Social dominance
evolvingthoughts | May 13, 2009In keeping with the last post on humanities, I thought I'd ruminate with no effort or knowledge to back it up on what the term "secular" means.
If the fundamentalists are to be believed, it is a synonym of "humanist" and also "Satanist", "infidel" and "homosexual". But somewhat more seriously, I have seen it used in journals to mean those who are not religious, those who aim to the elimination of religion, and those who seek to exclude religion from the affairs of the political institutions. None of these are exactly right, as far as I can tell.
In Australia it seems to be a term used largely…
evolvingthoughts | May 8, 2009There was a paper recently in PNAS on "The cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief". A couple of bloggers, Epiphenom and I Am David, come to opposite conclusions. Epiphenom says that the study shows that religion is not a side-effect of the evolution of cognitive processes, while IAD says that is exactly what it shows.
The paper purports to show that when thinking about God or beliefs about God, the very same areas of the brain are used that are used in ordinary social interactions and so on:
The MDS results confirmed the validity of the proposed psychological structure of…
evolvingthoughts | March 11, 2009In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time…
evolvingthoughts | January 2, 2009I's an ego thing, sure, but it's also a handy way of seeing what one did this past year. Here are what I think of as the substantial posts of Evolving Thoughts from 2008. Sorry for the lateness - it's a longish list. I (and my guest blogger) have been real busy this year...
Religion and Creationism
Desecration, blasphemy in public, and manners
Why are there still monkeys?
Can a Christian accept natural selection as true?
Does religion evolve?
The heat of religion
The religious we have always with us
Agriculture and the rise of religion
The origins of agriculture now extended
Darwin, God and…
evolvingthoughts | October 24, 2008
Waits is one of the few people I admire almost without reservation, even including the industrial blues. A comment quoted on a passing web site was "We are monkeys with money and guns", leading me via Google to this wonderful interview at NPR a few months back. Read it.
I have cited his version of Somewhere as the best of all time, in a philosophy article.
evolvingthoughts | September 27, 2008
Some threat display has publicly occurred between two primates vying for the alpha male position of a large troop of feral, introduced, great apes in north America. It is examined here. Apparently one of the contenders failed to make eye contact, which is a dead giveaway of probable loss to the other male, or perhaps an inability to avoid giving the Primate Threat Stare without the ability to follow it up by exposing his canines. Clearly that monkey is less confident than the other one (yes, folks, all great apes are monkeys, or Old World Monkeys at any rate). When the fur and teeth are…
evolvingthoughts | August 22, 2008
In my Fun with Christians and worldviews piece, I made a passing comment:
Some views are just not amenable to a good life. I think Christianity is one, and not because I have some well-worked alternative I'd like to sell you, but because I can learn from the past and make inferences, and so can you.
Jim Goetz, who I find to be a balanced and sensible sort of Christian, asked in the comments for some backing to this apparently outrageous claim. It's a fair cop, so here is my argument...
As someone who does not believe in moral absolutes, and yet wants to ground moral claims in the real…
evolvingthoughts | July 11, 2008
When does a person's religious beliefs constrain someone who is not religious? What sorts of redress can a religious person expect in a secular society?
These questions arise from the recent to-do about PZ Myers defense of the stealing of a communion wafer from a Catholic church. As a result, he got death threats, attempts to have him fired from his university position, and general abuse while the correspondents were simultaneously affirming the niceness of Catholics [see here, here and here for example]. Meanwhile, the Catholic Cardinal of Sydney, George Pell, appears not to have learned…
evolvingthoughts | June 21, 2008
A conference is being held in Sydney soon about whether God is necessary for morality. I find that an almost incomprehensible question. Of course humans are moral without gods to back up their moral systems. They can't help it. It's what humans do. We are social apes that follow rules. Sometimes the sanctions for following rules (which turn out to be sanctions for potential defectors rather than the majority, who will tend to follow rules with or without promises of reward or punishment) rely on a god. Mostly, they don't. The famous Euthyphro Dilemma (whether something is good because God…
evolvingthoughts | June 9, 2008
Few things make me very angry: injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the weak, good science fiction series being canned by network executives, and people who think they can say whatever they like without regard for their audience. I find it disgusting that some people think it's okay to be aggressive, rude and swear blindly in front of children, for instance, which matches two of my aversions. So when a communal forum that I spend a lot of time in, and which includes many of my friends, turns into that sort of street scene, I want to leave it. Am I being an old fogey?
It's not…