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Holding Out for a Hero: New ID Book Aims to Save You From Despair of Evolution

By Kriti Sharma

…ins.” But salvation is not such a cheap, glib thing. Those who are serious about salvation are serious about creating the conditions of genuine ease and assurance for others in the face of their deepest terrors and despairs. What this requires is much more difficult, interesting, and rewarding than trying to win the same tired arguments about the structure of molecules. What is needed, for theists and atheists alike, is more space to be listened t…

50th Anniversary of Inherit the Wind

By Lauri Lebo

…In honor of the 50th anniversary of Inherit the Wind, the National Center for Science Education has posted, with permission, an excerpt of Ed Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. The excerpt is from chapter 7 of The Trial of the Century and it makes for some fun gripping reading. The link to the excerpt is here….

Vaccine Mandates are Constitutional; Religious Exemptions are Unnecessary and Harmful

By Andrew L. Seidel

The Spirit of 1776 was as much about science as it was about freedom. George Washington required the entire Continental Army to get inoculated against smallpox—the first army-wide vaccination in history. Mortality dropped from 30% to 1%. Mandatory vaccinations just might have won America its freedom. From that auspicious beginning, Americans have let vaccine science protect our soldiers in the military, our students in school, our healthcare work…

The Good Liberal Fear of a Yoga Planet

By Jay Michaelson

…he New York Times Magazine piece, excerpted from his forthcoming book, The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards (Simon & Schuster, 2012), is an un-fair-and-balanced attack on yoga as it is practiced today, and it has predictably brought about an avalanche of responses, largely from furious yoga practitioners whose responses exhibit little of the peace of shavasana. The two questions I want to consider here are: 1) Whether the article is fair, an…

Freezing Our Way to a Fiery Hell?

By Steve A. Wiggins

…on. And the world warms. Global warming is already changing our lives. The science of climatology seconds the fictional Dr. Malcolm’s observation about chaos—everything affects everything else. The earth’s atmosphere is so complex that overeducated scientists still get the weather forecast wrong. For somebody who can’t even balance his checkbook, the math looks worse than its effects. The atmosphere, where traditional Judeo-Christian outlooks plac…

Can a Pig Heart be Kosher?

By Ari Stillman

…gain, or perhaps reminiscent of H. G. Wells’ Island of Doctor Moreau, this science fiction is fast becoming science. If it proves successful, this technology could dramatically reduce the long waiting lists to receive transplanted organs and tissue, thereby saving countless lives. It gets more interesting, however, when speculating whether kashrut (the Jewish body of laws governing the suitability of food and ritual objects) would preclude such a…

Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

By Andrew Aghapour

…osense, a “next generation consumer research enterprise” that applies neuroscience to marketing. Riley’s documentary wasn’t the first to make such claims, and given the popularity of neuroscience it likely won’t be the last. However, as this new picture of the “old city” brain continues to replace the “skyscraper” brain of the twentieth century, something else has become increasingly clear: unlike the well-labeled floors of an office building, the…

A Philosopher of Religion Calls it Quits

By Julia Galef

…ield’s high levels of creativity.) By contrast, Parsons’ background in the sciences (he obtained his doctorate in the history and philosophy of science at University of Pittsburgh) made him wary of unfettered reasoning. “There’s so little empirical grounding and constraint in philosophy. Even in paleontology, a so-called soft science, the bones are there,” Parsons says. “You can go measure them, look at them. You can’t say anything the bones won’t…

Can You Become Un-Autistic?

By Michael Schulson

…rocess of precise designation altogether. We can observe something similar about religious identity, where slotting individuals into denominations has become more difficult, even as spiritual life, in its myriad forms, seems to be vibrant as ever. Spectra bring challenges as their edges can be difficult to define—what does it mean to leave the territory of, say, autism, and enter some other part of the cognitive map? And their fluidity forces us t…

The Battle To Define ‘Avatar Spirituality’

By Bron Taylor

…and the film have been labeled pro-civilization and anti-civilization, pro-science and anti-science, un-American and too American, anti-marine and pro-marine, racist and anti-racist, anti-indigenous and pro-indigenous, women-respecting and misogynistic, leftist and neoconservative, progressive and reactionary, activist and self-absorbed; and last but not least, pagan, atheistic, theistic, pantheistic, panentheistic, and animistic. Avatar and Natur…