This blog has been dormant, as I’m now editing The New Humanism and shifted my blogging to The New Humanism Blog.
However, UUs will be interested to read the article Doug Muder has written, A Church That Would Have You As A Member: A Humanist Guide to Unitarian Universalism. Doug, who writes for UUWorld and The Weekly Sift, provides a guide to UUism for nonbelievers, and discusses what type of nonbeliever will fit in at a UU Church and who will want start running and screaming toward the door.
Good review of the field in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
I’ve been to Quebec this summer, and there is an interesting article about its secularization, while retaining sentimental attachments to the Roman Catholic Church.
The philosopher Charles Taylor, co-chair of the accra commission, points out that Quebeckers are not the only society of lapsed Catholics to show an attachment to religious traditions without necessarily embracing the doctrine. Millions of non-practising Germans continue to pay confessional taxes, for instance, even though simply declaring themselves as non-Catholics would spare them the expense. The most secular societies in the West also “retain the vestigial public reference to God in public space,†Prof. Taylor writes in A Secular Age .
According to an American Dental Association study, there is a genetic connection between red hair and pain sensitivity.
Researchers believe redheads are more sensitive to pain because of a mutation in a gene that affects hair color. In people with brown, black and blond hair, the gene, for the melanocortin-1 receptor, produces melanin. But a mutation in the MC1R gene results in the production of a substance called pheomelanin that results in red hair and fair skin.
The NY Times has an article, Brain Power – In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable, that discusses research on the use of intuition on threat detection, and references Antonio Damasio’s work.
Cool article in Harvard Magazine about using DNA studies of Y chomosomes of modern British men to elucidate what happened during the Ango-Saxon invasion of England after the fall of Rome. The Romano-British male population left few descendents in English areas, so the invaders didn’t just rule as an elite, they displaced the original population. It must have been a devastating time to be alive.
Good news! You can go to the restroom while they play God Bless America. A fan was ejected from Yankee Stadium for insufficient reverence, and sued and won. I’m not normally in favor of litigation, but in this case I am. God Bless America is an inferior song, saccharine through and through. It combines religion and nationalism in a way that is, if not quite ugly, does tend to give them impression that God is specifically on our side. It’s not the national anthem, but was added to the playlist in many places after 9/11. It’s time to strike it out.
The GOP class of 1994, which came in to revolutionize Washington and be more moral than thou, falls to Earth.
Newt Gingrich is a very smart guy, but lacks integrity, and I’m skeptical of the sincerity of his newfound faith.
, which comes as he seems to be preparing to run for president
Last month, Gingrich made a very public conversion to the Catholic faith of his wife, Callista. As Gingrich continues his rediscovery of God in America, watch for more quotes like this one from last Friday's conference: “I am not a citizen of the world,” he said. 'I am a citizen of the United States, because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator.”
While I’m not a fan of Mike Huckabee, I do believe his faith is sincere. Gingrich knows full well that U.S citizenship is not dependent on a religious test, while there are in fact established religions in many other nations, which makes his statement that only in the U.S. does citizenship start with faith a deliberate and knowing lie told to an audience he hopes will lap it up.
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