Bill Maher video on evolution: no need to teach “both sides”
This zany bit really hits the mark. It's short (about 4 minutes). Enjoy!
Dozens More Soldiers are Killed in Iraq. Headlines: “We Don’t Care.”
Remember all of the 2002 beltway sniper killings committed by John Muhammad and Lee Malvo? Each one of those deaths garnered loads of front page media attention. That is because human life was sacred and because every preventable death needed to be publicized to prevent further deaths. I remember the…
Where is the consistency in Republican positions?
In a past post, Grumpypilgrim asked : “Why do the two parties divide the issues the way they do, and who decided that the issues should be divided the way they are?”
I’ve often wondered that too. After all, you would think that the “pro life” Republicans would also be against capital punishment. You might think that a “conservative” Republican would be in favor of conservation, not squandering, of either the treasury or the environment. You would think that those supporting smaller, weaker starve-the-beast government would resist laws that harass gays. Asked in another way (regarding Democrats), what do gun control, generous welfare benefits, pro-union and pro-choice positions have in common?
George Lakoff asked these questions too. Writing of conservatives, he wondered:
. . . What does being against gun control have to do with being for tort reform? What makes sense of the linkage? I could not figure it out. I said to myself, These are strange people. Their collection of positions makes no sense. But then an embarrassing thought occurred to me. I have exactly the opposite positon on every issue. What do my positions have to do with one another?
(p. 5) Lakoff proposed a solution to these questions in his bestseller Don’t think of an elephant!: Know your values and frame the debate (2004). He concluded that our two different ways of understanding the nation come from two different understandings of family.
The conservatives model government off of a “strict father” model, where the government’s …
Six Flags over Jesus
After reading this account by someone who attended a so-called "mega-church," I was struck by the many parallels between the methods used by that church and the methods used by Hitler. Slick propaganda, belittling and scapegoating of outsiders, blending religion with nationalism, using fear to manipulate emotions, praising self-interest, etc.,…
Give us this day our daily endorphins
Why do people engage in religious rituals?
In keeping with suggestion of ethologist Niko Tinbergen, this question is actually four separate “why” questions. Rather than dealing with the first three Why questions (Phylogeny, Ontogeny or Function), I’d like to consider only the fourth Why, Proximate Cause, with regard to the practice of engaging in religious rituals. In other words, this post will consider the bodily machinery that leads people to attend religious rituals: the immediate payoff to the human animal.
Many believers would answer this question by introspecting. Believers have often told me that they go to church because they “experience God.” [How strange that God doesn’t so often hang out in the home, at cocktail parties or in Las Vegas!]. Many believers thus think that you can simply think about thinking to figure out why they do things. Numerous and repeated experiments have proven introspection to be woefully unreliable, however.
For instance, in 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson published “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” [Psychological Review 84, pp. 231-259.] They allowed female subjects to examine and select stockings. The subjects offered lots of reasons for why they selected the stockings they selected (they spoke of such things as texture and sheerness). Unbeknown to them, the stockings were identical. This and numerous additional experiments robustly demonstrate that people, though they always gave reasons for their choices, are often mistaken. “Inner workings of important aspects of the mind, including our own …