新約福音書可靠嗎？（教會不會讓你知道的學術界共識Part1）

耶穌在聖經中的演化

Percentage of Christians in U.S. Drifting Down, but Still High

http://www.gallup.com/poll/187955/percentage-christians-drifting-down-high.aspx

[CCTV] 十集电视纪录片《互联网时代》 第一集 时代

Here's a Comic Book Guide to the Tibetan Buddhist Afterlife

Here's a Comic Book Guide to the Tibetan Buddhist Afterlife

10 facts about religion in America

10 facts about religion in America

“Consciousness Creates Reality” – Physicists Admit The Universe Is Immaterial, Mental & Spiritual

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/11/11/consciousness-creates-reality-physicists-admit-the-universe-is-immaterial-mental-spiritual/

How Atheists Are Turning ‘Religious Freedom’ Laws Against Religion

http://www.zaobao.com.sg/realtime/world/story20150521-482657

Think Progres - For almost a year now, the nation has been locked in almost constant debate over various state and federal versions of the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA), a 20-year-old law that was broadened by the Supreme Court in 2014 and has since been embraced by right-wing politicians and pundits — especially religious conservatives. But in an unusual twist, an atheist activist is galvanizing support for a legal campaign to use the federal RFRA to remove the phrase “In God we trust” from U.S. coins and paper bills.

Michael Newdow, who unsuccessfully sued to have “Under God” removed from the Pledge of Allegiance in 2004, published a guest post on the The Friendly Atheist blog last Friday outlining a new initiative to challenge the decades-old policy of printing the religiously themed American national motto on U.S. currency. He explained that while courts have dismissed claims that the phrase violates the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution — which prohibits Congress from passing laws that establish one religion above others — his new legal argument is rooted in RFRA’s stipulation that religious activity cannot be “substantially burdened” without a “compelling government interest.” The government’s interest in emblazoning currency with “in God we trust,” Newdow argues, is suspect.

“Because Constitutional principles can be twisted and perverted, the challenges to this practice under the Establishment Clause have, so far, failed,” Newdow wrote. “Challenges under RFRA, however, are not as susceptible to misapplication. This is because every Supreme Court justice involved in the three RFRA cases heard to date has agreed that, under RFRA, religious activity may not be substantially burdened without a compelling governmental interest and laws narrowly tailored to serve that interest.”

Newdow, who plans to file the case in 7 federal court circuits, told Think Progress that although many Americans simply ignore the motto, it can be infuriating for those who don’t believe in God.

 “Imagine if Christians had to carry on their body something they disagree with religiously, like ‘Jesus is a lie’ — how long do you think that would stand?” Newdow said. “But atheists are so denigrated in this society that people accept this without a second thought.”

Use of “In God We Trust” has long frustrated hardline supporters of the separation of church and state, who often note that its inclusion on U.S. paper currency is a relatively recent phenomenon that emerged out of a specific historical context. The phrase didn’t even become theofficial U.S. national motto until 1956, for example, replacing the mantra “E pluribus unum” during the early years of the Red Scare — an era when the U.S. was locked in a Cold War with Russia and its officially atheistic communist government. Paper bills began bearing the aphorism the following year, joining several kinds of metal coins that had been imprinted with it since 1864. The phrase “Under God” was also added to the Pledge of Allegiance during this time, and the state of Ohio changed its motto in 1959 to “With God, all things are possible.”

For more, please check Think Progress

The end of religion as we know it: Why churches can no longer hide the truth

The end of religion as we know it: Why churches can no longer hide the truth

丹尼尔·丹尼特（Daniel Clement Dennett，1942年3月28日－），是一名美国哲学家、作家及认知科学家。其研究集中于科学哲学、生物学哲学，特别是与演化生物学及认知科学有关的课题。目前是塔夫斯大学（Tufts University）的哲学系教授、Austin B. Fletcher讲座哲学教授及认知研究中心的共同主任。

丹尼特是一名坚实的无神论及世俗论者，美国世俗联盟（Secular Coalition for America）咨询委员会成员，及明智思想运动（Brights movement）一名突出的支持者。有媒体将丹尼特、理查德·道金斯、山姆·哈里斯及克里斯托弗·希钦斯称作新无神论（New Atheism）的四骑士。

William Li: Can we eat to starve cancer ? ［TED 中文］

The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050

http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/

Why the Future of Religion Is Bleak为什么宗教的未来是暗淡

http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-future-of-religion-is-bleak-1430104785

By DANIEL C. DENNETT

April 26, 2015 11:19 p.m. ET

Religion has been waning in influence for several centuries, especially in Europe and North America. There have been a few brief and local revivals, but in recent years the pace of decline has accelerated.

THE RESILIENCE OF RELIGION

•           The search for meaning is eternal, writes Emilie M. Townes

Today one of the largest categories of religious affiliation in the world—with more than a billion people—is no religion at all, the “Nones.” One out of six Americans is already a None; by 2050, the figure will be one out of four, according to a new Pew Research Center study. Churches are being closed by the hundreds, deconsecrated and rehabilitated as housing, offices, restaurants and the like, or just abandoned.

