When students are introduced to the great philosophical works of the early modern period, it is usually in the hope that they will engage with the thoughts and arguments that the texts present. The teaching experience of many of us suggests that most students simply cannot understand these texts. The increasing rate of change in the English language ensures that fewer and fewer of today's readers can cope with the writings of the 16th-18th centuries. There are difficulties of syntax, length and complexity of sentences, words that are no longer current, still-familiar words used in meanings that they now do not have, arcane references to other philosophers which today's students will seldom understand or be required to follow up; these and other factors create forbidding obstacles to engaging with these early modern texts. I reduce the obstacles so that students can more easily come to grips with the philosophical thoughts the texts express. Once they do that, they still won't have an easy time, because the material itself is hard; but their efforts will go into getting philosophical understanding, not decoding old prose.
My versions are faithful to the content of the originals, but are plainer and
more straightforward in manner. I could have made them even plainer, but that
would have taken them further than I wanted to go from the stylistic feel of the
originals. I love the original texts, and am glad to have spent years wrestling
with them in their pristine form. I do wish, though, that through the years I
could also have read them sometimes with all my energy going into
the philosophy.
Some naturalists are trying to get rid of our evolved abilities of religiosity by quoting biology. But from an evolutionary as well as philosophic perspective, it may seem rather odd to try to defeat nature with naturalistic arguments.
Provocative? Certainly. But if you happen to be an atheist, don't congratulate yourself on your clearheadedness just yet. What Schjoedt's experiment really shows is how our expectations about others' charisma (or authority, or just-plain-specialness) can modulate the brain's ability to process and judge incoming information. And we're all subject to those expectations, even if we don't all apply them to faith-healing Christians. Schjoedt has this to say:
If our interpretation of the results is correct, our study may be indicative of a general effect of stereotype interaction. Doctors, judges, teachers, officers, etc., who are recognized as having special competencies, may all benefit (or suffer) from 'stereotype' effects, and this neural mechanism may play a central role in the general dynamics of social authority and obedience as observed in the early behavioural studies by Stanley Milgram...
However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution....
"The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it's because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they've seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.by Ryan Moore
Daily Texan Staff
Friday, August 7, 2009
Once upon a time, four blind men were walking in the forest, and they bumped into an elephant...
Two-thirds of U.S. adults today perceive that the influence of religion in American life is waning, while just 27% believe it is rising. This represents a sharp decline in the image of religion compared with only three years ago, when 50% thought its influence was on an upswing, and marks one of the weakest readings on the influence of religion in Gallup's five-decade history of asking the question.
Justin Barrett, a Christian and member of the centre's research team (whether it is research or propaganda is the moot question here) says with his colleagues on the centre's website:
Why is belief in supernatural beings so common? Because of the design of human minds. Human minds, under normal developmental conditions, have a strong receptivity to belief in gods, in the afterlife, in moral absolutes, and in other ideas commonly associated with 'religion' ... In a real sense, religiousness is the natural state of affairs. Unbelief is relatively unusual and unnatural.
''A clergyman in charge of education for the country's leading scientific organisation - it's a Monty Python sketch," pronounced Britain's top atheist, Richard Dawkins, recently.
The problem was that Reiss, as well as being an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist, is a non-stipendiary priest in the Church of England. When he said recently that science teachers should answer questions about creationism if pupils asked them he was deemed to have been advocating the idea that British schools should teach the idea that the world was magicked up (complete with fossils and ancient geology) just 6,000 years ago - and then tell pupils to make their own minds up between that and the theory of evolution to which the overwhelming scientific evidence points.
For 1,500 years, the Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery, until it was found - or stolen, as the monks say - in 1844 and split between Egypt, Russia, Germany and Britain.
Now these different parts are to be united online and, from next July, anyone, anywhere in the world with internet access will be able to view the complete text and read a translation...A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash by Amy Harmon -NYTimes
ORANGE PARK, Fla. -- David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote "Evolution" in the rectangle of light on the screen.
He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.
"If I do this wrong," Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, "I'll lose him."
Finding Morals Under Empty Heavens
By Christopher Hitchens -science-spirit.org
...We can all think of right actions performed by people who claim to be actuated by faith (just as we can all think of vile and cruel things done for the announced self-same motive). If I take my own case, I am not overwhelmed by the number of selfless or good things that I have done. But, when I can reflect on them, I have little difficulty explaining my motive. I do not hope for a heavenly reward and I am not afraid of divine punishment (and do not regard either of those inducements as moral). But I do hope to gain satisfaction for myself, and I do hope to benefit from others who are willing to do the same. My favorite example is donating blood, which I do not do with sufficient regularity. But I positively enjoy doing it. I do not lose a pint, but someone else gains one. And, when I too need blood one day (and I have a very rare blood group), I can be fairly sure that someone will have anonymously done the same for me. This is not strenuous, but not without its beauty and symmetry.
Daniel Dennett's Darwinian Mind: An Interview with a 'Dangerous' Man by Chris Floyd -science-spirit.org
The outspoken philosopher of science distills his rigorous conceptions of consciousness, and aims withering fire at the dialogue between science and religion.
In matters of the mind--the exploration of consciousness, its correlation with the body, its evolutionary foundations, and the possibilities of its creation through computer technology--few voices today speak as boldly as that of philosopher Daniel Dennett. His best-selling works--among them Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea--have provoked fierce debates with their rigorous arguments, eloquent polemic and witty, no-holds-barred approach to intellectual combat. He is often ranked alongside Richard Dawkins as one of the most powerful--and, in some circles, feared--proponents of thorough-going Darwinism.
