nlightnmnt

Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people’s decisions up to 10 seconds before they’re aware they’ve made a choice.

There is to be no science debate. The candidates will instead talk about the importance their religious faith has in their lives.

I hope it goes without saying that evolutionary theory is not a “theory” in the colloquial sense of “hypothesis” or “conjecture”. Rather, it’s a well-corroborated system of theoretical knowledge - so well-corroborated, in fact, that its basic picture of the development of life over hundreds of millions of years is as indubitable as the heliocentric picture of the Solar System. The entirety of modern biological science is thoroughly permeated by evolutionary theory and would collapse without it.

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.

The ethics of meat-eating. For us, the energy and environmental costs of meat-eating are of most concern, although the animal welfare issue is not to be ignored.

European action to avoid a dysfunctional global condition requires an unprecedented commitment to prevent climate change and ameliorate those effects that cannot now be avoided, especially in poorer countries.

Here the focus will be on why tolerance is often downplayed in favour of respect. Tolerance is in fact much more important and can go along with lack of respect, and even disrespect.

Perhaps I should add that when I got to Harvard Divinity School in the 1970s I was told by the reigning professor of theology, who out of deference will remain anonymous, that my way of speaking about God was too literal—almost as though I “believed the metaphor was a real thing.”

A journey into the light.

Talking to course members at the end of the seminar organised by the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican department in charge of fixing the punishments and indulgences handed down to sinners, Pope Benedict added his own personal voice of disquiet.

“We are losing the notion of sin,” he said. “If people do not confess regularly, they risk slowing their spiritual rhythm,” he added. The Pope confesses his sins regularly once a week.

Fewer people are living in fear. This is clearly bad for religion and therefore something must be done about it.

In India, the recent increase in affluence is matched by a corresponding increase in religious belief within the burgeoning middle class - despite these beliefs standing in direct contradiction to the very source of this new-found affluence.

Why?

Although many rationalists have taken the increase in nonbelievers as an unmitigated good, notice that three quarters of the non-religious in the table haven’t thought their beliefs through any more than most religious people have.

15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America’s highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards

 And yet we don’t hear many complaints about this from those who continually criticize affirmative action programs as being unfair.

I wonder why not?

The shameful hoarding of wealth by a handful of universities mirrors what is happening in general throughout the United States.