If this trend continues, religion largely will evaporate, at least in the West. Pockets of intense religious activity may continue, made up of people who will be more sharply differentiated from most of society in attitudes and customs, a likely source of growing tension and conflict.

Could anything turn this decline around? Yes, unfortunately. A global plague, a world war fought over water or oil, the collapse of the Internet (and thereby almost all electronic communication) or some as-yet unimagined catastrophe could throw the remaining population into misery and fear, the soil in which religion flourishes best.

Behind the decline

With hardly any significant exceptions, religion recedes whenever human security and well-being rises, a fact that has recently been shown in numerous studies, but was suspected by John Calvin in the 16th century. He noted that the more prosperous and comfortable his Genevans became, the less dependent they were on church. Presumably, those who deplore the decline of religion in the world today would not welcome the sort of devastation and despair that could give religion its second wind.

There is no other plausible scenario that could halt the slide, for a fairly obvious reason: the recent rapid growth of mutual knowledge, thanks to the global spread of electronic and digital communication.

Any institution—just like a person or an organism—depends on a modicum of privacy in which to conduct its business and control its activities without too much interference and too many prying eyes. Religious institutions, since their founding millennia ago, have managed to keep secrets and to control what their flocks knew about the world, about other religions and about the inner workings of their own religion with relative ease. Today it is next to impossible.

What is particularly corrosive to religion isn’t just the newly available information that can be unearthed by the curious, but the ambient knowledge that is shared by the general populace.

 Funny business

Laughter is particularly subversive. A Mormon watching the episode of “South Park” that lampoons the Church of Latter-day Saints doesn’t just see some outsiders poking fun at her religion. She learns that vast numbers of people find her religion comical, preposterous, ludicrous, as confirmed by the writers’ decision to belittle it and the networks’ decision to broadcast it. This may heighten her loyalty, but it also may shake her confidence, and as soon as she even entertains the hypothesis that belief in God might be a life-enhancing illusion, not a rock-solid truth, she is on the slippery slope.

The late computer scientist John McCarthy, a founder of artificial intelligence, once said, “When I see a slippery slope, my instinct is to build a terrace.” That’s what theologians have been doing for hundreds of years, shoring up whatever they think they can salvage from the rain of information eroding their ancient peaks of doctrine. In some denominations the clergy are obliged to swear to uphold the “inerrant truth” of every sentence in the Bible, but this is becoming more of an embarrassment than a shield against doubt.

Hardly anybody today believes in—or would want to believe in—the wrathful, Old Testament Jehovah, for instance. A God who commands our love is a nasty piece of work by today’s perspectives, and has been replaced, over the centuries, by ever-less-anthropomorphic (but more “loving,” more “forgiving”) addressees of our prayers. (Isn’t it curious how the obsolete term “God-fearing” is still used in some quarters as a commendation?) God has no ears, but may “listen” to our prayers, and “works in mysterious ways,” which is a face-saving way of acknowledging that He doesn’t answer them at all.

Do you remember the impressive and rigorous Benson Study? It was conducted by a Harvard Medical School team that labored for years. It was finally published in 2006, and it concluded that intercessionary prayer for the recovery of heart-surgery patients not only didn’t work; in some conditions it showed a small but measurable increase in post-surgical complications.

Media bias

This was dutifully reported by the media, and promptly forgotten by most. But if the study had found any positive result, you can be sure it would have been on the cover of all the newsmagazines and featured in television specials. This pro-religion bias in the media is crumbling, however, and once it dissolves, the exposure of all the antique falsehoods of religious doctrine will oblige the theologians to build yet another terrace, lower down the slope. They are running out of rocks.

Religious leaders of all faiths are struggling to find ways of keeping their institutions going, and one of the themes emerging from the surveys they conduct is that creed should be de-emphasized and loyalty and community should be fostered.

 PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

If we are lucky—if human health and security continue to rise and spread around the globe—churches might evolve into humanist communities and social clubs, dedicated to good works, with distinctive ceremonies and disappearing doctrine, except for a scattering of reclusive sects marked by something like institutional paranoia.

If we are unlucky and calamity strikes, our anxiety and misery will provide plenty of fuel for revivals and inventions of religions we have happily learned to live without.

Prof. Dennett is co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and co-author, with Linda LaScola, of “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind.” He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

基督教最愚蠢的信念

創造神的人類

Jesus was a Buddhist Monk BBC Documentary

The martyrdom of young Amos Yee年轻的殉道者

The martyrdom of young Amos Yee



年轻的殉道者

短片「賀」李光耀逝世 星洲少年被捕

http://news.mingpao.com/ins/%E7%9F%AD%E7%89%87%E3%80%8C%E8%B3%80%E3%80%8D%E6%9D%8E%E5%85%89%E8%80%80%E9%80%9D%E4%B8%96%20%E6%98%9F%E6%B4%B2%E5%B0%91%E5%B9%B4%E8%A2%AB%E6%8D%95/web_tc/article/20150330/s00005/1427680403317

末日真相(5)誰該下地獄?

