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So when the interviewer asked me if children need spirituality, I said sure, but offered a more helpful definition—one that doesn’t exclude 91 percent of the people who have ever lived. Spirituality is about being awake. It’s the attempt to transcend the mundane, sleepwalking experience of life we all fall into, to tap into the wonder of being a conscious and grateful thing in the midst of an astonishing universe. It doesn’t require religion. In fact, religion can and often does blunt our awareness by substituting false and frankly inferior wonders for real ones. It’s a fine joke on ourselves that most of what we call spirituality is actually about putting ourselves to sleep.
An economics book used in some high schools holds that the Antichrist — a world ruler predicted in the New Testament — will one day control what is bought and sold.
Web wanderers are more likely to get a computer virus by visiting a religious website than by peering at porn, according to a new study.
"Drive-by attacks" in which hackers booby-trap legitimate websites with malicious code continue to be a bane, the US-based anti-virus vendor Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report.
Websites with religious or ideological themes were found to have triple the average number of "threats" that those featuring adult content, according to Symantec.
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"It is interesting to note that websites hosting adult/pornographic content are not in the top five, but ranked tenth," Symantec said in the report.
"We hypothesise that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free; it's not good for repeat business."
We try to persuade people out of ideas all the time. We try to persuade people that their ideas about science, politics, philosophy, art, medicine, and more, are wrong: that they're harmful, ridiculous, repulsive, or simply mistaken. But when it comes to religion, trying to persuade people out of their ideas is somehow seen as horribly rude at best, invasive and bigoted and intolerant at worst. Why? Why should religion be the exception?
atheists in North America are are disliked because they are distrusted, and that untrustworthy people are often assumed to be atheists.
Why the distrust? Well, it's partly because they are an unknown quantity - many Americans never come across an open atheists - but also partly because people who think they are being watched at least claim to be trustworthy. Probably they think that other people will be trustworthy too, if they think they are being watched by a supernatural agent.
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All more good evidence that one important factor that draws people to belief in God is fear and anxiety, and that stable social systems that are common in wealthy countries are contributing to the increasing numbers of non-believers.
local, state, and federal governments in the United States subsidize religion—to the tune of about $71 billion every year.
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religious institutions, if they were required to pay taxes the same as for-profit corporations do, would not have nearly as much money or influence as they enjoy in America today. In this article we estimate how much local, state, and federal governments subsidize religions.
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By suggesting that these groups should pay taxes, we are likely to be criticized by those who think that religions are largely charitable institutions engaged in beneficial service or charitable work and should therefore be exempt from taxes. This criticism requires responses at two levels, because there are two ways to think about religious “charity.” The first type of charity is the type that most people think of when they hear the phrase “serving people’s physical needs” (feeding and clothing the poor, building schools, and the like). The second type is different and involves addressing people’s “spiritual concerns.”
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What's happening here is that both groups seem to have come to an understanding that Jesus is liberal on fellowship issues and conservative on moral issues. Liberals feel tension (cognitive dissonance) because they are not living up to Jesus' conservative views on morality. Conservatives feel similar tension about Jesus' fellowship views.
So, to reduce this tension, the liberals have convinced themselves that they are failing to live up to Jesus' liberal views, and the conservatives have convinced themselves that they are failing to live up to Jesus' conservative views.
And so, both groups can carry on believing that that they are doing their best to fulfill Jesus' edicts, even if they occasionally fall short!
A new University of B.C. study suggests analytical thinking can be harmful to religious faith.
The psychology report, published today in the prestigious journal Science, reveals that religious belief drops after subjects perform analytical tasks or are exposed to Rodin's sculpture The Thinker.
Researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada, found non-Christians feel less self-assured and have fewer positive feelings if a Christmas tree was in the room.
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taking a look at whether secular alternatives to religion actually have any measurable impact on happiness.
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Gaelle Encrenaz, at the Universitié Victor Segalen in Bordeaux, France, and colleagues have looked at the suicide rate in France during the Football World Cup of 1998. In that competition, which was held in France, the French team came through against the odds to win an unexpected victory.
They found that the suicide rate decreased significantly as the world cup progressed. In fact, the day after the French team played a match, the suicide rate dropped by 20%. - 2 more annotation(s)...
