Here is a video of the latest bit of fundie propoganda, airing in Missouri, where voters will soon have the opportunity to vote "yes" to allow the full range of stem cell research. These anti-stem-cell actors and athletes should be made to walk through hospitals and hospices. They should be made to…
Mark Johnson and George Lakoff have written several compelling books based on the premise that humans must use conceptual metaphors to understand abstract concepts. For example, we say "Things are looking up" to express optimism (i.e., good is up). Lakoff and Johnson actually go further. They argue that without metaphors,…
Erika Price’s article about the soul, “Soul Searching,” intrigued me. I’ve always assumed that people believed in the soul because they were terrified at the thought of being permanently deprived of the companionship of those they love.
I think, though, that there is a often-unnoticed prerequisite to believing in souls. One first needs to make an intellectual move that is so commonplace and subtle that it is easily missed. This early profound move, that of presuming that the soul is a thing, is a critical move with profound ramifications.
Subtle early changes often play out profoundly in the long run. Consider, for instance, the sensitive dependence on initial conditions within chaotic systems popularly known as the butterfly effect. Small variations of the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long-term behavior of the system.
Here’s another example of a subtle early adjustment paying off in a big way. In 1970, when it was still 321,860 km from earth, the Apollo 13 spacecraft was damaged by an explosion, causing the Service Module to lose its oxygen and electrical power. The astronauts were required to carefully fire the engines briefly and manually to correct their course to achieve a re-entry angle of 6.49 degrees. That short burst of the engine thus effected a tiny course correction that was a matter of life and death by the time Apollo 13 hit Earth’s atmosphere.
We also make subtle language moves that eventually make huge differences in …
Check out this article and video posted on Think Progress. Don't forget to read the citations to "stay the course" and the comments. Hey! Somehow, this man is still in charge of our country. Really, time kick this fratboy out of the oval office before he accidentally (or intentionally) launches a nuke.
How often do we hear people “explaining” religious beliefs by stating “The Bible says so,” as if the Bible fell out of the sky, pre-translated to English by God Himself? It’s not that simple, according to an impressive and clearly-written book that should be required reading for anyone who claims to know “what the Bible says.”
The 2005 bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, was not written by a raving atheist. Rather, it was written by a fellow who had a born-again experience in high school, then went on to attend the ultraconservative Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Bart Ehrman didn’t stop there, however. He wanted to become an evangelical voice with credentials that would enable him to teach in secular settings. It was for this reason that he continued his education at Wheaton and, eventually, Princeton, picking up the ability to read the New Testament in its original Greek in the process.
As a result of his disciplined study, Ehrman increasingly questioned the fundamentalist approach that the “Bible is the inerrant Word of God. It contains no mistakes.” Through his studies, Ehrman determined that the Bible was not free of mistakes:
We have only error ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.
(Page 7). At Princeton, Ehrman learned that mistakes had been made in the copying of the New Testament over the centuries. Upon realizing this, …