那些最终下地狱的基督徒

基督徒犯罪指南

为什么李光耀坚持不让新加坡人说方言？ - 佳礼报道 - 佳礼资讯网

为什么李光耀坚持不让新加坡人说方言？ - 佳礼报道 - 佳礼资讯网

Why are Christians Turning to Buddhism?

http://www.peaceful-traveler.com/why-are-christians-turning-to-buddhism/

Six Examples by Jay McDaniel

A small but growing number Christians in the West are turning to Buddhism for spiritual guidance. Many are reading books about Buddhism, and some are also meditating, participating in Buddhist retreats, and studying under Buddhist teachers. They are drawn to Buddhism’s emphasis on “being present” in the present moment; to its recognition of the interconnectedness of all things; to its emphasis on non-violence; to its appreciation of a world beyond words, and to its provision of practical means — namely meditation — for growing in one’s capacities for wise and compassionate living in daily life. As they learn from Buddhism, they do not abandon Christianity. Their hope is that Buddhism can help them become better Christians. They are Christians influenced by Buddhism.

1. Julia is typical of one kind of Christian influenced by Buddhism. She is a hospice worker in New York who, as a Benedictine sister, turns to Buddhism “to become a better listener and to become more patient.” As a student of Zen she has been practicing zazen for twenty years under the inspiration of the Vietnamese Zen teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, whose book Living Buddha/Living Christ gave her new eyes for Christ, proposing that Jesus himself was “mindful in the present moment.” She practices meditation in order to deepen her own capacities for mindfulness, particularly as it might help her be more effective in her life’s calling. As a hospice worker she feels called to listen to dying people, quietly and without judgment, as a way of extending the healing ministry of Christ. Like many people in consumer society, she sometimes finds herself too hurried and distracted, too caught up in her own concerns, to be present to others in patient and healing ways. She turns to Zen practice because it has helped her become more patient and attentive in her capacities to be available to people in a spirit of compassion.

From Julia’s perspective, “being present” to people in a compassionate way is a spiritual practice in its own right. She calls this attention “practicing the presence of God,” and she believes that this listening participates in a deeper Listening – an all-inclusive Love — whom she calls God, and whom she believes is everywhere at once. She turns to Zen meditation, then, not to escape the world, but to help her drawn closer to the very God whose face she sees in people in need, and to help her become gentler and more attentive in her own capacities for listening. In her words: “I hope that my Zen practice has helped me become a better Christian.”

2. John, too, is a Christian who practices meditation, but for different reasons. He suffers from chronic back pain from a car accident several years ago. He has turned to meditation as a way of coping more creatively with his pain. “The pain doesn’t go away,” he says, but it’s so much worse when I fight it. Meditation has helped me live with the pain, instead of fighting it all the time.” When people see John, they note that he seems a little more at peace, and a little more joyful, than he used to seem. Not that everything is perfect. He has his bad days and his good days. Still, he finds solace in the fact that, even on the bad days, he can “take a deep breath” and feel a little more control in his life.

When John is asked to reflect on the relation between his meditation practice and Christianity, he reminds his questioner that that the very word Spirit is connected to the Hebrew word ruach, which means breathing. John sees physical breathing—the kind that we do each moment of our lives–as a portable icon for a deeper Breathing, divine in nature, which supports us in all circumstances, painful and pleasant, and which allows us to face suffering, our own and that of others, with courage. “Buddhism has helped me find strength in times of pain; it has helped me find God’s Breathing.”

3. Sheila is an advertising agent in Detroit who turns to Buddhism for a different reason. She does not practice meditation and is temperamentally very active and busy. But over the years her busyness has become a compulsion and she now risks losing her husband and children, because she never has time for her family. As she explains: “Almost all of my daily life has been absorbed with selling products, MAKING MONEY, and manipulating other people’s desires. Somewhere in the process I have forgotten what was most important to me: helping others, being with friends and family, and appreciating the simple beauties of life. Buddhism speaks to my deeper side.”

When Sheila reflects on the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity, she thinks about the lifestyle and values of Jesus. She recognizes that Jesus himself had little interest in appearance, affluence, and marketable achievement, and that he was deeply critical of the very idea that “amassing wealth” should be a central organizing principle of life. She doubts that Jesus would approve of the business culture in which she is immersed, in which the accumulation of wealth seems to be the inordinate concern. For her, then, Buddhism invites her to rethink the values by which she lives and to turn to values that are closer to the true teachings of Christ. “I find this simpler way challenging,” she says, “but also hopeful. I hope that Buddhism can help me have the courage to follow Christ more truly.

4. Robert is an unemployed social worker in Texas, who feels unworthy of respect because he does not have a salaried job like so many of his friends. He, too, has been reading books on Buddhism, “Most people identify with their jobs,” he says, “but I don’t have one. Sometimes I feel like a nothing, a nobody. Sometimes I feel like it is only at church, and sometimes not even there, that I count for anything.”

Robert turns to Buddhism as a complement to the kind of support he seeks to find, but sometimes doesn’t find, in Christianity. Buddhism tells him that his real identity—his true self, as Buddhists put it—lies more in the kindness he extends to others, and to himself, than in the MAKING MONEY AND amassing wealth. Like Sheila, he sees this as connected with the teachings of Jesus. “Jesus tells me that I am made in the image of God; Buddhism tells me that I possess the Buddha-Nature. I don’t care what name you use, but somehow you need to know that you are more than money and wealth.”

