Category: religion
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The Bible a Prerequisite for Understanding Literature?
Poet Laureate Andrew Motion (incidentally, the first Poet Laureate to not hold the position for life) suggests that the classics and the Bible should continue to be taught in school, as to cease doing so will prevent a whole generation being able to understand great literature and culture. I can’t help but find myself agreeing…
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Darwin on Creationism
Last week the news thatĀ Sir David Attenborough receivesĀ hate mail for failing to credit God in his documentaries was everywhere you looked. If you would like a recap, I previously discussed Attenborough’s rather graphic reason for disbelieving in a deity in Attenborough on Creationism back in November. One thing has come to light since, however: Charles…
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The Atheist Demographic Disadvantage
There may be a number of reasons why theist people have more children than non-believers, as Anthony Gottlieb–former executive editor of The Economist and author of The Dream of Reason–suggests in this article from Intelligent Life. Like other demographers, Eric Kaufmann expects western Europe to become markedly more religious in the course of the 21st…
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A Thanksgiving/Christmas Prayer (for Atheists)
A prayer for atheists before Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner: Dear Global Economy, we thank thee for thy economies of scale, thy professional specialization, and thy international networks of trade under Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage, without which we would all starve to death while trying to assemble the ingredients for such a dinner as this.Ā Amen.
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What’s the Difference: Shia vs. Sunni
What’s the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims? An article reprinted from the mental_floss book, What’s the Difference? Like Christianity, Islam is home to a spectrum of sects espousing different beliefs and practices. And just as Christianity can be divided into two large groups – Catholic and Protestant – from which other subsects have emerged,…
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Remarketing the Bible
Some modernised versions of the Bible for a contemporary audience: The Jesus Loves Porn Stars Bible, The Manga Bible, The Bible in Cockney, The (Lego) Brick Testament, and the all-star Bible podcast (featuringĀ Forest Whitaker, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Samuel L Jackson, no less). The person behind this remarketing of holy writings is Dag Soederberg, a…
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Attenborough on Creationism
I’m considering treating someone (possibly myself!) to David Attenborough’s The Life Collection: the full set of David Attenborough’s Life series, consisting of over 60 hours of some of the best nature footage in history. As is the norm when I’m intrigued by anything, I head over to Wikipedia and read all I can on a…
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Why We Can’t Imagine Death
Jesse Bering of Scientific American argues that, due to the very nature of our consciousness, almost everyone has a tendency to imagine the mind continuing to exist after the death of the body. People in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to…
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Blogging the Bible: A Philosophical Primer
A few years ago I was in a discussion with one of the more intelligent people I have had the pleasure to meet: a Ph.D. philosophy student at the University of Cambridge. Substantial parts of his thesis had to consist of original philosophical ideas, and this meant a large portion of his ‘revision’ consisted of…
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Our Evolutionary Predisposition to Faith
The anthropologist Pascal Boyer asks, “Is religion a product of our evolution?” and in doing so he concludes that it may be easier to believe than to reject faith. In the past ten years, the evolutionary and cognitive study of religion has begun to mature. It does not try to identify the gene or genes…