Reading Time: 7 minutes Since ancient times, people from almost all religions and societies have been burning books. As one scholar put it: “The goals of the book burners have been to extirpate history, to intimidate and stamp out opposition, to create solidarity, and to cleanse society of controversial ideas.” Not surprisingly, the act of book burning has […]
religion
Posted inResearch
Belief in God among religiously unaffiliated Americans
Reading Time: < 1 minute Not all Americans who are religiously unaffiliated are nonbelievers in the existence of a god. For years, religiously unaffiliated Americans have been split into approximate thirds among nonbelievers, general belief in a higher power, and specific belief in God. However, the proportion of nonbelievers has recently risen to comprise nearly half of all religiously unaffiliated […]
Posted inComedy
List of times religion debunked science
Reading Time: < 1 minute Since time immemorial, religion has revealed to mankind The Truth about life, the universe, and everything…in appropriate context as decided by unelected church officials often no better educated than the lowest parishioner. Everyone who wasn’t branded a witch or a heretic was happy with that system. Then along came upstart “science” throwing their son-of-a-monkey wrench […]
Posted inReligion
Fascism in India: The weaponization of religious custom
Reading Time: 8 minutes Where I live, Navidad and Semana Santa are significant religious affairs, times when the hustle and bustle of city life eases for a month and a week respectively: to observe Catholic customs, to be with family, or simply to travel to nearby towns and farms. One side effect, though, is the impact of reduced foot […]
Posted inReligious News
This child had all her hair plucked out in a disturbing Jain ritual
Reading Time: 4 minutes In a truly disturbing video circulating online, an eight-year-old girl from India is seen having her hair ripped off, clump by clump, strand by strand, as a way to prove she’s indifferent to pain. It’s part of a Jain religious ritual that marks her entry into the priesthood. I repeat: She’s eight and entering the […]
Posted inGen Z Rising
Z: The least religious generation ever
Reading Time: 4 minutes And religion in America just continues to decline and decline and decline. According to a new report from The Survey Center on American Life of the American Enterprise Institute, Gen Z (comprised of Americans born in or after 1995) is the least religious generation in the nation’s history. In an analysis that reads like veritable […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Religion as the sole path to happiness? Not on your one and only life
Reading Time: 3 minutes A renewed line of pro-religion persuasion is leveraging people’s desire for happiness and religion’s purported ability to provide it. I suspect that with seculars it’s proving as effective as the many get-religion rhetorical gambits that have gone before it. Which is to say not effective. At all. A recent piece at the Big Think portal […]
Posted inScience
Why have we not developed a genetic resistance to religion?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has given us the concept of memes—items of information that replicate themselves by being copied from one human brain to another. They evolve in a manner similar to genetic life and sometimes combine in a coordinated group known as a memeplex just as genes do in complex animals. We (our genetic […]
Posted inComedy
The lazy atheist
Reading Time: 3 minutes Not doing something is usually easier than doing it. Not taking out the trash burns fewer calories than taking out the trash. Forgetting to run a marathon, neglecting to get a Ph.D. in physics, declining to write a novel—each of these non-doings is easier than doing any one of them. So it should be easy […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Changing clocks and playing with time
Reading Time: 4 minutes There have long been practical concerns about our annual clock-changing ritual. It causes sleepiness, confusion, and accidents. In response, the Senate passed the “Sunshine Protection Act” this week, a first step to making Daylight Savings Time permanent. But if the clocks move forward permanently, we might end up driving to work in the dark during […]