5. Jane is a practicing physicist who works at a laboratory in Maryland who goes to a local Methodist church regularly. For her, a religious orientation must “make sense” intellectually, even as it also appeals to a more affective side of life, as discovered in personal relations, music, and the natural world. But she also finds God in science and in scientific ways of understanding the world. She is troubled that, too often, the atmosphere of church seems to discourage, rather than encourage, the spirit of enquiry and questioning that are so important in the scientific life. Jane appreciates the fact that, in Buddhism as she understands it, this spirit is encouraged.

This non-dogmatic approach, in which even religious convictions can be subject to revision, inspires her. In her words: “I plan to remain a Christian and stay with my Methodist church, but I want to learn more about Buddhism. I sense that its approach to life can help me see the spiritual dimensions of doubt and inquiry and help me integrate religion and science.

6. Sandra is a Roman Catholic nun in Missouri who leads a retreat center. Twelve months a year she leads retreats for Christians, Catholic and non-Catholic, who wish to recover the more contemplative traditions of their prayer life and enter more deeply into their interior journey with God. At her workshops she offers spiritual guidance and introduces participants to many of the mystics of the Christian tradition: John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen. Even as she does this, she herself is on the very journey to God, and she makes this clear to people who come her way.

Sandra turns to Buddhism because she believes that its teaching of no-ego or no-self, when understood experientially and not just intellectually, is itself an essential dimension of the journey to God. She sees this teaching as complementary to, and yet enriching, the teaching of “death and resurrection” that is at the heart of Christian faith. In her words: “Christianity and Buddhism agree that the spiritual pilgrimage involves an absolute letting go, or dropping away, of all that a person knows of self and God. Indeed, this is what happened in Jesus as he lay dying on the cross, and perhaps at many moments leading up to the cross. Only after the dying can new life emerge, in which there is in some sense ‘only God’ and no more ‘me.’ I see the cross as symbolizing this dying of self and resurrecting of new life that must occur within each of us. Buddhism helps me enter into that dying of self.”

As you listen to their stories, perhaps you hear your own desires in some of them? If so, you have undertaken an empathy experiment. You need not be “Christian” or “Buddhist” to do this. There is something to learn from them even if you are not religious at all. Don’t we all need to live by dying? Don’t we all need to listen better? Don’t we all need to inquire and seek truth? There is something deeply human in their searching, and deeply human in our willingness to learn from them, even if we don’t share their faith. And even if we do.

Americans are abandoning religion in droves.

BELIEF

A Shocking Number of Americans Under 30 Have No Religion — This Country Is Going to Change

Americans are abandoning religion in droves.

By Amelia Thomson-Deveaux / The American Prospect January 19, 2015

http://www.alternet.org/belief/shocking-number-americans-under-30-have-no-religion-country-going-change#.VMCZ6_P53fE.facebook

The following article first appeared in the American Prospect.

In the two years leading up to his death, the legal and political philosopher Ronald Dworkin was completing a slim volume with a weighty title. Religion without God, which began as a series of lectures in 2011, set a lofty goal: to propose a “religious attitude” in the absence of belief. Dworkin’s objective was not just theological. The book, he hoped, would help lower the temperature in the past decade’s battle between a group of scientists and philosophers dubbed the New Atheists and an array of critics who have accused them of everything from Islamophobia to fundamentalism to heresy.

Although the New Atheists are part of a long and distinguished tradition, including (but not limited to) philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Bertrand Russell, they are notable because they have made atheism a pop success in the U.S. Since the 2004 publication of Sam Harris’s post–September 11 polemic, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, the kingpins of the movement—Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel C. Dennett, and A.C. Grayling, to name a few—have launched diatribes against God and belief. To them, religion is at best superfluous, at worst (in Hitchens’s words) “allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” This zealous attitude has earned the New Atheists high-profile critics, including Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Great Britain, who recently wrote in a column for The Spectator:

Where is there the remotest sense that [the New Atheists] have grappled with the real issues, which have nothing to do with science and the literal meaning of scripture and everything to do with the meaningfulness or otherwise of human life, the existence or non-existence of an objective moral order … and the ability or inability of society to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond?

For a religious leader like Sacks, who has staked his career on interfaith cooperation, the New Atheists’ antagonism is obnoxious. But it turns out all the public sparring may have been missing the point. Thanks to an even more seismic shift, nonbelievers in the U.S. are already leaving the New Atheists behind.

Americans are abandoning organized religion in droves. Data from the Public Religion Research Institute shows that while only 7 percent of Americans were raised outside a religious tradition, nearly 19 percent are religiously unaffiliated today. According to the General Social Survey, the number of Americans who say they have “no religion” has more than doubled since 1990.

