We’ve had a horrible tragedy back here in the United States. Thirty-three students are dead at Virginia Tech, with many others wounded. Our papers are going to spill a lot of ink on this story, as they should. But on the other side of the world, multitudes of innocent civilians…
At this site we have often debated the extent to which non-Believers are harmed by the beliefs of religious moderates. The main idea is that moderates are serving as human shields for whacked-out literalist fundamentalists. Society would be hammering fundamentalists with enough widespread ridicule to make them political untouchables, except that religious moderates continue clinging to “lite” versions of fundamentalist beliefs.
This concern has been well-articulated by Sam Harris:
Religious moderates are giving cover to fundamentalists because of the respect that moderates demand of faith-based talk. Religious moderation doesn’t allow us to say the really critical things we must say about the abject stupidity of religious fundamentalism.
This issue raises a serious question: Should non-Believers actively challenge the ubiquitous “mild,” religious pronouncements made by religious moderates? Until recently, I usually remained silent when my kind and decent relatives, acquaintances and neighbors, uttered things like this:
Assertions like this don’t imminently threaten me. The religious moderates who utter such things are not power-mongerers who dream of taking the reins of government to impose literalist versions of their sacred literature on people like me. These assertions certainly don’t pack the poisonous wallop of the commonly uttered fundamentalist accusations that non-Believers like me are morally unfit to participate in society. Rather, statements of faith uttered by religious moderates are usually …
I wrote a paper for one of my Master’s classes a couple of weeks ago, integrating what I’d absorbed from two textbooks into pages of my actual life. Shortly after I got it back from my professor, a friend and I were discussing this very blog, which led to a discussion of philosophizing in general. He lamented how lately, he’s seen an awfully lot of writing overwrought with words at the expense of actual ideas. This guy is an intellectual himself, a prolific writer and thinker, so his comment gave me pause.
As I’ve read for this particular graduate Communication class, I’ve worried more than once that some in my degree program seem to overstate the obvious. I love taking a fragment of seemingly mundane human interaction, analyzing its details and its place in our lives to parse from it a deeper understanding of our connectedness, yet I can’t shake the underlying fear that many would meet our research with a big, “So what?”
I thought I’d share some thoughts from this particular paper here, and ask for the feedback of the ‘blog’s readership. Based on responses I’ve received to previous pieces and the responses I’ve read here to the writing of others, I believe this audience falls toward the thinking end of the spectrum. There. I’ve laid out a blanket compliment. Be nice when you pick me apart, then, please??
Here goes:
Drama unfolds around us continually, though the mundane events of daily life often blur into methodical sameness …
I often jump at the chance to report on new well-written articles regarding happiness, especially when they are based upon science rather than mere anecdotes.
Last year, I started a subscription to Scientific American Mind It’s a well-written magazine that addresses lively and timely topics. Be February-March 2007 issue contains an article entitled “Why It’s so Hard to Be Happy.”
Why is it so hard? After all (as the article points out), the buying power of average Americans has tripled since 1950, though we are not three times happier. In fact, our children are more anxious. Is happiness about achieving goals, for instance? Apparently not. The growing field of “positive psychology” shows that happiness
Is not something that can be achieved by hard work or good luck. The happiest people seem to be those who are fully engaged in the present, rather than focused on future goals.
Evolutionary psychology suggests that humans have inherited “a remarkable capacity to habituate to, or become accustomed to, the status quo.” While this is great when we are facing adverse conditions, it causes ongoing pleasant experiences to fade in the consciousness. In fact, we seem to be especially well-tuned to notice dangers much more than pleasures. “The natural human condition is to take positive experiences for granted and to focus on the bothersome aspects of life.” The article suggests that humans who were never satisfied had an survival advantage over their easily-satisfied peers.
A twin study from 1996 indicates that 80% of the variation …
Jonathan Chait of Common Dreams raises a good question: why do Republicans disagree with climate scientists more at a time when climate scientists are accruing new terrifying evidence that human activities are truly responsible for warming the atmosphere?
Last year, the National Journal asked a group of Republican senators and House members: “Do you think it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?” Of the respondents, 23% said yes, 77% said no . . . So, the magazine asked the question again last month. The results? Only 13% of Republicans agreed that global warming has been proved.
As the evidence for global warming gets stronger, Republicans are actually getting more skeptical. . . . How did it get this way? The easy answer is that Republicans are just tools of the energy industry. It’s certainly true that many of them are. . . But the financial relationship doesn’t quite explain the entirety of GOP skepticism on global warming. For one thing, the energy industry has dramatically softened its opposition to global warming over the last year, even as Republicans have stiffened theirs.
The truth is more complicated — and more depressing: A small number of hard-core ideologues (some, but not all, industry shills) have led the thinking for the whole conservative movement . . .Conservatives defer to a tiny handful of renegade scientists who reject the overwhelming professional consensus.
In other words, the thinking process of most Republicans is worse than …