I have already read about 15 of these short essays published by Edge. It's hard to stop, because the answers are especially thoughtful and well-articulated. Daniel Dennett's response is representative of the quality of these responses. Here is an excerpt from Dennett's response, entitled: "The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique…
This age. Bizarre. Part of the bizarreness rests in how much we actually know about it. We swim in a deepening sea of information. How to cope? We compartmentalize. So, though, do those providing us the information, and therein lies another problem, which is a question of integration. Recently at…
We’re right in the middle of massively expensive Christmas displays. No, not just the light displays. I’m referring to the numerous expenditures of time, energy and money that, because they are expensive, serve as reliable messages to others that we are interested in bonding with them . . . or not. Christmas is as good a time as any to let the truth hang out.
These displays take many forms. To whom do we send Christmas cards (and from whom do we receive them?)? To whose parties will we be invited? Who are those select people with whom we will end up exchaning gifts? It doesn’t matter if we don’t really enjoy cards, parties and gifts. It doesn’t really matter whether we believe in virgin birth. It doesn’t matter whether there were three kings or whether there was an especially bright star. As with oh-so-many things, Christmas is really about relationships. At bottom, Christmas is about rubbing elbows and bonding, no matter what the conventional wisdom.
The conventional wisdom says that Christmas is about a particular set of alleged historical truths. We need to keep in mind, though, that there are many cultures that give no credibility to the Jesus story who engage in similar gatherings and similar gift exchanges based on their own lore, much of if as unlikely as the story of a virgin giving birth to a God. They have their own gift exchanges and parties and songs and decorations framed by lore that makes no …
I can’t reveal how I obtained a copy of the dramatic memo re-printed below. It is important reading for anyone who might someday die. It is a rare candid glimpse into the mind of the Creator of the Universe.
To: Heaven Admission Screeners
From: God
Date: December 23, 2006
Re: Criteria for Admittance to Heaven
As you all learned in your basic training, our screening program is simple. After a person dies, he or she is brought to one of the numerous screening stations at the Pearly Gates (it’s a lot like airport customs down on Earth). Each applicant is asked to succinctly describe what he or she has accomplished on earth that would justify admission into heaven. We’ve heard lots of flimsy excuses over the eons, many of them falling into predicable categories. I wrote this “refresher memo” to point out many of these commonly heard (deficient) accomplishments and to give you a few other pointers to assist you in your screening duties.
First of all, keep the focus on the bottom line: exclude from heaven all of those people who haven’t shown any significant accomplishments while they lived on earth. Remember, our task is to give fair, expedient and professional resolutions of whether the applicant deserves admission to heaven. Your job is not to chit-chat with the applicants, much less counsel those who you’ve just turned down. Tell them that the rules are the rules, then loudly and resolutely state, “Next!”
Many applicants base their application primarily on …
In my quest to better understand basic principles of group behavior, I reviewed Intergroup Relations, by Maryland B. Brewer and Norman Miller (1996) [this work appears to be out of print]. The stated focus this book is to better understand “the causes and consequences of the distinctions between ingroups (those groups to which an individual belongs) and outgroups (social groups that do not include the individual as a member). At the outset, the authors note “the apparently universal propensity to differentiate the social world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’” (Page xiii).
It was my suspicion that basic principles of social psychology would give me a deeper context for understanding many modern conflicts. I was not disappointed. By the way, these same principles appear in all basic social psychology books. Nothing I mention here is tentative or controversial among social scientists.
According to Sherif (1966) “whenever individuals belonging to one group interact, collectively or individually, with another group or its members in terms of their group identification, we have an instance of Intergroup behavior.” (Page 2) Such social categories “tend to be less rational than other categorizations in that the beliefs we hold about social groupings often do not rest on firm evidence of actual Intergroup differences.” (Page 6) Once we establish categories, “we are biased toward information that enhances the differences between categories and less attentive to information about similarities between members of different categories.” (Page 7).
We live in a pluralistic society. Therefore, individuals are simultaneously members in multiple …