Although they are one of the fastest-growing groups today, the unaffiliated are just one wave on a sea of religious change. Minorities are playing a greater role in shaping Christian denominations traditionally dominated by whites. The Catholic Church is hemorrhaging followers—by some estimates, 12 percent of Americans today are former Catholics—but recent immigrants from Latin America have buoyed its membership, making at least some changes in leadership and emphasis inevitable. Latino Americans are also converting to evangelical Christianity, which is sure to jostle the old alliances of the Christian conservative movement. The Christian right has battened down the hatches for a long tussle with the forces of secularization. But Christian pollsters warn that evangelical churches are losing followers, too, in part because Christianity is gaining a reputation for touting shallow, anti-science, and sexually repressive teachings.

One-third of Americans under age 30, meanwhile, say they have no religion. This group, though still majority-white, is substantially more diverse than the older unaffiliated. Many of its members are choosing other nonbelievers as life partners, raising new questions about non-religious families and child rearing. Amid this churn, demographers and sociologists have no reason to believe that Americans’ flight from organized religion will ebb anytime soon.

The New Atheists are eager to claim the transformation. In a recent video debate, Daniel Dennett, a New Atheist patriarch complete with a venerable-looking white beard, declared, “We gave [the unaffiliated] permission to declare their lack of interest in religion … and we have significant numbers of converts on our tally sheets. We get e-mailed from them all the time.” Yet atheists—especially those bold enough to e-mail Dennett—are only a vocal minority. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, more than two-thirds of the unaffiliated believe in God; nearly four in ten say they are “spiritual” but not “religious”; more than one-fifth say they pray every day.

Pollsters and demographers strain to arrange the swelling numbers of nonbelievers into categories that make sense. But their rapid growth—and our lack of a language to identify their convictions—makes every hypothesis feel obsolete before it’s published. After decades of surveys that use church attendance as the primary measure of religiosity, what can we say about Americans who rarely set foot in a sanctuary but nevertheless believe in God? Or who disavow God but call themselves spiritual or say they’ve had a religious or mystical experience? Pew and others still unsatisfyingly refer to the unaffiliated as the “nones.” They’re hard to organize (as liberal political operatives have discovered, to their chagrin) and even harder to convert—whether those evangelizing are atheists or believers. In fact, the unaffiliated are blurring the line between religion and atheism.

Online, the intrepid seeker can find secular wedding vows and baptism alternatives, as well as links to support groups and defenders of nonbelievers’ rights like the Secular Coalition for America. There is also an increasing amount of information about how to raise children in a nonreligious household, how to say a godless grace, and how to grieve without God or an afterlife. None of this pretends to be definitive. Rather, it’s a collective effort to grapple with a widely shared set of questions and anxieties. Among the unaffiliated, the will to create non-religious community is humming. But rather than being handed down from on high, it’s being crowdsourced.

Atheist churches are a topic of perennial media interest—although the media appears more obsessed than anyone else with hyping this phenomenon. Comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, the creators of the Sunday Assembly, a London-based weekly gathering for nonbelievers of all stripes, landed in the news after announcing that they were taking their project global. Goofy marketing was almost certainly part of the appeal: In one YouTube video promoting the assembly, Jones promises, smiling manically, that the gathering will be “livelier than an eel in your underpants.” Pop philosopher Alain de Botton, the author of Religion for Atheists, takes credit for pioneering the concept of the “atheist church.” But de Botton’s effort to spell out all the rules feels out of step with the moment, and his grand plan to raid religious traditions for source material is a mixed bag. Ultimately, the book reads more like an ode to his favorite things—museums, Madonnas, Zen Buddhist retreats—than a replacement for the structures that for centuries have helped people express gratitude, cope with loss, and search for meaning and purpose.

Nonbelievers’ efforts to create a moral, happy life in the face of prejudice has created, for some, a kind of angry optimism. PZ (Paul Zachary) Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, and one of the proprietors of the blog Pharyngula—where you can read his take on science, current events, and cephalopods—is one of the latest to revel in the “joys of reality” and the folly of faith. His new book, The Happy Atheist, is a gleeful, self-righteous celebration of life without belief. Much of Myers’s happiness, at least according to the book, is derived from mocking the spectacle of religious hypocrisy. But Myers seems distressed by the outsider’s perception that atheists subsist on glib patter. “What we atheists are saying,” he writes, “is that we need to turn away from the powerless rationalizations of the holy books, no matter how poetic they might be, and recognize that their power and their appeal flows from their humanity, not from their religiosity.” Far from missing the point, he proposes, atheists are even more deeply embedded in the sorrows and joys of human experience because they sidestep the “magical thinking” of religious belief.

Myers won’t win brownie points from those who want the New Atheists to temper their tone. Near the end, he calls believers “lazy-minded”—for him, that’s charitable. In his last essay, he seems almost ready to call a truce: quoting from The Epic of Gilgamesh, he declares that grief is “the touchstone, the common element that atheists and theists share.” But he can’t bring himself to admit that the concept of God might be anything but comical.

Ronald Dworkin is more willing to compromise. Religion without God is a genuinely thoughtful attempt to expand the categories of both “atheist” and “religious.” Far from sneering at the supernatural, Dworkin proposes that religion is too important to be discarded by nonbelievers. Many atheists, Dworkin writes, “have convictions and experiences similar to and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a ‘personal’ god, they nevertheless believe in a ‘force’ in the universe ‘greater than we are.’ They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted.” This faith—unconnected to God but no less profound because of it—provides the opportunity for an unrealized communion between believers and nonbelievers.