Many people believe, with Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov, that if ethical precepts were not grounded in God's commands, then anything would be permitted. From Plato on, however, the philosophical tradition has frequently questioned the idea of a religious foundation for ethics.
Despite this, philosophers have yearned for a different source of absolute ethical authority, substituting the dictates of reason for any divine imperative, seeking, with Kant, the "moral law within."
Without such transcendental limits - so the story goes - there is nothing ultimately to prevent us from ruthlessly exploiting our neighbours, using them as tools for profit and pleasure, or enslaving, humiliating and killing them in their millions. All that stands between us and this moral vacuum, in the absence of a transcendental limit, are those self-imposed limitations and arbitrary "pacts among wolves" made in the interest of one's survival and temporary well-being, but which can be violated at any moment.
But are things really like that?
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It is well-known that Jacques Lacan claimed that the psychoanalytic practice inverts Dostoyevsky's dictum: "If there is no God, then everything is prohibited." This reversal, of course, runs contrary to moral common sense.
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even if Lacan's inversion appears to be an empty paradox, a quick look at our moral landscape confirms that it is a much more appropriate description of the atheist liberal/hedonist behaviour: they dedicate their life to the pursuit of pleasures, but since there is no external authority which would guarantee them personal space for this pursuit, they get entangled in a thick network of self-imposed "Politically Correct" regulations, as if they are answerable to a superego far more severe than that of the traditional morality. They thus become obsessed with the concern that, in pursuing their pleasures, they may violate the space of others, and so regulate their behaviour by adopting detailed prescriptions about how to avoid "harassing" others, along with the no less complex regime of the care-of-the-self (physical fitness, health food, spiritual relaxation, and so on).
Today, nothing is more oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist.
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I’m a Christian and ultimately come to Christ through faith. With climate change no faith is required. There is a large and growing body of evidence. The way nature works applies the same to Republican and Democrat, Christian and Muslim, animal, tree and stone. Why do people who profess to love and follow God roll their eyes? Luke 16:2 says “Man has been appointed as a steward for the management of God’s property, and ultimately he will give account for his stewardship.”
It’s a message that my father put succinctly: Actions have consequences.
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During a 2007 homecoming banquet for Iraqi war vets I asked my personal hero, Senator John McCain, if he thought this could all be some cosmic coincidence. He rolled his eyes. “Paul, I just returned from the Yukon, where a village elder presented me with a tomahawk that had just melted out of the permafrost. The answer is no.”
How did so much of the Republican Party enter perpetual denial? We’ve turned climate science into a bizarre litmus test for conservatism. To pretend that heat-trapping gases can be waved away with a nod and a smirk is political fairytale. No harm. No foul. Keep drilling.
The meteorologist and energy entrepreneur Paul Douglas is keeping up his valuable effort to depoliticize the science pointing to a growing human influence on the climate. Last month, I noted a post in which he described the scientific case posed by the unabated emissions of greenhouse gases. He described himself as a “Republican deeply concerned about the environmental sacrifices some are asking us to make to keep our economy powered-up, long-term.”
Now he’s going further, taking his argument to the commerce-oriented Bloomberg Businessweek Web site in a piece titled “Climate Change Has Nothing to Do With Al Gore” (the first of a two-part post, Douglas says)
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How did so much of the Republican Party enter perpetual denial? We’ve turned climate science into a bizarre litmus test for conservatism. To pretend that heat-trapping gases can be waved away with a nod and a smirk is political fairytale. No harm. No foul. Keep drilling.
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I’m a Christian and ultimately come to Christ through faith. With climate change no faith is required. There is a large and growing body of evidence. The way nature works applies the same to Republican and Democrat, Christian and Muslim, animal, tree and stone. Why do people who profess to love and follow God roll their eyes? Luke 16:2 says “Man has been appointed as a steward for the management of God’s property, and ultimately he will give account for his stewardship.”
Anti-bullying backlash doesn't only come from Christian groups. Orthodox Jewish and Christian groups came together in Toronto last year to protest an anti-bullying measure “as a vehicle to indoctrinate children into embracing a new sexual revolution.” It focused on the measure's call to establish a gay-straight alliance, and add support for students of all sexual orientations and gender identities.
“To force, especially Christian, classrooms or schools to have homosexual clubs would, of course, be an affront to their family values,” said Charles McVety, president of Christian Canada College. “And what does this have to do with bullying? Nothing.”
