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Better Science Through God?

By Nathan Schneider

…e important research takes place in non-Christian countries like China and Japan and by their nationals working in the West, a totally theology-centric narrative seems less and less plausible. But even an anecdotal survey of what ways of thinking uphold the everyday habits of science today don’t quickly draw one’s mind to religion, nor do they necessarily stand in opposition to it. As in any profession, there are professionals competing for advanc…

Seven Years After Hurricane Katrina, Reflecting on the Fallacy of Divine Retribution

By The Editors

…us Groups Ignore Him LEVI MCLAUGHLIN • Mar 17, 2011 While it appears as if Japan, like America, has its share of vocal public figures eager to equate disaster with apocalypse and to use mass human suffering as an excuse to propagandize, Japanese religious groups have joined together—largely under the media radar—to help in the relief effort. The Heresy of End Times Predictions LOUIS A. RUPRECHT • Jun 6, 2011 Apocalyptically-minded souls—nationalis…

International Protest of Anti-Gay Persecution in Chechnya Grows; more in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…Taiwan’s range of cultural influences, from indigenous groups to Dutch and Japanese colonizers, to seafaring settlers from the Chinese mainland — and their seafaring gods. But the groundswell of support that spurred hope for marriage equality has spurred a bitter backlash that has experts and advocates wondering when or whether the law will move ahead. Over the past year, mostly Christian community groups have mobilized against the marriage-equali…

The Failure to Focus on — And Yes, to ‘Cancel’ — Right Wing Antisemitism is a Problem

By Elad Nehorai

…ribed how the movement behind the attack, Aum Shinrikyo, was well known in Japan when the attack occurred, but that the movement and its supporters had not been ostracized. After the attack, however, a cultural line was drawn: the group and anyone associated with it was ostracized and alienated. In America, when we attempt as a culture to preempt violence or mistreatment—sexual abuse, racism, etc.—by drawing a line in the sand, it’s often dismisse…

Sit Down and Shut Up: Pulling Mindfulness Up By Its (Buddhist) Roots

By Max Zahn

…uddhism has gone through many, many transformations from India to China to Japan,” said David McMahan, a scholar of Buddhism at Franklin and Marshall College. McMahan’s 2008 book, The Making of Buddhist Modernism, analyzes how Buddhism changed as it took hold in the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “Now it’s changing again,” he said. This change, though, comes within a context of colonial expansion and widespread cultural theft,…

When Are You Dead? Science Just Made the Work of Religion a Bit More Difficult

By Arri Eisen

…nt shamans in different tribes. Is it when your heart stops working (as in Japan and Shintoism)? When your soul leaves your body (as in Tibet and Buddhism)? When your brain stops working? When a certain part of your brain stops working? Who decides when you’re dead? Can you be dead in body, but not in mind? Vice versa? Cogito ergo sum? A new study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine adds intriguing neuroscientific fuel to the fir…

Religious, Spiritual, and “None of the Above”: How Did Mindfulness Get So Big?

By Nalika Gajaweera

…Asian Buddhist reformers—from places as disparate as Sri Lanka, Burma and Japan. Their innovative efforts positioned the Dharma as consistent with “reason” rather than superstition, “empiricism” rather than divine revelation and ultimately the “spiritual” rather than the “religious.” It is also in part due to the parallel efforts of Indian gurus, such as Vivekananda, who presented yoga as an ancient wisdom tradition to help Americans cope with th…

Imagine No Religion: Sustaining Morality Without God

By Konstantin Petrenko

…litarian, peaceful and happy countries—such as Denmark, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Norway and Sweden. By contrast, the most religious countries were poorer, largely agrarian societies that lacked many of the political freedoms and economic benefits of their more secular counterparts. When the sociologist Phil Zuckerman conducted a study of Denmark and Sweden, two of the most secular nations on Earth, he found that the lack of religious belief did n…

The Terrorism & Poverty Myth

By Ira Chernus

…will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists. For this claim Diamond presents no evidence. He can’t—not only because it’s not his field of expertise, but because real evidence to support the claim does not exist. It’s one of those cliches that get repeated over and over, even by really smart people, because “everyone knows it…

Taqwacore Roundtable: On Punks, the Media, and the Meaning of “Muslim”

By Shahjehan Khan

…that Pakistan was as capable of putting out punk rock as Turkey, Malaysia, Japan, and Lebanon. The USA is good to sell obscure Malaysian and Japanese records in, but it’s not a good place to play this kind of music. We’d do much better in South Eastern Asia, which yes, we get a lot of traffic from online. Tons of people from Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia add us. We’ve been covered in the major Malaysian music magazine. I think it makes more s…