Who Lies Sleeping?

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• Karl Kautsky on the Materialist Ethic of Darwinism 18 July, 2010
  The process of making the organic world adapt to Nature is the result of the struggle for existence in it. If the moral law is a social instinct brought out by the struggle for life, the supernatural world has lost an old buttress of support. […]
• Religion: a Spandrel of the Social Mind 8 July, 2010
  Religion is a side effect of natural mental processes, an evolutionary spandrel. Moral instincts support us as animals for which society is essential, not just an option. An instinct to attribute agency to anything suspicious or unusual helped us survive by being cautious. These contrived to give us religion, an explanation of phenomena we experience through […]
• Personal God: How Morality, Intentionality and Religion Evolved 24 April, 2010
  Updated: People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about God's beliefs. The God of the believers has just the same opinions as themselves! […]
• The Parousia: The Return of Jesus Christ 23 April, 2010
  New Comment: "I find it difficult not to call you an ignorant and a man that does not know God because you falsely accuse christians of being liars." The word Parousia means a theophany of God, not of some MacArthur saying he will return. Only by promoting their crucified leader to the level of God did the Christians change the coming from that of […]
• Diaspora of the Jews 5 April, 2010
  The Hellenized world of Alexander's generals was already full of Jews from the outset. Their Persian masters had been destroyed leaving the underclass of Juddin as a substantial body of people with a history and a temple. […]
• Forty Days of Lent: Origins and History 16 February, 2010
  European pagans celebrated the return of spring with fertility festivals commemorating their goddess of fertility and of springtime, Eostre. Lenten frugality under subsistence agriculture might have been a necessity rather than a feature, as food stored away in the previous autumn was running out or going bad in store, and little new could be expected soon. […]
• Jonathan Haidt: The Happiness Hypothesis 5 February, 2010
  Where is the political balance? About half way along the left-right scale appear the liberals, the demonic lefties of modern US conventional politics, almost at the center of the whole political space! In Great Britain, political parties are differentiated mainly on the left-right continuum, and little on the authoritarian-libertarian axis. […]
• New Atheists and the Misunderstanding of Religion 5 February, 2010
  Emile Durkheim showed that morality is a set of rules to bind people into an effective group. Religiosity is a feature of human life, and evolutionary, developmental, neuropsychological, and anthropological theories must explain human religions. J Haidt thinks the New Atheists do not get it. […]
• Secular Christianity, Morals and the Kingdom Vision 11 January, 2010
  Christ's message was a practical ethic for a successful, caring, unoppressive society for everyone. "God is love" is meaningless outside of a social context, and acted upon within society. Those accepting it and acting on it were Christians. They live their lives by the teachings of Christ, whether they believe in God, or Christ himself. […]
• Sociality and Common Identity in the Evolution of Religion 2 January, 2010
  Human sensitivity to social reputation is a psychological mechanism, unrelated to religion, that evolved to facilitate reciprocal co-operative bonds in groups. Selfish people could be accused, punished or excluded from the group. Religions help sociality in large groups, but efficient secular social organization, and practical institutions to enforce the law […]