Religion Dispatches
Western experts, looking for a comprehensible narrative, mistake consistency for fact. The misconceptions are further compounded by how difficult it is to identify a potential suicide—even mental health professionals can get it wrong—and how easy it is to conflate suicide terrorists with regular terrorists, the vast majority of whom don’t strap on bombs, preferring to stay alive and fight.
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For the research subjects’ sacred values, the ones they wouldn’t give up on for any amount of money (they could ‘auction off their value’ for up to $100), what lit up in the brain were areas known to be involved in right-wrong decisions, not in cost-benefit/utilitarian parts of the brain. That is, we naturally go to right-wrong thinking in making sacred value decisions.
Read MoreWhat scientists discover and what they say about it are two different things.
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Both the good and bad in our species come from our primate background, says primatologist Frans de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy.
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Beyond a growing distaste for the rancor around hot-button issues like human sexuality, gender equity, and reproductive choice, people seem to be put off church because they are able to do the kind of work—tending the sick, advocating for the oppressed, caring for the earth, comforting those in trouble or need—that was long the stock in trade of local churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples, but which, through the modern corporatizing of mainstream religions, was largely outsourced to separate agencies. This is why you’ll probably find more people volunteering in any given week at Martha’s Kitchen food pantry in downtown San Jose, California than at Sunday services at the church across the street. If Facebook is killing the church, that is, it’s probably more accurate to call it an assisted suicide.
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If you haven’t heard of Jonathan Haidt yet, you probably will soon. The social psychologist from the University of Virginia is making quite a media splash. Most recently, he set off a small media storm by calling out his fellow psychologists for unacknowledged liberal bias.
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Read MoreIn one of this week’s features, eminent scholar Philip Clayton proposes that we are entering a new stage in the tangle between religion and science. Professor Robert Tapp responds.
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Since the fall of Secularization Theory, which claimed that belief in God would slowly recede in the face of science and technology, we still must ask: Is there a future for formal, organized, institutionalized religion as we presently recognize it in rapidly globalizing, postindustrial and postmodern world? Here’s what religion will have to do for humans to survive and flourish.
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In a recent promotional letter, Richard Dawkins caricatured the average American’s Christian beliefs. Problem is, caricatures cease to be useful when the critic invites his audience to deride the real thing based on a lampoon.
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Recent drama at the American Psychiatric Association reminds us that the arguments on both sides of the gay/ex-gay dispute fall short of the mark.
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