Is this new Pope actually Catholic? Bill Moyers discusses Pope Francis with Thomas Cahill

This is a delightful conversation, in which author Thomas Cahill offers excellent insights into Pope Francis. Cahill's view on Christianity meshes well with the teachings by Pope Francis. Here is how Cahill would describe the important part of Christianity:

I've come to the conclusion that they are really only two movements in the world. One is kindness, and the other is cruelty. I don't think there's anything else, really. You can explain virtually everything by those two movements. The cruelty in religion is so often a form of, "Under no circumstances may you do this, because if you do, we will exclude you. That's not how Jesus spoke. Jesus is the one who, you know, lifted the weeping prostitute off the floor and said, "Your sins are forgiven you." He had no problem with sexual deviancy of any kind. It's we who have that problem. And it's a problem for institutionalized religion as it is for institutionalized anything. The institutions will tend to exclude. ... I'm a believing Christian who finds himself equally at home and equally impatient and equally ill-at-ease in virtually any church. BILL MOYERS: Why is that? THOMAS CAHILL: I just don't think that it matters that much. I think that we've, you know, in the 16th and 17th centuries, we killed one another over doctrine. It was after this period that you finally had in the period of the enlightenment, people saying, "Do we really have to keep doing this? Do we really have to keep-- is it really necessary to kill one another? Couldn't we just agree to disagree?" And then you have the beginning of a new era. And it's time that we got past the largely silly divisions, theological divisions, which really don't count. Because people don't care about those things anymore. BILL MOYERS: What do you think they care about? Or what do you care about? THOMAS CAHILL: "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." That's Christianity. The rest of it, isn't worth a hill of beans.

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How to interpret scientific claims – 20 tips

How should one interpret scientific claims? Here are the headings to an excellent article featured in Nature: Differences and chance cause variation. No measurement is exact. Bias is rife. Bigger is usually better for sample size. Correlation does not imply causation. Regression to the mean can mislead. Extrapolating beyond the data is risky. Beware the base-rate fallacy. Controls are important. Randomization avoids bias. Seek replication, not pseudoreplication. Scientists are human. Significance is significant. Separate no effect from non-significance. Effect size matters. Study relevance limits generalizations. Feelings influence risk perception. Dependencies change the risks. Data can be dredged or cherry picked. Extreme measurements may mislead.

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Robert Sapolsky discusses the alleged uniqueness of humans

Excellent lecture by Robert Sapolsky. Scientists used to think that humans were unique in many ways when compared to other animals. The number of ways in which we are truly unique is dwindling, however, and that dwindling number is the focus of Sapolsky's talk. There is at least one way in which we are unique, and that is our ability to entertain a contradiction. Sapolsky, speaking to a graduating class, challenges them to take on this contradiction: They are highly educated and thus privileged human animals who are educated to such an extent that they realize that it is virtually impossible for one person to make a difference in the world. The more clear this becomes that it is impossible to make the world better, "the more you must."

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