For quite some time now, there’s been an irritating trend in the social sciences. In every generation, someone new comes along to explain how all of religion exists in order to satisfy this one particular human need. The 16 Strivings For God: The New Psychology of Religious Experiences Steven Reiss Mercer University Press (January, 2016) According to nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward B. Tylor, religion arose to satisfy our curiosity about…
Today is the National Day of Prayer in the United States, an annual day of observance that was formally established by Congress in 1952. The law that establishes a National Day of Prayer (36 U.S.C. § 119) falls under Title 36, which outlines various patriotic observances including Mother’s Day and Save Your Vision Week. According to the law, The President shall issue each year a proclamation designating the first Thursday in May as a National Day…
If Daniel Dennett is anything, he is a champion of the facts. The prominent philosopher of science is an advocate for hard-nosed empiricism, and as a leading New Atheist he calls for naturalistic explanations of religion. Dennett is also the co-author (along with Linda LaScola) of the recently expanded and updated Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Faith Behind, which documents the stories of preachers and rabbis who themselves came to see…the facts….
Social media has made possible a new global distribution of cognitive ephemera. We are tweeting 6,000 times per second—and most of it is garbage. And while social media has facilitated powerful forms of speech that might otherwise be stifled, it favors short snippets and the rebroadcasting of other voices, which isn’t ideal for public discourse. It is also a capitalist project, not a democratic one. Social media will continue to shape the way tha…
Thank you for your interest in writing for The Cubit! The Cubit covers topics at the intersection of religion, science, technology, and ethics. If you aren’t familiar with our voice, please start with our manifesto, and then check out the collected works. Send pitches to michael@religiondispatches.org. Tell us: 1. A one sentence version of your main argument or idea 2. Background information about the topic at hand 3. Why your idea is a good fit…
By profession, Sam Harris is a brawler. The New Atheist writer has ongoing feuds with Salon, AlterNet, The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, and plenty of religious leaders. Whether Harris is a brawler because he loves to fight, or because conflict is the cost of truth-telling, we will not adjudicate, other than to say that all of this scrapping looks like good business. The man is a magnet for controversy, in a media economy where controversy sells. Ha…
Just weeks after the turn of the 17th century, Giordano Bruno was burned alive by the Roman Inquisition for, among other things, claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity. The “multiverse”—or the idea that our world might be just one of many others—dates back to the Ancient Greeks, and has long been a controversial notion since, as Mary-Jane Rubenstein notes below, God becomes less necessary in our quest to explain certai…
… 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 …
I have some secrets for you; feel free to tell everyone. Psychopaths have distinct types of brains, and so do left-handed people. Bar Mitzvahs aid myelination, the conversion of gray-matter neurons into white-matter neurons. Bragging makes us feel really good, which is why Facebook is better than sex. If that concerns you, don’t worry, because the pharmaceutical industry is going to save marriage. Shakespeare tickles the visual association cortex…
I have a theory: New Year’s resolutions have nothing to do with the turn of the calendar year. There’s a much stronger force at play: that, every December, America collectively visits its family. Every year, millions of families unplug from their day-to-day lives and reunite. Siblings compare their parallel lives. We peruse old photo albums and take mental snapshots of our aging parents, forming a past-and-future flip book of our own aging bodies…
