belief items › MachineMachine /stream

“We’re proud to put our name on what will become the body of Jesus.” The wafers I bought were manufactured by the Cavanagh Company…

April 8 2012, 1:06am | Comments

Twitter Links Does It Matter Whether God Exists?

Discussions of religion are typically about God. Atheists reject religion because they don’t believe in God; Jews, Christians and Muslims take belief in God…

March 23 2012, 1:51am | Comments

Link The God wars

Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in…

March 7 2012, 3:42pm | Comments

Link The Exegete

When Philip K. Dick died in 1982 of a series of strokes brought on by years of overwork and amphetamine abuse, he was seen within the science fiction genre as…

March 4 2012, 6:22am | Comments

Twitter Links Life after Papyrus: The Swerve

Books. They have an almost alarming corporeality. Stephen Greenblatt, esteemed Harvard professor and founder of New Historicism, tells us that between the eras of…

February 17 2012, 6:05am | Comments

Twitter Links No secularism please, we're British

This is what always happens with religion: it is meant to make people behave better, but when they get too serious about it, it…

February 15 2012, 4:20am | Comments

Link A Conversation with film-maker Adam Curtis

Since the early 1990s Adam Curtis has made a number of serial documentaries and films for the BBC using a playful mix of journalistic reportage and a wide range of…

February 12 2012, 5:36am | Comments

Link Man as Machine

A peculiar experiment inspired by the Enlightenment sheds light on the age-old question of what makes us human.

February 9 2012, 11:34am | Comments

Twitter Links The God gap

Religion may have lost much of its power to explain our modern world but we still crave its emotional satisfactions

January 28 2012, 11:35am | Comments

Twitter Links It's time for science to move on from materialism

Today we live in the 21st century, and it seems that we are still stuck with this narrow and rigid view of the things.…

January 28 2012, 11:35am | Comments

Link Nature, nurture and liberal values

Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural impulses

January 25 2012, 11:35am | Comments

Twitter Links Freud: The last great Enlightenment thinker

Freud’s ideas are today not simply rejected as false. They are repudiated as being dangerous or immoral; the “gloomy mythology” of warring instincts is…

January 22 2012, 12:07pm | Comments

Link Kopimism: the world's newest religion explained

Isak Gerson is spiritual leader of the world's newest religion, Kopimism, devoted to file-sharing. On 5 January the Church of Kopimism was formally recognised as a religion by the Swedish…

January 15 2012, 2:32pm | Comments

Twitter Links The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

Even in his earliest stories, Dick wrestled with the nature of perception. As he described it to me, “I began to get an idea…

December 18 2011, 3:20am | Comments

Link The Mystery of the Five Wounds

Why, though, to begin with, did stigmata materialize in 13th-century Italy? Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St.…

November 21 2011, 1:07pm | Comments

Twitter Links Atheists, theists, and gnostics, oh my!

There’s a popular idea that being an atheist involves sharing the exact ideas of all non-believers, a notion I would argue is extremely misguided.…

October 24 2011, 4:36pm | Comments

Link The Roots of Religion: Myth, Play and Human…

Robert Bellah, one of America's most distinguished sociologists, caps off his luminous academic career with "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age" , a near 800-page…

October 19 2011, 3:17am | Comments

Link The case for reconciling the scientific with the…

As a both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of…

October 8 2011, 10:01am | Comments

Link Can religion tell us more than science?

In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and…

September 20 2011, 3:12am | Comments

Link The New Atheism

Trapped in the childhood literalism of my background, I had not entertained the possibility of Christian belief separated from the great lure and threat of heaven and hell. The New…

August 30 2011, 8:21am | Comments

Twitter Links Shock: Adam and Eve NEVER existed! (If it wasn't for you pesky biochemists...) http://t.co/hjiA8lK #religion #faith…

Shock: Adam and Eve NEVER existed! (If it wasn't for you pesky biochemists...) http://t.co/hjiA8lK #religion #faith #belief #science #x

August 18 2011, 1:37am | Comments

Wikipedia Sacred Contagion Sacred contagion is the belief that spiritual properties within an object, place, or person may be passed to another object, place, or person, usually by direct contact or…

