Born believers: How your brain creates God From New Scientist magazine 04 February 2009 by Michael Brooks Read our related editorial:The credit crunch could be a boon for irrational belief. WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works. That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. So how does the brain conjure up gods?
Religious Diversity Around The World Several years ago, the Pew Research Center produced estimates of the religious makeup of more than 200 countries and territories, which it published in the 2012 report “The Global Religious Landscape.” The effort was part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world. As part of the next phase of this project, Pew Research has produced an index that ranks each country by its level of religious diversity. Comparing religious diversity across countries presents many challenges, starting with the definition of diversity. Social scientists have conceived of diversity in a variety of ways, including the degree to which a society is split into distinct groups; minority group size (in share and/or absolute number); minority group influence (the degree to which multiple groups are visible and influential in civil society); and group dominance (the degree to which one or more groups dominate society).
Geographic Distribution of Religious Centers in the U.S. These maps were generated from the listings in the Pluralism Project's Directory of Religious Centers and reflect the distributions as of August 2006. Click on the thumbnail to view a printable, full-size map in a new window. Interfaith: 604 Centers Jainism: 94 Centers Sikhism: 244 Centers Hinduism: 714 Centers Buddhism: 2150 Centers Islam: 1583 Centers The World Without Forms – GODS & RADICALS I said to a friend, we see the darkness, and some go in. It is the Abyss. We have to find out what is there, to find out if there is meaning. And we see only the abyss. And some go mad. And some never return. Terror often greets the far-off glances on the faces of those who return from the Abyss. Like the ones who ‘walk away from Omelas,’ they did not know to where they were going, only somewhere not-here, not the streets full of opulent wealth and the joyous cries of liberation made possible by a founding horror. It is their own fire, and it is a fire others are right to fear. I am what some might call an Egoist. It is generally easier to list what I reject (for those of you checking-off boxes on mental clipboards) than it is to begin the litany of what I embrace. I will tell you what I do not like. Here, though, I should remind you: “Fascism” means nothing at all. Max Stirner called these ideas ‘spooks.’ Consider the World Trade Center attacks in 2001 in the United States. Like this:
Ogdoad In Egyptian mythology, the Ogdoad (Greek "ογδοάς", the eightfold) were eight deities worshipped in Hermopolis during what is called the Old Kingdom, the third through sixth dynasties, dated between 2686 to 2134 BC. In Egyptian mythology[edit] Together the four concepts represent the primal, fundamental state of the beginning. They are what always was. In the myth, however, their interaction ultimately proved to be unbalanced, resulting in the arising of a new entity. The entity containing Ra is depicted either as an egg or as a lotus bud. In the former version, a mound arises from the waters. In Gnosticism[edit] The number eight plays an important part in Gnostic systems, and it is necessary to distinguish the different forms in which it appeared at different stages in the development of Gnosticism. In the system of Valentinus, the seven heavens, and even the region above them, were regarded as but the lowest and last stage of the exercise of creative power. 7 + 1[edit] Seven heavens[edit]
Church of the SubGenius Jehovah 1, the primary deity of the Church of the SubGenius The Church of the SubGenius is an American parody and UFO religion that targets established faiths. It teaches a complex belief system that focuses on J. Ivan Stang, who co-founded the Church of the SubGenius in the 1970s, serves as its high profile leader and publicist. Origins[edit] The Church of the SubGenius was founded by Ivan Stang (born Douglas St Clair Smith) and Philo Drummond (born Steve Wilcox) as the SubGenius Foundation. Church leaders maintain that a man named J. Beliefs[edit] Deities[edit] The Church of the SubGenius' ostensible beliefs defy categorization or a simple narrative, often striking outside observers as bizarre and convoluted. Dobbs[edit] SubGenius leaders teach that Dobbs' nature is ineffable and consequently stylize his name with quotation marks. In the Church's mythology, Jehovah 1 had intended for Dobbs to lead a powerful conspiracy and brainwash individuals to make them work for a living. R.
