Tag: religion
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The other day commenter Cotdail took issue with a tossed-off aside in my post about religion and happiness. I said the hostility of militant atheists to religion borders on madness, to which Cotdail replied: "I fail to recognise anything that is 'bordering on a kind of madness' about being hostile ... Read More
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Maybe there are no atheists in foxholes, as William T. Cummings famously said. But who wants to live in a foxhole? Most of us would prefer a room with a view. So if religion comforts the oppressed and miserable, it should follow that a lessening of human misery should lead to a drop-off in ... Read More
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"Resist what resists in you," the god Krishna tells heroic Arjuna in Peter Brook's epic theatrical version of The Mahabharata . "Become yourself!" This is, as the experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe remarks in this intriguing post at The Stone, "one of the distinctive ideals of modern life." But ... Read More
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Among the appalling sights Primo Levi witnessed at Auschwitz was the fervent prayer of a prisoner grateful to be spared the ovens. "I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud," Levi wrote, "with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been ... Read More
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When I was a kid, atheists ruled over large swatches of the world and mainstream conventional wisdom expected religion to die out. If Communism (not then acquainted with history's ash-heap) didn't squash faith, then a combination of prosperity and technology would dilute religion into a weak ... Read More
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The country is at war. Americans are at each others' throats. People are disappointed in the President and many think (hope?) he won't be re-elected. So it goes in October, 1863, when President Lincoln proclaims the last Thursday in November "as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent ... Read More
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Do you want to help suffering Haitians, but find yourself hesitating, because someone might thank God for your good deed? I didn't think so, but the Richard Dawkins Foundation has decided you're out there. It just set up Non-Believers Giving Aid, a "religion-free'' disaster-relief fund, where ... Read More
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Jury selection starts this week in the trial of Scott Roeder, who has confessed to the assassination last May of George Tiller, a doctor vilified by pro-lifers for performing late-term abortions.(There's a trial because Roeder pled "not guilty''; since he considers abortion to be murder, he doesn't ... Read More
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Where in the United States are teen-age girls most likely to become pregnant? According to this study, published last month in the journal Reproductive Health, the answer is: Where Evangelical Christians are most numerous.The debate over whether abstinence education ``works'' has been running for a ... Read More
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About Mind Matters
In markets, medicine, justice, politics, psychology, and economics, "Rational Man" is dead. As the science of human behavior enters the post-rational era, we no longer think of ourselves as cool calculators in pursuit of our objective self-interest. Mind Matters is about this change and its effects on how we live. It's about the reasons people perceive, feel, think, and act as they do, and the gaps between what we think we're doing and what research says we're doing. Most importantly, it's about how this sea change affects the institutions we live by: courts, hospitals, governments, stock markets and other entities that still run on the presumption that people act rationally.
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In A Shipwreck, Your Heart Is More Likely To Go On If You're Male