On dealing with the lack of hell

I sometimes listen to AM religious talk radio because I'm amazed at the sorts of the things I hear. Today, while listening into local St. Louis 24/7 "TruthTalk" Christian radio station KJ SL in my car, I heard a bit of contentious discussion between a radio host and a caller. I believe that the host of the radio show was Bob Dutko. Dutko has long held the position that "Jesus really is the only way and He really did rise from the dead, physically and historically." When I first tuned in, the caller was talking, saying something much like this: I believe that the spirit of God resides in every person, and that people can live good and meaningful lives without belonging to any church. I believe that God will reward them based upon the good things that they do, and based upon how they treat others, regardless of whether or not they follow any religion. Good-hearted people who do not believe in Jesus or follow a religion will not go to hell. The host told the caller that his "new age" religious outlook was hopelessly naïve, and that he needed to read the Bible, whereupon he would see that there is only one way to avoid hell is by accepting Jesus Christ as Savior. [More . . . ]

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On celebrating the death of Osama Bin Laden

In the New York Times, Jonathan Haidt has invoked group selection theory to explain why so many people outwardly celebrated the death of Osama Bin Laden.  To understand why the reaction was natural and predictable rather than primal and boorish, Haidt pointed out that we are more than "selfish creatures, able to act altruistically only when it will benefit our kin or our future selves." We often do function like this, but we, unique among primates (and akin to bees and ants) simultaneously function intensely at a second higher level.

This [higher level] competition favors groups that can best come together and act as one. Only a few species have found a way to do this. Bees, ants and termites are the best examples. Their brains and bodies are specialized for working as a team to accomplish nearly miraculous feats of cooperation like hive construction and group defense. Early humans found ways to come together as well, but for us unity is a fragile and temporary state. We have all the old selfish programming of other primates, but we also have a more recent overlay that makes us able to become, briefly, hive creatures like bees.
As Emile Durkheim pointed out, humans don't merely act on narrowly focused selfishness; rather, they are subject to emotions that "dissolve the petty, small-minded self. They make people feel that they are a part of something larger and more important than themselves." Human beings can be knitted together through a benign "collective effervescence" that goes by the name of "patriotism," which Haidt distinguishes from "nationalism,"
[T]he view that one’s own country is superior to other countries and should therefore be dominant. Nationalism is generally found to be correlated with racism and with hostility toward other countries, but patriotism by itself is not."

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Is religion an evolutionary adaptation or a byproduct?

I just finished reading "The Adaptationist-Byproduct Debate on the Evolution of Religion: Five Misunderstandings of the Adaptationist Program." The article was written by Richard Sosis, a professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut, and it was published by the Journal of Cognition and Culture 9 (2009) 315-332. This article will mostly consist of a summary of Sosis' article (I am putting page numbers from the Sosis' article next to various parts of my summary). Sosis is convinced that the often contentious debate as to whether religion is an adaptation or a byproduct, and the premature declaration that it is a byproduct, is hampering serious interdisciplinary efforts to scientifically study religion. He holds that these disagreements stem largely from disagreements as to the meanings of "core ideas upon which the evolutionary study of religion is founded." Nonetheless, he is hopeful that these debates can be largely resolved after we take the time to clarify these core ideas. Many people will probably not take the time to read Sosis' fine article because they will presume religion could not possibly be an adaptation because the practices and beliefs of many people strike them as bizarre (I also find many such practices and beliefs bizarre). Richard Dawkins and many other prominent writers have taken this position that religion is not an adaptation; rather, they find it to be an annoying and sometimes dangerous byproduct of evolution (I've written about this byproduct position here and here). In fact, this byproduct position is the dominant position among scientists studying religion from an evolutionary perspective. [More . . . ]

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The strangeness of humans

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered:

Man.... Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.

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