The strange star that has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure A long exposure image showing an airplane passing in the sky during the Perseids meteor shower over the remains of a centuries old Christian basilica near the town of Pirdop, Bulgaria, early on Aug. 12. (Nikolay Doychinov/AFP/Getty Images) “It was kind of unbelievable that it was real data,” said Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. She was talking to the New Scientist about KIC 8462852, a distant star with a very unusual flickering habit. Boyajian wrote up a paper on possible explanations for the star’s bizarre behavior, and it was published recently in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. To Wright, it looked like the kind of star he and his colleagues had been waiting for. Aliens. Or, to be more specific, something built by aliens — a “swarm of megastructures,” as he told the Atlantic, likely outfitted with solar panels to collect energy from the star. [No, we haven’t discovered alien megastructures around a distant star] It wasn’t the star’s fault either.
50 Atheist Quotes - Born Again Pagan 50 Atheist Quotes George Carlin 1. 2. 3. Frankie Boyle Why are we asked to pray after a disaster? Friedrich Nietzsche 4. 5. 6. Albert Einstein 7. 8. 9. Gandhi 10. 11. Mark Twain 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. Thomas Jefferson 17. 18. Benjamin Franklin 19. 20. Voltaire 21. 22. Stephen Hawking 23. 24. Jiddu Krishnamurti 25. 26. Christopher Hitchens 27. 28.If you gave Jerry Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox. Sigmund Freud 29. 29b. Karl Marx 30. MarxGeorge Bernard Shaw 31. Blaise Pascal 32. Richard Jeni 32. Steven Weinberg 34. Delos B. 35. Edward Gibbon 36. Robert Ingersoll 37. Huang Po 38. Benjamin Disraeli 39. Unknown 40. Dave Barry 41. Epicurus 42. Eric Hoffer 43. Bill Maher 44. 45. Baron D’Holbach 46. Bill Hicks 47. Isaac Asimov 48. José Bergamín 49. Arthur C. 50. Overtime quotes: Penn Gillette There is no god, and that’s the simple truth.
Planet Tozer Creative Review commissioned photographer Jason Tozer to shoot these pictures on behalf of Sony using its new Alpha 350 digital camera. They are, in fact, all common-or-garden soap bubbles, shot in-camera. We'll be revealing more on how Tozer obtained these stunning images later in the week. The full series is shown below and to see them at a larger size simply click on each image. Click here for more details on the new Sony Alpha D-SLR. For more of Tozer's work, see jasontozer.com Main Page - FreeThoughtPedia Evidence for God from Science Why Atheists Don't Really Exist Confirmation bias is the tendency to ascribe greater significance to information which supports our pre-existing theories and lesser significance to information which contradicts those theories. We often do this subconsciously. For example you get a new car, and suddenly you notice that type of car on the road with a much greater frequency than you had noticed before. But though confirmation bias generally refers to the inclusion or exclusion of data, there are other ways we can shoehorn the obvious to make it fit within our world view. Last month in The Atlantic, Matthew Hutson wrote a fascinating article titled: “The Science of Superstition: No One Is Immune to Magical Thinking.” Actually as an article it’s really not that fascinating, but as an illustration of the mental contortions one must make to defend atheism, it is Olympic. Skeptics call this patternicity, or projecting pattern where there is none. Fr. When C.S.
This Year’s Finest Conjunction: Venus and Jupiter Two brightest planets Venus and Jupiter come as close as a third of a degree apart as seen from North America. It will be easy to spot them in the western sky as no other celestial body will outshine the beautiful tandem when the sun and the moon are down. “To the eye they’ll look like a double star,” said Kelly Beatty, a senior editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. “Anyone who hasn’t glanced at the evening sky for a while will be surprised by how dramatically tight the pairing is.” The closest conjunction will happen on June 30th and July 1st, 2015. Star Walk is available worldwide on iOS, Android, Kindle and Windows Mobile.
The Improbability of God The Improbability of God by Richard Dawkins from Free Inquiry, Volume 18, Number 3. Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Why do people believe in God? So ran Paley's argument, and it is an argument that nearly all thoughtful and sensitive people discover for themselves at some stage in their childhood. What do all objects that look as if they must have had a designer have in common? This is not a circular argument, by the way. Of all the trillions of different ways of putting together the atoms of a telescope, only a minority would actually work in some useful way. We can safely conclude that living bodies are billions of times too complicated -- too statistically improbable -- to have come into being by sheer chance. For instance, it is theoretically possible for an eye to spring into being, in a single lucky step, from nothing: from bare skin, let's say. Eyes and wings cannot spring into existence in a single step. Return to Top