lauri Lebo

…tism, such as, for instance, the United Methodist Church. Duin was writing about a recent study, which I wrote about here, which indicates that one in eight biology teachers are teaching creationism in the classroom. Duin takes a rather sympathetic view to those creationist and intelligent design-spouting teachers and wonders whether it’s fair to make them teach evolution when they don’t accept it. For some reason, Duin leaves out a discussion of…

Do Make Trouble: The Complex World of Radical Jewish ‘Revenge Theologian,’ Meir Kahane

By Shane Burley

…the “true” trajectory of Jewishness for Kahane. It’s about militancy, it’s about power, it’s about conquest. It’s not about the martyr Rabbi Akiva. And ultimately it’s about the use of violence to protect Jewish bodies; everything else for him is kind of about how the diasporic experience has deluded the Jews such that they’re no longer aware of their true nature. So in a sense what Kahane was saying, the muscular Jew of Max Nordau and early Zioni…

Material(ist) Girl: A Philosopher Argues Against the Soul

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ry interested in the brain. He asked a group of us to come and talk to him about it and teach him about it. He and I got into this long conversation about reincarnation and I presented him with my reservations about such a thing. Something is left, namely the body, and as that disintegrates small creatures make use of the bits and pieces and in that sense it’s reincarnated, but there isn’t anything else, some nonphysical thing that has feelings a…

HuffPo Columnist Tries to Link Darwin to Hitler

By Lauri Lebo

…ly, Huffington Post’s living pages have long been filled with various anti-science sentiments and new age woo, from vitamin cures to the “science of distant healing.” Most egregiously, it has provided a place for Jenny McCarthy and others to peddle ongoing claims about there being a link between autism and vaccine shots. Of course, such claims are patently false. There has not been one single scientifically linked case of vaccines to autism. Meanw…