The premise for Religion without God may be its most valuable contribution. Elsewhere, Dworkin’s personal and aesthetic obsessions color the book in a way that is both endearing and frustrating. He explores physicists’ quasi-religious belief in the beauty of the universe for more than 50 pages. But for all of his reflections on the harmony of the heavens, Dworkin offers no sense of how mortals can achieve accord with one another.

The book also skirts the ache for ritual and community among the unaffiliated. Dworkin makes a point of dismissing prayer and worship as mere “godly convictions.” Yet on a basic level, rituals are habits that remind people, religious or not, who they are and what they hold important. Prayer and meditation can help cultivate self-discipline or ease stress. Rituals are social, not just individual; community members can participate in grief and help draw the mourner toward a sense of acceptance.

At the end of Religion without God, Dworkin briefly reflects on death. Religious atheists, he argues, should think of lives well lived as works of art—accomplishments that constitute an “achievement in just having been made, whether or not they continue to be admired or even survive.” The honesty of this section is touching, as is its stark brevity; in his last paragraph, Dworkin confesses that he knows “that may not be good enough for you: it may not even soften a bit the fear we face.” But it opens the door to a faith that does not rely on miracles.

Despite their potential for political influence, nonbelievers have yet to breach the deep levels of antipathy toward the notion of nonreligious elected officials. Nearly half of Americans say that the growing numbers of people who are not religious is a bad thing, while only 11 percent say it is a good thing. Fully two-thirds of Americans are uncomfortable with the idea of an atheist in the White House. In July, a vigorous debate over whether atheists and humanists should join the Army Chaplain Corps illustrated the dangers of voicing sympathy with the nonreligious. Republican congressmen, declaring that such chaplains would “make a mockery” of the institution, darkly hypothesized that atheist chaplains would tell grieving families that their sons were “worm food.” Hostility toward nonbelief is still recommended for lawmakers who want to keep their jobs; since 9/11 it’s become hard to imagine a speech that doesn’t end with “God bless America.” Nor does it help that the unaffiliated are one of the most politically disengaged groups in the country.

Dworkin turns his legal eye to this uncomfortable reality. Historically, he says, courts have assumed that a “religion” must have a God, or at least something that resembles a deity. But what privileges should theists receive in a country with a rapidly growing number of religiously unaffiliated citizens? For Dworkin, the solution is simple: Replace the right to religious freedom with the right to something he calls “ethical independence.” This, according to Dworkin, “limits the reasons government may offer for any constraint on a citizen’s freedom,” without providing a special right that fixes on a particular subject (in this case, religion). To receive a religious exemption, in other words, belief in God would be beside the point.

Adjusting the scope of freedom of religion is a controversial move for any legal scholar to make, and Dworkin’s argument has its critics. In an article for the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, Rafael Domingo dismisses Dworkin’s view as reductive, unable to encompass “a conception of religion as a fact and a value.” In a practical sense, Dworkin’s approach is also a pipe dream. For his proposition to succeed, religious institutions and individuals would have to relinquish their significant legal clout and, in so doing, admit that the United States is no longer a nation “under God.” But the spirit of the argument points toward a laying-down of arms in the culture wars that Dworkin cautiously hoped might soon be on the horizon. Even if the right of religious exercise isn’t reframed, transformations in the country’s religious landscape may convince believers to accept that faith in God does not give them the moral high ground, at least in the public square. The next few years will tell whether his optimism was justified.

Atheists may come to see the benefits of compromise as well. Back in 2013, Juan Mendez, an atheist lawmaker in the Arizona House of Representatives, standing up to give the daily invocation, asked his colleagues to look around and take a moment to acknowledge their shared humanity. Mendez’s action was powerful (one might even say Dworkinian) because it undermined the notion that the statehouse is a place for Christian prayer but did not insist that ethical reflection be removed.

Dworkin is right: A broader conception of religion and values will not result in chaos. This is something that countless religiously unaffiliated Americans have already discovered. Attitudes toward atheists and nonbelievers in public office, while still frosty, are thawing just a little. We have now elected multiple secular lawmakers to Congress, signaling that Americans can accept political campaigns in which the candidates’ religion does not play a central role. Meanwhile, the New Atheists’ attitudes are softening, too: Sam Harris, a linchpin of the movement, is writing a defense of spirituality.

Yet a tension remains between the necessary loneliness of an individual’s hunt for the secrets of the universe and the desire for companions along the way. Clearly we’re not all looking for the same answers. In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, an aging preacher contemplates his relationship with his friend’s estranged son, writing:

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable. … We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

The search for kinship among the unaffiliated will be an exercise in communication, because no assumptions can be made about shared values or priorities, at least not at first. But without the shared language of belief or an ethical script handed down through religious tradition, the unaffiliated can engage—either together or alone—in exciting acts of reinvention. We’re hurtling toward a new moment in the American religious experience—one in which, for many, belief and nonbelief will exist side by side.

