Category Archives: Religion

Evolutionary Politics

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Fascinating. Via Andrew Sullivan’s summary at Political Biology Chris Mooney looks at a book by Avi Tuschman about evolutionary accounts of politics— Conservatives, he suggests in one of three interrelated evolutionary accounts of the origins of politics, are a modern … Continue reading →

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God and Morality

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

The US is an outlier among nations whose peoples believe that belief in God is essential to morality. http://www.alternet.org/belief/no-you-dont-need-god-be-good-person The trend across the world is mirrored within the US: Not coincidentally, led again by Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, nine of … Continue reading →

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Truth-Claims?

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Jerry Coyne links to Sam Harris’ characterization of Christianity, in a long exchange with Nature science writer Philip Ball. There are more polite versions of this, but for anyone who did not grow up with this narrative and is an … Continue reading →

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Political parties, religion, and individualism

Posted on Friday 14 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Connor Wood at Science on Religion writes about current social and political trends and where libertarians fall in the republican-democratic spectrum, and how both of those parties may be splitting into factions. Big changes are coming to politics in America. … Continue reading →

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A Fellow Heir of Carl Sagan

Posted on Thursday 13 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Via Friendly Atheist, this post of a Tale of a lapsed Christian who grew up in a household that mocked Carl Sagan when the first Cosmos series was aired. In my childhood home, Carl Sagan was a fundamentalist caricature of … Continue reading →

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Fox, Certainty, Arrogance, Evidence, and Cosmos

Posted on Wednesday 12 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Follow-up article in Salon about the man whose father was lost to the paranoid outrage of Fox News. (The original article on this topic inspired my explanation about how science fiction represents the antithesis of such dead-end traps of ideology … Continue reading →

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Hidebound, Unreflecting, Blind

Posted on Tuesday 11 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Andrew Sullivan (that gay conservative Catholic author and blogger) has an ongoing thread about Christians who feel persecuted for not approving of same-sex marriage. His blog doesn’t take comments, as this one doesn’t, but he posts substantive responses from email. … Continue reading →

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Religion vs Cosmos

Posted on Tuesday 11 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Tech writer Andrew Leonard writes in Salon about religious outrage against science. Watch out, “Cosmos”! The Holy Inquisition is not happy with you The best part: “Cosmos” is labeled “a glossy multi-million-dollar piece of agitprop for scientific materialism” as if … Continue reading →

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Cosmos Is Great So Far, but It’s Missing Something

Posted on Monday 10 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

The new Cosmos series seems to be just fine, so far. It celebrates science and our knowledge of the vastness of the known universe, and takes a legitimate stand against the religious resistance that would deny or trivialize this knowledge. … Continue reading →

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Agnotology, Science Denialism, and Joan Slonczewski

Posted on Sunday 9 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A column in the business section of the LA Times this morning, by Michael Hiltzik, Cultural production of ignorance provides rich field for study [curiously the print edition that I read this morning has the title “Sowing doubt about science”] … Continue reading →

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