Monthly Archive for February, 2011

Where Lies the Folly?

Published on February 28, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

By Thomas F. Farr, in The Immanent Frame

Two recent developments provide good reason to revisit a debate that took place in these pages last year concerning the U.S. policy of advancing international religious freedom (IRF).

The first is the emergence of mass protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, combined with an outbreak of severe persecution against Christian minorities in the region. The second is the Obama administration’s striking indifference to America’s statutory policy of advancing international religious freedom.

The subject of religious freedom, especially as an element of American foreign policy, has long been controversial. Not surprisingly, contributors to the Immanent Frame debate staked out varied positions.

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God and Gossip

Published on February 27, 2011 in News. 1 Comment

A Review by Damon Linker of The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life, in The Book

Who will save science from the scientists? I often ponder that question when I peruse the writings of evolutionary psychologists—and did so once again as I read Jesse Bering’s new book, which is at once marvelously informative and endlessly infuriating.

Bering wants to spread the word that belief in a personal God—along with concomitant ideas about the existence of purpose, providence, an afterlife, and a cosmic support for justice—is an “adaptive illusion.” His originality lies not in his confident insistence that such beliefs are groundless—a view that has been defended over and over again in recent years in a series of bestselling books—but rather in the first half of his claim; he contends that theological beliefs serve a crucial evolutionary function. The bulk of his book is devoted to establishing this point, drawing on a wide range of findings in the cognitive sciences to back it up.

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Einstein’s God

Published on February 25, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 1 Comment

By Michael Shermer, Big Questions Online

Albert Einstein famously opined, “God is cunning but He is not malicious.” And: “God does not play dice.” When asked his motivation for doing physics, Einstein replied: “I want to know how God created the world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.” In the final weeks of his life, when Einstein learned of the death of his old physicist friend Michele Besso, he wrote the Besso family: “He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.”

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Are You There God? It’s Me, Brain

Published on February 24, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 2 Comments

By Jesse Bering, in Slate

The following is an edited excerpt from The Belief Instinct, which will be published Feb. 7.

The scientific jury is still out on whether our species is unique among social mammals in being able to conceptualize mental states—other species, such as chimps, dogs, scrub jays and dolphins, may have some modest capacity in this regard. But there’s absolutely no question that we’re much better at it than the rest of the animal kingdom. We are natural psychologists, exquisitely attuned to the unseen psychological world. Reasoning about abstract mental states is as much a trademark of our species as walking upright on two legs, learning a language, and raising our offspring into their teens.

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Religion and Truth

Published on February 22, 2011 in News. 1 Comment

By Sean, in Discover

One thing that religions typically do — although certainly not the only one — is to make claims about how the world works. How important are those claims to what religion really is, and how we should think about it?

PZ Myers has posted a very interesting letter from Stephen Asma that talks about this issue. Asma earlier wrote a critique of New Atheism in the Chronicle of Higher Education, to which PZ responded, but I think the new letter is more interesting than the previous salvos. Russell Blackford has also chimed in.

This is a very healthy discussion to be having — moving a bit beyond the caricatures of atheism by believers, and of religion by atheists. Much of what Asma says I find quite persuasive. The crux is something like this:

My argument is that religion helps people, rightly or wrongly, manage their emotional lives. And while it doesn’t do very much for me and other skeptics (I prefer art), I would be very inattentive if I failed to notice how much relief and comfort it gave to other people.

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2012 Religion Conference, Vancouver

Published on February 3, 2011 in Conference and Newsletter. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Location and Date

The 2012 Religion Conference will  be held in Vancouver, Canada at UBC’s Satellite in downtown Vancouver: Robson Square from 20-22 February. For more information, please visit www.Religion-Conference.com

Plenary Speakers

We are currently working on our plenary speaker line-up. Please visit our website for updates and further information.

Call for Papers

If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, please click here. To submit a proposal click here and follow the online instructions. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.

Registration

Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal.  Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2012 Religion Conference, click here.

Themes

The themes for the International Religion and Spirituality in Society Conference are loosely grouped into four categories:

More details on these themes can be seen online here. Please do note that these themes are meant to be rather broad so as to encompass a larger group of interests.

Scope and Concerns

The Religion Conference scope and concerns is outlined here.

Contact

Please feel free to contact us with any questions that you may have. We can be reached by email at support@religioninsociety.com or by phone at +1 (217) 328-0405.

A Niche for a Prophet

Published on February 3, 2011 in News. 1 Comment

By Eric Hobsbawm, in London Review of Books

The Jews of San Nicandro by John Davis
Yale, 238 pp, £20.00, November 2010, ISBN 978 0 300 11425 6

San Nicandro Garganico is a modest agrarian township of some 16,000 inhabitants on the edge of the spur of the boot-shaped Italian peninsula. It has been somewhat bypassed by Italy’s postwar development and has never been on the tourist circuit, or indeed had anything about it that might attract outsiders. The railway didn’t even reach it until 1931. To judge by the photo in the current Italian Wikipedia entry, it looks pretty much the same as it did in 1957, when I visited it, curious about the subject on which John Davis has now given us a first-rate, concise and attractively written book. San Nicandro has made only two entrances onto the historical stage. It was an early centre of Italian socialism and agrarian struggle in the grain-fields of northern Apulia, whose local political head, Domenico Fioritto, became its deputy and subsequently leader of the Italian Socialist Party. The former Communist Party (now the Democratic Party) continues to supply its mayor. The second appearance of the town in the wider world was less relevant to Italian politics, but globally more prominent, though the postwar headlines would soon be forgotten. It linked the town to a group of local peasants who decided in the 1930s to convert to Judaism and eventually emigrated to Israel. John Davis has not only rescued the ‘Jews of San Nicandro’ from more than a half-century of oblivion, but used them to illuminate 20th-century Europe’s extraordinary history.

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