http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/dogma/buying-the-body-of-christ//buying-the-body-of-christ-lt-killing-the-buddha Branding the communion wafer : “We’re proud to put our name on what will become the body of Jesus.” http://t.co/RBrsOghu #transubstantiation ]]> Sun, 08 Apr 2012 01:06:18 -0700 http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/dogma/buying-the-body-of-christ//buying-the-body-of-christ-lt-killing-the-buddha http://thebrowser.com/interviews/john-gray-on-critiques-utopia-and-apocalypse?page=full There are those who say that utopian projects, while they can never be achieved, are valuable because they spur human advance. That’s not my view. My view is that the attempt to achieve the impossible very often – if not always – has huge costs. Even if a project has good intent, its colossal cost always outweighs its reasonability, as we saw in Iraq. What is distinctive about utopianism at the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st is that it has become centrist. In other words, for the first half of the 20th century utopianism was… ]]> Wed, 28 Mar 2012 01:43:55 -0700 http://thebrowser.com/interviews/john-gray-on-critiques-utopia-and-apocalypse?page=full http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/does-it-matter-whether-god-exists//does-it-matter-whether-god-exists-nytimescom John Gray is probably wrong about religion, but does it matter? http://t.co/mdv8yZih ]]> Fri, 23 Mar 2012 01:51:43 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/does-it-matter-whether-god-exists//does-it-matter-whether-god-exists-nytimescom http://secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=kors_32_3/council-for-secular-humanism The Enlightenment, Naturalism, And The Secularization Of Values : http://t.co/VVPManIW cc @tomcolls ]]> Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:20:24 -0700 http://secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=kors_32_3/council-for-secular-humanism http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2012/02/neo-atheism-atheists-dawkins Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist - indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, "Render unto Caesar" - and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by… ]]> Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:42:54 -0700 http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2012/02/neo-atheism-atheists-dawkins http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/no-secularism-please-were-british-6917549.html/no-secularism-please-were-british-home-news-uk-the-independent No secularism please, we're British http://t.co/M2A2PHQt ]]> Wed, 15 Feb 2012 04:20:20 -0700 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/no-secularism-please-were-british-6917549.html/no-secularism-please-were-british-home-news-uk-the-independent http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/11/the-mystery-of-the-five-wounds-ready-to-go/ Why, though, to begin with, did stigmata materialize in 13th-century Italy? Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St. Francis’s day had begun to place much greater stress on the humanity of Christ, and would soon introduce a new feast day, Corpus Christi, into the calendar to encourage contemplation of his physical sufferings. Religious painters responded by depicting the crucifixion explicitly for the first time, portraying a Jesus who was plainly in agony from wounds that dripped blood. Indeed, the contemporary obsession with the marks of crucifixion may best… ]]> Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:07:55 -0700 http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/11/the-mystery-of-the-five-wounds-ready-to-go/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14944470 In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and against them. Religion is then not fundamentally different from science, both seem like attempts to frame true beliefs about the world. That way of thinking tends to see science and religion as rivals, and it then becomes tempting to conclude that there's no longer any need for religion.

This was the view presented by the Victorian anthropologist JG Frazer in his book The Golden Bough, a study… ]]> Tue, 20 Sep 2011 03:12:00 -0700 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14944470 http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/05/hitchens-201105 Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England” itself was becoming more of a nation-state and less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into English, and claimed that the result was the “Authorized” or “King James” version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind… ]]> Tue, 12 Apr 2011 15:57:36 -0700 http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/05/hitchens-201105 http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/death-anxiety-shapes-views-on-evolution-29580/ It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for this knowledge gap, newly published research suggests the key factor isn’t faith per se but rather a benefit it provides that Darwin does not: A sense that our all-too-short lives have meaning.
A Canadian study just published in the journal PLoS ONE finds a strong link between existential angst and reluctance to embrace the theory of evolution. A team of researchers led by University of British Columbia psychologist Jessica… ]]> Thu, 07 Apr 2011 03:39:19 -0700 http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/death-anxiety-shapes-views-on-evolution-29580/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZuowNcuGsc&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Mon, 29 Nov 2010 03:05:49 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZuowNcuGsc&feature=youtube_gdata http://chronicle.com/article/Youre-Dead-Now-What-/123759/ Will my enduring ghost be a mute witness to the goings-on down here, waving its vapory arms frantically at the undead? Or will it be an agent, endowed with the capacity to act? Put differently, if someone chooses to immortalize me in lyric, will I get to sing along?

Extremely odd queries of this sort kept leaping to mind as I perused four recently released books about the afterlife. Two examine what science has to say about the possibility that we persevere even after our bodies have ceased to function. One amasses perceptions of heaven and hell… ]]> Fri, 13 Aug 2010 04:29:00 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Youre-Dead-Now-What-/123759/ http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-last-supper23-2010mar23,0,7531075.story An unusual study looks at the food portions in artistic depictions of the Last Supper throughout history. The apostles have eaten better and better over the years, scholars say.

The Christian faith holds several acts of "super-sizing" to be miracles accomplished by Jesus Christ -- a handful of fish and loaves of bread expanded to feed thousands; a wedding feast running low on wine suddenly awash in the stuff. Now a new study of portion expansion puts Jesus once more at the center.

In a bid to uncover the roots of super-sized American… ]]> Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:46:00 -0700 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-last-supper23-2010mar23,0,7531075.story http://www.slate.com/id/2255105/ In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. "You oughta worship me, I'll tell you that!" one of the Christs yelled. "I will not worship you! You're a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts!" another snapped back. "No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord!" the third interjected,… ]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:18:00 -0700 http://www.slate.com/id/2255105/ http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/24/100524crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets John, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the River Jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the Gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: John the Baptizer—as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form—baptized Jesus. They believe it because… ]]> Wed, 19 May 2010 03:52:00 -0700 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/24/100524crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/04/believe-it-or-not I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally… ]]> Sun, 16 May 2010 16:19:00 -0700 http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/04/believe-it-or-not http://www.curatormagazine.com/sorinahiggins/posthumanism-a-christian-response/ The posthuman worldview goes a step beyond demoting human begins in the hierarchy of value. It promotes other species, proposing that animals are more rational than we knew. We are forced to ask: If rationality is not our Imago Dei, what is? Will you say next that we don’t have souls? Well, unfortunately, yes. Not only does Wolfe say we need to move beyond anthropocentrism (thinking that humans are the center of the universe) and speciesism (prejudice based on our species – differences from “nonhuman animals”); his entire theory is anti-ontological, and also assumes we all gave up metaphysics a… ]]> Thu, 29 Apr 2010 10:16:00 -0700 http://www.curatormagazine.com/sorinahiggins/posthumanism-a-christian-response/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-8-Yxdphsg&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Fri, 26 Mar 2010 05:21:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-8-Yxdphsg&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn0sDwqsrrI&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:06:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn0sDwqsrrI&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jan/04/religion-atheism Theology lets us talk about deep and irrational urges. This is seen by some atheists as weakness. But maybe it's a strength as well James Wood, a writer who himself has lived between the tugs of belief and unbelief, made an eloquent call in the New Yorker last August for "a theologically engaged atheism". Concluding a review of Terry Eagleton's recent attack on Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, he imagines something "only a semitone from faith [which] could give a brother's account of belief, rather than treat it as some unwanted impoverished relative." At the American Academy of Religion meeting… ]]> Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:29:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jan/04/religion-atheism