Reading Time: < 1 minute Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Episode 11, “The Immortals” As the new Cosmos approaches its final episode, it’s about time that the series started looking back on the ground it’s covered and drawing some larger lessons. This episode accomplished that, and while it treads into more speculative territory than earlier outings, I think that’s appropriate. But […]
Memetics
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Is the Internet Killing Religion?
Reading Time: 3 minutes In recent weeks, we’ve seen a fierce debate ignited by a study which argued that the Internet is responsible for the dramatic growth in American religious disaffiliation over the last two decades. Since 1990, the number of Americans with no religion has skyrocketed by almost 25 million people. The study’s author, Allen Downey, believes that […]
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Help Coin a New Word
Reading Time: < 1 minute I’ve been thinking for a few days that there’s a gap in the language that needs to be filled, and as always, I turn to the hive mind of the internet to help out. In fact, it’s the internet that’s created the need for this word. It’s made possible a new kind of career: a […]
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How to Eradicate Militant Islam
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s said that nothing is harder to kill than an idea. Trying to stamp out a deeply felt belief by force, especially a religious belief, not only makes its followers cling to it more tenaciously, it gives them an aura of martyrdom that makes the belief look even more attractive to outsiders. And when the […]
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Jealous Gods
Reading Time: 3 minutes For thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous god. —Exodus 34:14 Many verses in the Bible, such as the one above, state unequivocally that Yahweh is a jealous and vengeful lawgiver. They warn of how he loathes idols, and graphically describe the dreadful punishments he will […]
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The Bubble
Reading Time: 2 minutes The Evangelical Outpost, a major Christian blog, last week published a positive review of Nancy Pearcey‘s book Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity. In it, Pearcey argues that true Christians must purge their thinking of evolution and all other secular ideas and philosophies: Most Christians are more secular then they realize, and this […]
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The Reason for the Season
Reading Time: 3 minutes As the solstice holiday draws near, the annual complaints by the religious right about the alleged “War on Christmas” are ramping up in volume, as usual. Every store greeter who says “Season’s Greetings” is bitterly denounced; every municipality that erects a “holiday tree” is reviled with a level of shrillness that used to be reserved […]
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Infectious Memes
Reading Time: 7 minutes Hi! I am a .signature virus. Copy me into your .signature to join in! —seen on Usenet And these words which I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them thoroughly to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on […]