The Religion Category Archive

Welcome to the Religion archives. The posts are listed in chronological order. Click the post title to read more.

March 3rd, 2009

Apparently, People Don’t Steal As Much Porn in Utah

s640x480A study by a Harvard Business School professor shows that Utah outpaces the more conservative states — which all tend to purchase more Internet porn than other states.

Online porn subscription rates are higher in states that enacted conservative legislation banning same-sex marriage or civil unions and where surveys show support for conservative positions on religion, gender roles and sexuality, according to an analysis published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. [...]

Utah has the nation’s highest online porn subscription rate per thousand home broadband users, at 5.47, while the nearby states of Idaho and Montana showed the lowest rates of 1.98 and 1.92, respectively, according to the study.

Full Article at The Salt Lake Tribune (via KFB)

December 11th, 2008

The Death of a Dear Friend, RIP The Mischke Broadcast: 1992 – 2008

The Mischke Poem

I can’t think of many people that I’ve spent more cumulative time with in my entire life than TD Mischke.  Though I only, briefly, met him 3 times …  I always felt as if the time we spent together (Me, listener…. Tommy, broadcaster) was more of a two way street than was ever possible.  As a teenager I’d listen to him before I went to bed….  then he become a staple of evenings… and later, my constant podcasting co-pilot during a long commute.

Perhaps it’s the right time to call the guy up, meet him for a hundred Summits at the Dubliner, and finally tell him that long, seemingly fabricated story about me and the city of Milwaukee (and the government agencies it involved) that took place in the fall of 2001.

Tommy, thanks for everything.  I look forward to hearing you wherever you land.

Mick Anselmo, Are you fucking listening??

December 1st, 2008

The Magic of Macroeconomics

Magic, anthropologists have always known, is about what people throughout the world do when faced with uncertainty, catastrophic damage, injustice, illness, suffering or harm, while ritual (also magical in its logic) is performed to forestall or prevent these very things. Magic is not about deficient logic, childish mental mistakes, clever priestly illusions or other mistaken technologies. It is the universal feeling that what we see and feel exceeds our knowledge, our understanding and our control. Can we deny that the infusion of 700 billion dollars into our banks is a magical act designed to make our banks rain credit again? Has it worked yet? Are we discarding our belief in banks and credit as a result? Magic is a method for deploying modest technical means to address outsize ethical challenges. Human beings have always done this and always will. We might as well have a grown-up word for this set of practices. [...]

In much of the world, magic is not just about miracle and mystery, it is also about questions and answers, means and ends, suffering and healing. It is not just about “what’s up.” It is about “how to.” And magical practice is primarily about the management of risk and uncertainty.

Even anthropologists, experts in the language of ritual, have lost the forest for the trees. Ritual is not primarily about sticks and stones, about making the fields yield grain and women yield children, about making boys and girls into men and women, and about assuring that troubled elders became contented ancestors. It is not just about boundaries and margins, the cycle of the seasons and the passage of human beings through the stages of life. It is about these moments and rhythms, indeed, but it is mostly about risk management. Magic is humanity’s oldest tool for managing the myriad ways in which things can go wrong. We have reduced magic to ritual and ritual to etiquette, to a set of mechanical procedures for lubricating the traffic of social life. Nothing could be a sillier view of magic, which is not about the big things that govern human life. Magic is the set of techniques that human beings have assembled to manage those risks which appear in the zone where the big things meet the little things, and when that meeting goes wrong.

Continue reading at The Immanent Frame.

Image: Uri Geller.

November 22nd, 2008

There is no God but Allah, and Mohammad is the messenger of Allah

October 25th, 2008

You can make it clap

This one speaks for itself.

October 24th, 2008

Mind Vs Brain

“YOU cannot overestimate,” thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, “how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You’re gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about… how Darwin’s explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it… I’m asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.” [...]

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing “non-material neuroscience” movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism – the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial – in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. [...]

To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use “mindful attention” to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology – the material brain is changing the material brain. [...]

The attack on materialism proposes to do just that, but it all turns on definitions. “At one time it looked like all physical causation was push/pull Newtonianism,” says Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, North Carolina. “Now we have a new understanding of physics. What counts as material has changed. Some respectable philosophers think that we might have to posit sentience as a fundamental force of nature or use quantum gravity to understand consciousness. These stretch beyond the bounds of what we today call ‘material’, and we haven’t discovered everything about nature yet.”

Link to The New Scientist

October 13th, 2008

Taking another look at the evangelical voting bloc.

It helps to make some sense of arguments made by Michael Lindsay and Rebecca Sager, also on The Immanent Frame, that there are “new types” of evangelicals, often relatively progressive in their politics. And with the newly articulated concerns on, for example, poverty, AIDS, and global warming, by Rick Warren, Bill Hybels and others. So, understanding variation, and finding shades of gray in the “evangelical” monolith, may have significant political implications. [...]

Now it is true that in an electorate fairly neatly divided, one need not persuade very many people in order to win an election. Just a few cracks in the Republican base, including that part composed of conservative Protestants, may tip the balance. So perhaps I should not doubt the importance of the actual variation among those Christians who consider themselves “evangelicals.” But after the Saddleback Church “conversations” hosted by Rick Warren, where Obama spoke easily and sincerely about his faith, few churchgoers who attended (and spoke to reporters afterward) seemed to be persuaded to actually vote for a Democrat. He was still too different, too unknown, and, some said, still not right about the “core” social issue of abortion. For many people, there is now almost 30 years of associating evangelical Protestantism with voting Republican—it may well have become a part of evangelical identity for many, a core affiliation.

Thus, at least in an election year, when elected officials, aspiring candidates, consultants, and media all have a lot at stake on shaping their appeals effectively, this practical outcome seems to me to swamp the scholarly concerns scholars have with precision and definition. If we want to know who evangelicals are, how many there are, and what they believe and how they practice, I am all for precision, nuance, and variation. But if we need to know how “they” are going to pull a voting lever regarding an either/or choice in a divided electorate, it seems to me that the global term bandied about in the media tells us what we want to know.

From Rhys H. Williams at The Immanent Frame.

Also see:

A new kind of evangelical.

A progressive evangelical movement?

October 13th, 2008

Suicide bombing is so passé.

Among all the bombs, explosives and guns, the number of martyred dead is rising. Though this is the will of Allah, it is nevertheless possible to cause the enemy greater damage without exposing the Muslims to danger. How is it to be done?

Despite countless attempts by Western intelligence agencies, and the many projects by psychologists trying to draw the profile of the average suicide terrorist, we have failed miserably in finding a solution to the “poor man’s smart bomb.” Now, however, attrition may achieve what the experts have not: after years of battle in two main arenas — Iraq and Afghanistan — Al Qaeda’s suicide-recruitment mechanisms are beginning to wear out.

Martyrdom operations are legitimate, and they are among the greatest acts of combat for Allah’s cause,” said Bashir bin Fahd al-Bashir, a Saudi preacher and one of Al Qaeda’s most popular religious authorities, in a recent sermon. “But they should not be allowed excessively. They should be allowed strictly on two conditions: 1. The commander is convinced they can definitely inflict serious losses on the enemy. 2. This cannot be achieved otherwise.

The meaning of such dictates is clear: carrying out suicide attacks when there are alternatives that would allow the bomber to survive should be considered “intihar,” the ultimate sin of taking one’s own life without religious justification.

Continue reading: The New York Times.

October 12th, 2008

Hebbo!


Say Hebbo! from Torvakian on Vimeo.

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