Optimism in Evolution
By Olivia Judson -NY Times
When the dog days of summer come to an end, one thing we can be sure of is that the school year that follows will see more fights over the teaching of evolution and whether intelligent design, or even Biblical accounts of creation, have a place in America's science classrooms.
In these arguments, evolution is treated as an abstract subject that deals with the age of the earth or how fish first flopped onto land. It's discussed as though it were an optional, quaint and largely irrelevant part of biology. And a common consequence of the arguments is that evolution gets dropped from the curriculum entirely.
Why Islam Is Unfunny for a Cartoonist -By Andrew Higgins - WSJ.com
The arrest of a controversial Dutch cartoonist has set off a wave of protests. The case is raising questions for a changing Europe about free speech, religion and art.
On a sunny May morning, six plainclothes police officers, two uniformed policemen and a trio of functionaries from the state prosecutor's office closed in on a small apartment in Amsterdam. Their quarry: a skinny Dutch cartoonist with a rude sense of humor. Informed that he was suspected of sketching offensive drawings of Muslims and other minorities, the Dutchman surrendered without a struggle.
Religions thrived to protect against disease - Telegraph
Prof Richard Dawkins the atheist and sceptic, has condemned religion as a "virus of the mind" but it seems that people became religious for good reason - actually to avoid infection by viruses and other diseases - according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences.
Losing Sight of Progress
How blind salamanders make nonsense of creationists' claims.
-By Christopher Hitchens -Slate Magazine
It is extremely seldom that one has the opportunity to think a new thought about a familiar subject, let alone an original thought on a contested subject, so when I had a moment of eureka a few nights ago, my very first instinct was to distrust my very first instinct...
Professor Antony Flew reviews The God Delusion
Antony Flew -bethinking.org
On 1st November 2007, Professor Antony Flew's new book There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind was published by HarperOne. Professor Flew has been called 'the world's most influential philosophical atheist', as well as 'one of the most renowned atheists of the 20th Century' (see Peter S. Williams' bethinking.org article "A change of mind for Antony Flew"). In his book, Professor Flew recounts how he has come to believe in a Creator God as a result of the scientific evidence and philosophical argument.
More words from Flew, and Dawkins' response (2-8-08):
Richard Dawkins branded 'secularist bigot' by veteran philosopher
By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent -Telegraph.co.uk
The prominent scientist Richard Dawkins has been denounced as a "secularist bigot" by a philosopher who was himself once renowned for being an atheist.
He is accused by Prof Antony Flew of being more interested in promoting his personal views than finding the truth, in the latest controversy over his best-selling book The God Delusion.
Prof Dawkins, professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, is also said to have "scandalously" selected particular quotes from Einstein to back up his claims that God does not exist and that people who believe in a divine creator despite an abundance of contradictory evidence are delusional.
Bisexual Species: Unorthodox Sex in the Animal Kingdom: Scientific American
Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male.
Robert Gramzay, a keeper at the zoo, watched the chinstrap penguin pair roll a rock into their nest and sit on it, according to newspaper reports. Gramzay found an egg from another pair of penguins that was having difficulty hatching it and slipped it into Roy and Silo's nest. Roy and Silo took turns warming the egg with their blubbery underbellies until, after 34 days, a female chick pecked her way into the world. Roy and Silo kept the gray, fuzzy chick warm and regurgitated food into her tiny black beak.
Like most animal species, penguins tend to pair with the opposite sex, for the obvious reason. But researchers are finding that same-sex couplings are surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Roy and Silo belong to one of as many as 1,500 species of wild and captive animals that have been observed engaging in homosexual activity. Researchers have seen such same-sex goings-on in both male and female, old and young, and social and solitary creatures and on branches of the evolutionary tree ranging from insects to mammals.
Origin of the Novel Species Noodleous doubleous: Evidence for Intelligent Design
Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.
Frederick, MD
Abstract
Penne Rigate will spontaneously insert itself into Rigatoni (order pasta) under liquid to gas transition conditions of H2O to create the previously unobserved species Noodleous doubleous. The estimated probability of this spontaneous generation event is too low to be explained by thermodynamics and therefore apparently represents intelligent design.
We the People of Faith -By Howard Fineman
You wouldn't think religion would matter much in this presidential election. There would seem to be so many more pressing issues: oppressive gasoline and food prices; a president widely regarded as a failure; a foreign policy that has us adrift in the world and mired in an unpopular war. Why would faith be an issue?
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Strong words, of course, but hardly unprecedented in our history. Whatever Thomas Jefferson's beliefs, they weren't traditional enough to satisfy his Federalist critics. In the tumultuous election of 1800, he was branded an atheist or worse, and one Federalist newspaper asked the question: Did its readers want "GOD--AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT; OR JEFFERSON--AND NO GOD!!"
We got Jefferson, and we still have God.
Ever wonder where your donations go when you give to charity by mail or over the phone? On average, commercial fundraisers deliver just 46 cents of each donated dollar to the charity. Some charities enjoy much better success, but in other cases ineffective fundraisers can take all the money that's raised.
To see how your favorite charities or causes did from 1997-2006, search our database. You can look up individual causes like St. Jude's Hospital and The Heritage Foundation, browse by charity types like animal welfare and disaster relief, or just page through the whole list.
Atheists Are Distrusted | American Sociological Association
From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in "sharing their vision of American society." Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.
Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. "Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years," says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study's lead researcher.
Stop distorting young minds! Faith organisations shouldn't run our schools
By AC Grayling -guardian.co.uk
Anousics, people with a worrying range of beliefs and practices, are indoctrinating our children with the full support of the government
Everything you are about to read is true. Without any public consultation or debate, without once having made this a manifesto pledge, without ever having invited independent or critical opinion to scrutinise the implications, the British government is handing over large tracts of the school education system, along with tens of millions of our tax money, to groups of Anousics.