August 12 2011, 8:08am | Comments

Twitter Links A Trick of the Mind - Reason Magazine

The Believing Brain: From alien intervention to federal conspiracy http://t.co/G5KcJN7 #conspiracy #religion #belief #human #culture #mm

August 6 2011, 5:02am | Comments

Link Rebellion Against Pluralism

Anders Behring Breivik, who has admitted responsibility for the death of seventy six innocents, is undoubtedly a madman. But madmen can be spurred on by anything in their environment they…

July 27 2011, 3:08pm | Comments

Link When the King Saved God

Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England”…

April 12 2011, 3:57pm | Comments

Link Views on Evolution, Intelligent Design Hinge on Death…

It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for…

April 7 2011, 3:39am | Comments

Link 400 years of the King James Bible

The King James Bible is a book that attracts superlatives. To David Norton it is “the most important book in English religion and culture”, to Gordon Campbell “the most celebrated…

February 11 2011, 4:43am | Comments

Link The New Atheists' Narrow Worldview

With tongues in cheeks, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett are embracing their reputation as the "Four Horsemen." Lampooning the anxieties of evangelicals, these best-selling atheists are…

January 24 2011, 3:58am | Comments

Link The rise of the new agnostics

Let's get one thing straight: Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition…

July 30 2010, 4:38am | Comments

Link Roger Scruton - Gloom merchant

The belief that humanity makes moral progress depends upon a wilful ignorance of history. It also depends upon a wilful ignorance of oneself – a refusal to recognise the extent…

June 12 2010, 9:19am | Comments

Link The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: What happens when…

In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together…

June 12 2010, 9:18am | Comments

Link What did Jesus do? (Reading and Unreading the…

When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee,…

May 19 2010, 3:52am | Comments

Link Believe it or Not

I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply…

May 16 2010, 4:19pm | Comments

Link Philip K Dick journals to be published next…

The Exegesis, much anticipated by fans of the writer, will come out in autumn 2011, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt revealed. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53,…

May 4 2010, 2:28am | Comments

Link Giorgio Agamben - What is a Paradigm -…

...we all make use of paradigms in our work, but do we really know what a paradigm is, and what does it mean to use a paradigm in philosophy, in…

April 30 2010, 6:39am | Comments

Link Posthumanism: A Christian Response

The posthuman worldview goes a step beyond demoting human begins in the hierarchy of value. It promotes other species, proposing that animals are more rational than we knew. We are…

April 29 2010, 10:16am | Comments

Link Jesus Is A Dick

This sort of acting out is typical behavior from somebody whose parents didn't give them enough attention growing up.

April 28 2010, 1:35am | Comments

Link Separate Truths

It is misleading — and dangerous — to think that religions are different paths to the same wisdom. At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe…

April 27 2010, 7:55am | Comments

Link Conceiving God: the Cognitive Origin and Evolution of…

Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens confront the faithful head-on, but there may be another way to dispel religious beliefs. I am not so sure about this. In my…

April 4 2010, 6:56am | Comments

Link An evolutionary biologist on religion: Spirit level

WHEREVER their investigations lead, all analysts of religion begin somewhere. And in the final lines of his densely but skilfully packed account of faith from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology,…

March 7 2010, 4:52pm | Comments

Link Your Reality is out of Date

These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often,…

March 5 2010, 6:14am | Comments

Link Theology for atheists

Theology lets us talk about deep and irrational urges. This is seen by some atheists as weakness. But maybe it's a strength as well James Wood, a writer who himself…

January 8 2010, 3:29am | Comments

Link Left vs Right | Information Is Beautiful

A concept-map exploring the Left vs Right political spectrum. A collaboration between David McCandless and information artist Stefanie Posavec, taken from my book The Visual Miscellaneum (out Nov 10th). Of…

October 21 2009, 3:28pm | Comments

Link Atheism: class is a distraction

For some reasons it seems to be anathema to say that there might be an intrinsic reason for the correlation between educational level and the rejection of religion: atheism takes…

October 15 2009, 8:14am | Comments

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