This video, from ABC’s show What Would You Do?, features an incredible gesture of altruistic human love which made me quite teary to watch. And it’s by someone inspired by Jesus. If only this was the sum of what following Jesus meant to people: Your Thoughts?
In an e-mail to me, Caroline proposes thought provoking reasons for non-believers to encourage (or at least to not actively discourage) religious beliefs: It would also be nice if people would carry out actions in good conscience of just being decent human beings rather than in fear of reprisal in the afterlife, but as there [...]
Drew Dyck has written a book called Generation Ex-Christian: Why Young Adults Are Leaving the Faith. . .and How to Bring Them Back. I want to focus on just a few passages from his interesting five page article from last fall in last November’s Christianity Today. Unlike many Christians who, despite living in a culture [...]
Robin Hanson explores the causes and nature of our double-mindedness that makes us talk a good game about long term goals and make grand long term commitments only to default to short term preferences in practice: All animals need different ways to reason about things up close vs. far away. And because humans are especially [...]
bewarethelizards42 explains why it’s gay-okay: And her follow up replying to homophobic comments: Your Thoughts?
Cultural variation is amazing: Your Thoughts?
In a recent comments section, Gregory Wahl argued to me that religion is so deeply rooted in psychological needs, specifically the longing for immortality, that there is an inherent limitation to the ability of all my philosophical arguments to dissuade the faithful. As this line of reasoning goes, they do not believe for intellectual reasons [...]
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study this February revealed that less than one fifth of all American adults under 30 report regular church attendance. But they still also overwhelmingly claim belief in God. Tom Rees thinks that despite their beliefs, their abandonment of the pews may indicate that a multi-generational secularization [...]
Nicolai Sennels spent several years working with criminal Muslims in Copenhagen (where as of March 2009 “70% of the prison population in the Copenhagen youth prison consists of young man of Muslim heritage.”) He writes the following about the different ways that Westerners and Muslims view the locus of control: There is another strong difference between the [...]
Earlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of [...]
In recent years, Jonathan Haidt has been influentially arguing that there are five essential modules in the mind from which human moral concerns originate. He has made this claim in several places, most prominently among philosophers in his contribution to Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s groundbreaking [...]
A study of 1,000 men and women ages 18-23, “Nonmarital Romantic Relationships and Mental Health in Early Adulthood” by Robin Simon and Anne Barrett, finds that young men benefit more from a romantic relationship going well and suffer worse from the strain of a bad one, whereas young women benefit more from simply being in [...]
Some interesting insights, but visually a blast to watch: <object width=”640″ height=”385″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/A3oIiH7BLmg&hl=en_US&fs=1&”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/A3oIiH7BLmg&hl=en_US&fs=1&” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”640″ height=”385″></embed></object> Your Thoughts?
Roger Friedland finds an interesting correlation between the two kinds of belief and examines its possible causes and implications: We found that belief in God has no impact on young people’s sex lives. College virgins are no more likely to believe in God than non-virgins. Even those who took a virginity pledge are not sexually [...]
Via Pharyngula comes a bleak picture of what is going on in the lives, hearts, and minds of Evangelical pastors: Another article reveals even more telling statistics based on a survey of 1,050 evangelical Pastors (note these are evangelical pastors not liberal pastors): 89% considered leaving the ministry at one time. 57% said they would leave [...]
One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers has an interesting and accurate seeming account of the effects of conservative American Christianity’s obsessive and draconian opposition to all premarital sex and its implications for contributing to the hysteria about children learning about same sex couples: I teach at a large university in a conservative part of the country, [...]
Sendai Anonymous pointed me to a really interesting sociological study by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva which attempts to shed light on the various contortions that “color blind” racists go through in an incoherent attempt to evade their racism while expressing their views. First, I document how whites avoid direct racial language while expressing their racial views. [...]
The hostility to atheism is so incredibly illogical, but there it is, from this paper out of the University of Minnesota, published in American Sociological Review in April 2006: The core point of this article can be stated concisely. Atheists are at the top of the list of groups that Americans find problematic in both [...]
I am puzzled by appeals to history to oppose gay marriage because history is only the story of what people have done and never of itself directly tells us anything about right or wrong. Results of history can serve as warnings about effective and uneffective approaches to goal x or goal y but what people [...]
Johann Hari on the rise of open gay parenting in the UK and the research indicating no averse effects for children: The children of gay couples are desperately and passionately wanted. They are, by definition, planned, with parents who have to go to a great deal of hassle and heart-searching before they are created. Compare [...]
Go here for the explanations of each of the 10 basic “psych 101″ points and also to find further articles on the topic. I found point 6 most interesting and so included it in full below: 1. Groups can arise from almost nothing 2. Initiation rites improve group evaluations 3. Groups breed conformity 4. Learn [...]
A few weeks ago now, I wrote a post, Commitment To Value Without God, in which I discussed how even when I was a Christian, I realized that I did not need to make reference to God in order to either psychologically recognize the value of sumptuous food or good friendship or any of various [...]
A week ago we pointed readers to a study that provided evidence women tend to psyche out when they think they are playing chess against men and perform worse than they are capable. Here Laura Woodhouse from thefword.org shares her own anecdotes about underperforming at tasks when she is around men. She finds herself [...]
The other day I quoted one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers who attributed Sarah Palin’s popularity among fundamentalists to the fact that they and she are both fundamentally liars who have to refuse reality to sustain their beliefs. I used this remark for a launching pad for discussing Nietzsche’s critique of theologians as fundamentally deceitful and [...]