The Way of the Mister: Fuck The Pope!

Jim Holt: Why does the universe exist?

MIT Science Prof Threatens to Undo Everything Religious Right Holds Dear

http://www.alternet.org/belief/scientist-undos-wacky-creationism-claims

By Paul Rosenberg / Salon January 3, 2015

The Christian right’s obsessive hatred of Darwin is a wonder to behold, but it could someday be rivaled by the hatred of someone you’ve probably never even heard of. Darwin earned their hatred because he explained the evolution of life in a way that doesn’t require the hand of God. Darwin didn’t exclude God, of course, though many creationists seem incapable of grasping this point. But he didn’t require God, either, and that was enough to drive some people mad.

Darwin also didn’t have anything to say about how life got started in the first place — which still leaves a mighty big role for God to play, for those who are so inclined. But that could be about to change, and things could get a whole lot worse for creationists because of Jeremy England, a young MIT professor who’s proposed a theory, based in thermodynamics, showing that the emergence of life was not accidental, but necessary. “[U]nder certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life,” he was quoted as saying in an article in Quanta magazine early in 2014, that’s since been republished by Scientific American and, more recently, by Business Insider. In essence, he’s saying, life itself evolved out of simpler non-living systems.

The notion of an evolutionary process broader than life itself is not entirely new. Indeed, there’s evidence, recounted by Eric Havelock in “The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics,” that it was held by the pre-Socratic natural philosophers, who also first gave us the concept of the atom, among many other things. But unlike them or other earlier precursors, England has a specific, unifying, testable evolutionary mechanism in mind.

Quanta fleshed things out a bit more like this:

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

It doesn’t mean we should expect life everywhere in the universe — lack of a decent atmosphere or being too far from the sun still makes most of our solar system inhospitable for life with or without England’s perspective. But it does mean that “under certain conditions” where life is possible — as it is here on Earth, obviously — it is also quite probable, if not, ultimately, inevitable. Indeed, life on Earth could well have developed multiple times independently of each other, or all at once, or both. The first truly living organism could have had hundreds, perhaps thousands of siblings, all born not from a single physical parent, but from a physical system, literally pregnant with the possibility of producing life. And similar multiple births of life could have happened repeatedly at different points in time.

That also means that Earth-like planets circling other suns would have a much higher likelihood of carrying life as well. We’re fortunate to have substantial oceans as well as an atmosphere — the heat baths referred to above — but England’s theory suggests we could get life with just one of them — and even with much smaller versions, given enough time. Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1600, was perhaps the first to take Copernicanism to its logical extension, speculating that stars were other suns, circled by other worlds, populated by beings like ourselves. His extreme minority view in his own time now looks better than ever, thanks to England.

If England’s theory works out, it will obviously be an epochal scientific advance. But on a lighter note, it will also be a fitting rebuke to pseudo-scientific creationists, who have long mistakenly claimed that thermodynamics disproves evolution (here, for example), the exact opposite of what England’s work is designed to show — that thermodynamics drives evolution, starting even before life itself first appears, with a physics-based logic that applies equally to living and non-living matter.

Most important in this regard is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in any closed process, there is an increase in the total entropy (roughly speaking, a measure of disorder). The increase in disorder is the opposite of increasing order due to evolution, the creationists reason, ergo — a contradiction! Overlooking the crucial word “closed,” of course. There are various equivalent ways of stating the law, one of which is that energy cannot pass from a cooler to a warmer body without extra work being done. Legendary science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov put it like this: “You can’t win. You can’t break even. You can’t get out of the game.” Although creationists have long mistakenly believed that evolution is a violation of the Second Law, actual scientists have not. For example, physicist Stephen G. Brush, writing for The American Physical Society in 2000, in “Creationism Versus Physical Science,” noted: “As Ludwig Boltzmann noted more than a century ago, thermodynamics correctly interpreted does not just allow Darwinian evolution, it favors it.”

A simple explanation of this comes from a document in the thermodynamics FAQ subsection of TalkOrigins Archive (the  first and foremost online repository of reliable information on the creation/evolution controversy), which in part explains:

Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.

However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can’t have more usable energy still?

That passage goes right to the heart of the matter. Evolution is no more a violation of the Second Law than life itself is. A more extensive, lighthearted, non-technical treatment of the creationist’s misunderstanding and what’s really going on can be found here.

The driving flow of energy — whether from the sun or some other source — can give rise to what are known as dissipative structures, which are self-organized by the process of dissipating the energy that flows through them. Russian-born Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work developing the concept. All living things are dissipative structures, as are many non-living things as well — cyclones, hurricanes and tornados, for example. Without explicitly using the term “dissipative structures,” the passage above went on to invoke them thus:

Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?

In a very real sense, Prigogine’s work laid the foundations for what England is doing today, which is why it might be overstated to credit England with originating this theory, as several commentators at Quanta pointed out, noting other progenitors as well (here, here andhere, among others). But already England appears to have assembled a collection of analytical tools, along with a sophisticated multidisciplinary theoretical approach, which promises to do much more than simply propound a theory, but to generate a whole new research agenda giving detailed meaning to that theoretical conjecture. And that research agenda is already starting to produce results. (See his research group home page for more.) It’s the development of this sort of detailed body of specific mutually interrelated results that will distinguish England’s articulation of his theory from other earlier formulations that have not yet been translated into successful theory-testing research agendas.

