Religion Dispatches
… Relevant Links: The Study. Articles that emphasized stupidity or American bullshit receptivity: The Independent, Quartz, Alphr, Mental Floss Articles that extrapolated to inspirational quotes: Jezebel, Huffington Post, Mic, IBNLive, Deccan Herald Articles that amounted to uncritical stenography: Vox, Gizmodo, Forbes, Patheos …
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…trange claims, too. They echo claims made by the now-suspect 19th century science of Phrenology. The idea there was that by studying the human head—its size, shape, and general morphology—you could tell a lot about the intelligence and even the moral character of the person under consideration. There were criminal craniums; that was the main idea. Naturally, the Nazi pseudo-science of racializing the human head and face dealt a deserved death-b…
Read More…out our evolutionary heritage. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? There are many misconceptions about evolution, intelligent design, religion, Creationism—too many to comprehensively list. But I’ll tell you the biggest misconception about me, which is that I’m either an angry Creationist or an angry Darwinian. I’m neither. I’m a very mild-mannered Darwinian who wishes, every so often, that there could be a supernatural d…
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…some of whom cared mainly about making money, and others who cared mainly about doing good science. I saw a company that litigated fiercely, but no more fiercely than Sony, Disney, or Apple, and I wondered why people—myself included—felt that seeds should be governed by different intellectual property laws than, say, tractors. But then I realized I would never write that story. It wasn’t worth it. Why risk associating myself, even in passing, wit…
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…o vote. We’re talking about Project 2025, because this actually isn’t even about Trump. This is about the conservative movement. They’ve selected Trump because he’s probably willing to go along. But we’ve seen everyone else, DeSantis, everyone else who’s come forward in the Republican administration has said that they’re down with this agenda. I’ve been looking at what the lessons are of countries who lost their democracy, like Hungary, like Polan…
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…. How does the experiential view of religion fare in the academy? My gripe about the academy is that they do talk about these concrete forms of religion, but in very abstract ways. So this book is an experiment in translating those ideas and reframing them into great stories. While writing the book I thought about scholars and the academic study of religion, but I also thought about the spirituality and self-help section at Barnes & Noble, the int…
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…t doesn’t make any sense and just feeds all these baleful and banal things about religion. I write about that Elvis song, “Crying in the Chapel.” Boy, that just says it. The envy part has to do with people who can feel joy, feel peace, and feel uplifted. I would have welcomed, oddly, those kinds of emotions. But you can still feel good emotions if it comes organically out of your childhood as it did for me. Larry David once did a whole bit about s…
Read More…science version of Pandas when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that creation science was a religious notion and had no business in public school science class. So, realizing that Pandas’ marketability had just taken a nose dive right into the toilet, FTE editors quickly went through the manuscript with a search-and-replace word processor option, taking out “creation science” and replacing it with “intelligent design”. Really. That’s all they did. Bu…
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…s same unfortunate category. What is interesting here is the desire to use science (indeed, really bad science) as an instrument to verify religion. While it’s not unique to Muslims by any means, such ideas today are very popular in the Muslim world, which is still nostalgic about the golden age when it was literally naming the heavens. The emotional appeal of such ideas, and the backing of some Muslim scientists, makes it very hard to challenge t…
Read More…ols, comments by the bill’s supporters reveal a stunning hostility towards science and education. Andy Sher writing for the Chattanooga Free Press, quotes bill-supporter Rep. Richard Floyd, R-Chattanooga, saying that “since the late ‘50s, early ‘60s when we let the intellectual bullies hijack our education system, we’ve been on a slippery slope.” Floyd sounds as if he’s been listening to Texas Board of Education Don McLeroy, who, in arguing for cr…
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