I feel obligated to write about this because it squats squarely in my basket of interests, touching on politics, belief, science, ethics, media… If I didn’t post something about this I’d be signaling gross indifference to the enterprise of blogging. Concern in the science community shouldn’t be surprising. By comparison, while we don’t expect the agriculture [...]
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Part of an ongoing series on belief. David Brooks generated a lot of discussion with his column in May on “The Neural Buddhists“: Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a [...]
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I’m going to go through this a lot quicker than the subject maybe deserves; it won’t be as comprehensive or straightforward as the title suggests. Anyways, this post is part of an ongoing series… It’s that… the whole point is this isn’t something to be settled on, but something that continuously unfolds or emerges through life [...]
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A follow-up to Identifying with Non-Belief. If skepticism is the act of being skeptical, I’m ok with it, but if we go to a lot of trouble to define and systematize “Skepticism,” then we run the risk of falling into the same absolutist traps in which we don’t recognize the truest shape of reality because it’s [...]
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It has taken me a while to comment on the little hoohaw caused by Barack Obama’s inaugural acknowledgment of “non-believers.” That’s roughly the category I belong to so it was encouraging to hear… I was going to post a hasty retort to this from Chris Selley at National Post’s Full Comment: Though no doubt well intentioned, it’s a weirdly [...]
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