Above all, as described on the home page mentioned above, England is involved in knitting together the understanding of life and various stages of life-like processes combining the perspectives of biology and physics:

Living things are good at collecting information about their surroundings, and at putting that information to use through the ways they interact with their environment so as to survive and replicate themselves. Thus, talking about biology inevitably leads to talking about decision, purpose, and function.

At the same time, living things are also made of atoms that, in and of themselves, have no particular function. Rather, molecules and the atoms from which they are built exhibit well-defined physical properties having to do with how they bounce off of, stick to, and combine with each other across space and over time.

Making sense of life at the molecular level is all about building a bridge between these two different ways of looking at the world.

If that sounds intriguing, you might enjoy this hour-long presentation of his work (with splashes of local Swedish color) — especially (but not only) if you’re a science nerd.

Whether or not England’s theory proves out in the end, he’s already doing quite a lot to build that bridge between worldviews and inspire others to make similar efforts. Science is not just about making new discoveries, but about seeing the world in new ways — which then makes new discoveries almost inevitable. And England has already succeeded in that.  As the Quanta article explained:

England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.

“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”

Creationists often cast themselves as humble servants of God, and paint scientists as arrogant, know-it-all rebels against him. But, unsurprisingly, they’ve got it all backwards, once again. England’s work reminds us that it’s scientists’ willingness to admit our own ignorance and confront it head on — rather than papering over it — that unlocks the great storehouse of wonders we live in and gives us our most challenging, satisfying quests.

Perdition and sedition

Perdition and sedition

http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2009/06/perdition-and-sedition/

"This case came to my attention only recently though it happened a few years ago. Nonetheless, I think it is still relevant today, and will probably be relevant for many years from now. The question is: How to set the limits and inculcate sensibilities of evangelism in a secular and multi-religion state. As the article states, though "the defendants appeared motivated by religious fervour rather than malice", it is exactly such religious fervour that often leads to malice. In a secular state, religious freedom and free speech does not equate to freedom to evangelize, a point that many Christians in Singapore seems to have forgotten in the name of being faithful missionaries."——Lim Ni Eng

JUNE 12, 2009 BY LEONG SZE HIAN     

   

 The invoking of the Sedition Act in the prosecution of the Christian couple for distributing offensive tracts may seem overly harsh – setting a dangerous precedent for the future.

EIGHT WEEKS in jail– that was the sentence dished out under the Sedition Act to Christian couple Mr Ong Kian Cheong and Dorothy Chan for distributing offensive tracts to Muslims.

(Photo from The Straits Times)

Even so, as ill-judged as the couple’s actions were, it was still a leap to argue that they had committed sedition. The fallout seemed localised; the defendants appeared motivated by religious fervour rather than malice.

Nevertheless, the sentencing should have come as little surprise, since a pair of bloggers were similarly jailed under the Act for posting “racist remarks on the Internet in 2005.

There is also no surprise that the Muslims who received the tracts were offended and chose to take action. A pair of booklets that were highlighted by the prosecution aimed at advocating conversion away from Islam by grossly misrepresenting the religion.

Understandably the recipients –- having received such tracts anonymously in the mail, and with little information about how many had been sent out or the intent of the sender –- were not out of place in fearing that it could be an attempt to undermine their religion.

Why Sedition Act and not Penal Code?

One curious aspect of the case is that the government chose to prosecute the couple under the portentous Sedition Act, rather than Sections 298 and 298A of the Penal Code which address acts that deliberately injure racial or religious feelings.

Furthermore, Sections 298 and 298A were added by the government in 2007 in response to the blogger case of 2005 so as to provide a lower-signature alternative to the Sedition Act to deal with such offenders.

In this context, the use of the Sedition Act against Mr Ong and Ms Chan suggests that the government intended to attach a high signature to the case, perhaps for a deterrence effect.

Or it could be for the more practical reason that the Sedition Act specifically legislates against the “distribution” of “seditious” material, while the Penal Code is more vague on this point. Invoking the Sedition Act would also allow the government to take action against stores that imported the booklets.

Legalities aside, the case is unfortunately timed. National attention on religious matters has been unusually intense of late, particularly since the high-profile ouster of a Christian faction from the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE), a local woman’s rights group.

The sentences passed on Mr Ong and Ms Chan, who had expressed contrition for their actions, might appear harsh to elements in the Christian community already chaffing at the fallout from the AWARE takeover, perhaps even reinforcing their perceptions that their religion is being unjustly singled out.

The government’s decision to invoke the Sedition Act could therefore prove to be a double-edged sword. The Act seems to have become the government’s favoured weapon for tackling racial- and religious-related offences.

Interestingly, prior to the 2005 cases involving the bloggers, the last time the Act was invoked was in 1966.

The problem is that the present case might have set a relatively low bar for invoking the Act, causing the government to rely more rather than less on it in future.

http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2009/06/perdition-and-sedition/

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God