The movement began in the winter of 2003 when Ms. Bonnivard, a member of a small far-right nationalist movement called the Identity Bloc, began serving hot soup to the homeless. At first, she said, the group used pork simply because it was an inexpensive traditional ingredient for hearty French soup. But after the political significance of serving pork dawned on them and others, it quickly became the focus of their work.
Made with smoked bacon, pigs' ears, pigs' feet and pigs' tails together with assorted vegetables and sausages, the soup is meant to make a political statement: "Help our own before others."
The "others," Ms. Bonnivard explained, are non-European immigrants who she and her colleagues on the far right say are sopping up scarce resources that ought to be used for descendants of the Continent's original inhabitants. In other words, the soup is meant to exclude those who do not eat pork — for the most part, Muslims and Jews.
"Other communities don't hesitate to help their own, so why can't we?" she asked, noting that Europe's Islamic charities serve halal food to disadvantaged Muslims and that its Jewish charities operate kosher soup kitchens.
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In December, Ms. Bonnivard said, a van of plainclothes police chased her soup-bearing car through the streets, and several busloads of officers arrived to stop her group from setting up at their usual spot near the Montparnasse train station, citing "the discriminatory nature of the soup."
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Ms. Bonnivard talks glowingly of the camaraderie engendered by her group's gatherings, whose motive, she said, is to defend European culture and identity. "Our freedom in France is being threatened," she said. "If we prefer European civilization and Christian culture, that's our choice."
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Converts puzzle me. It is unremarkable if you were raised in a Christian environment (like myself) and been exposed to Christian doctrine from young. But if you somehow move from atheism or whatever religion you were brought up with, there must have been something that really moved you.
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Two factors make this difficult:
Firstly, converts aren’t just acknowledging the existence of God, or seeking some general idea of divine intervention in their life. They are subscribing to a specific orthodoxy. What makes them pick one over the rest?Secondly, converts aren’t just subscribing to a set of privileges – that’d be easy to agree to (as per Prosperity Churches). They need to pay a subscription fee as well, metaphorically of course (although in some churches, literally =P). They need to somehow accept an entire new system of beliefs, and often premises-which-are-accepted-as-truths-just-because.
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The convert has been living without this system of orthodoxy for all of his life, and suddenly an hour talk causes a major change. How? What is the rationale?
I know of a lot of social/mass psychology pressures, but I highly doubt that’s enough to cause religious fervor, or a “genuine” conversion.
"His critique of those universal philosophies of history (Marx, Toynbee, Spengler) that have made a lasting mark on our century: philosophies which all claim to have discovered the ultimate meaning of history, both the basic principle of historical structures and the causal force behind historical development). To him, these philosophies show themselves to be a ‘secularization of theologies’. In the act of the ‘idolization of history’,’ such theologies obey the personal philosophical possibilities of their creators in a secularized civilization. By contrast to other political ideologies, the secular religions absorb metaphysical, spiritual components; in Aron’s view, they are nourished by the substantive core of the universal philosophy of history, for they adapt to the above-cited elements in order to establish a historical truth.
In its character of promising inner-worldly salvation, the secularized religion, eschatological promise and proclamation of an absolute, dogmatic truth instrumentalize history as an instance of legitimation of their respective world-views - world-views that are fixed in stone as true. Accompanying the substitution of Christian belief in a secularized mass society, one finds here both a simplification and a banalization of transcendent belief — even a caricature of it. The secular religions, which therefore have pejorative connotations, transpose the individual human being’s formerly transcendent expectation of benefit and salvation into collective, inner-worldly promises of liberation. These are supposed to provide an ‘equivalent of the lost eternity’ in the form of new kinds of homogeneous social structures."
In general, the difference in stress levels between those who were exposed to the event and those who were not was smaller for religious people than for spiritual people or those who were neither.
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But if you look at the graph, you can see that something more complex is happening. The reason that there is no difference among religious people is not just because between those who experienced the event have fewer ill effects. It's also because those who did not directly experience it have more flashbacks.
It seems that religious people who did not directly experience the event were still affected by it, while those who did experience it were less affected. Perhaps this is because they are plugged into a wider social network, which allows the burden of distressing events to be shared.
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