AASFSHNR

"Once upon a time, animal sacrifice was an important part of Hindu life, Catholic priests weren't celibate and visual depictions of the Prophet Muhammad were part of Islamic art. And soon some churches in the UK may be marrying gay couples. How do religions manage to change their mind?" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"this “science quiz” WAS actually given to 4th graders in the Blueridge Christian Academy of Greenville, South Carolina, as the urban legend detectives at Snopes.com found out. The actual father of the child whose test was on reddit wrote in to quiet the naysayers asserting that the quiz did indeed belong to his 10-year-old daughter" - Tinfoil 2.0

@ Tinfoil 2.0 wow respect to the teachers teacher! - Eddy63

"NEW YORKER Rorie Weisberg forked out $45.00 for a one-ounce a bottle of facial gunk that promised a full night and day of “lasting perfection”. The Orthodox Jewish woman did so because she wanted something that would last her through the Sabbath. The product had to be long- lasting because it is verboten for observant Jews to apply make-up between sundown on a Friday and Saturday night. Lancôme’s new Teint Idole Ultra 24H foundation held out the promise of a full 24 hours of beauty enhancement, but apparently failed to deliver. So, according to this report, Weisberg “can’t look good and stay holy at the same time”, and she’s suing the make-up giant." - April Russo from Bookmarklet

She has to sue for unspecified damages? She can't just ask for her $45 back? - Stephen Mack #TeamMomo

[redacted] - April Russo

Thanks, Eivind. - April Russo

"“The problem is communication,” says physiologist Steven Swoap. “How does the foot talk to the pancreas?” The foot is full of sensory nerves, Swoap explains. These can detect temperature, pain or position and send that information to the spinal cord. If the signal is something urgent—say, you stepped on a nail—the spinal cord will send a quick command back to the foot (“STOP!”). If the signal from the foot is a non-painful one (“Hey, I’m walking on grass”), it will travel all the way up the spinal cord to the brain. “But in no instance do those sensory nerves bypass either the spinal cord or the brain and go directly to the liver, or the kidney, or the colon,” Swoap says. This means your foot can’t communicate directly with any other body part except your spinal cord or brain. Whatever stories the feet have told, they’ve had a limited audience." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

Give me an example of something you have to do often that actually requires you to believe in something and make a decision or act without any proof that what you believe is true. - April Russo

Thank you Stephen...that's a wonderful example. And thanks for the link (almost sarcastically). I see I am going to be trapped in wikipedia for quite awhile. :-D - April Russo

"I have no doubt that for Lynch and many other practitioners, TM works; that is, it makes them feel better. “Better” can include anything from feeling calmer and less stressed to having a stronger sense of purpose, meaning and connection to other people and all of life. Of course, by this criterion Scientology, Catholicism, Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, the Hare Krishna movement, Unification Church and every other cult works. (Some readers may prefer the term “religion” for some of these institutions, but I view religions as cults that have achieved respectability, in some cases by abandoning extreme tenets.) After all, numerous studies have found a correlation between health and religious faith. The question is, why do cults work? Why do they make adherents feel better? The obvious (to me) answer is that they harness the placebo effect, the tendency of our belief that something will benefit us to be self-fulfilling." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

Calmer, less stressed, having a stronger sense of purpose, meaning and connection to other people and all of life? I don't need a cult for that...that's what my computer is for. - April Russo

"In evolutionary religious studies there are some scholars who claim that “religion” is an adaptation that is the product of natural selection. Though there are several different variants of this argument, all of them rely – in one way or another – on some form of “cultural evolution.” This is not cultural evolution in the old-fashioned, progressive, and normative anthropological sense (i.e., Lubbock, Tylor, and Frazer) — in its modern guises, cultural evolution relies on some variant of gene-culture co-evolution, niche construction, or memetics. While Dawkins and Dennett continue professing faith in memetics, they are pretty much alone. The most serious contender is the dual inheritance model first proposed by Boyd and Richerson (1985) in Culture and the Evolutionary Process." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

So, it's more like cultural breeding than natural selection? :) - Eivind

'We can finally admit that attempting to discern the entire checklist by which God will justify each person at the end of the world is entirely pointless and counterproductive to making the world a more beautiful place right here and right now.' - Tinfoil 2.0

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: "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 for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. "You oughta worship me, I'll tell you that!" one of... more... - Eivind

"The 57th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), taking place from March 4 to 15 at UN headquarters, seeks to ratify a declaration euphemistically entitled ‘End Violence against Women’. That title, however, is misleading and deceptive. The document includes articles that contradict established principles of Islam, undermine Islamic ethics and destroy the family, the basic building block of society, according to the Egyptian Constitution. This declaration, if ratified, would lead to complete disintegration of society, and would certainly be the final step in the intellectual and cultural invasion of Muslim countries, eliminating the moral specificity that helps preserve cohesion of Islamic societies." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"The expression “getting up the wrong side of the bed” supposedly evolved from getting up on the "right side" which in turn grew out the Roman belief that the left side was evil. The word "sinister" is derived from the Latin word for "left side" and the first "footmen" were hired by Roman nobles to makes sure guests entered their house right foot first. [People's Almanac]" - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"The Romans believed that each of the 12 Zodiac sign controlled a different part of the body. The planets Mars and Venus were given the character of the gods they were named after. On fortunetellers, Pliny the Elder wrote: "this most fraudulent of arts has held complete sway throughout the world for many years. Nobody should be surprised at the greatness of its influence...There is no one who did not fear the spellbound by curse tablets." - Eivind

"i could hazard an educated guess" :) - grizabella

"I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon of the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. "Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!" - Eivind

The emphasis on thought crimes in Jesus' teachings is troubling to me, but I think the Beatitudes must have spoken to Vonnegut's pacifism. - Eivind

"Feuerbach had, in idealist (and sometimes obscure) Hegelian fashion, argued that God or the “divine” was simply a projection of alienated human consciousness. It was, for Feuerbach, an entirely psychological process. Marx was troubled by the idea that such thoughts or “alienated consciousness” could simply occur, unbidden and uncaused. There was no apparent mechanism, something which might prompt people to have such ideas and feel alienated. Marx found the mechanism in the material conditions of life that determine social relations. These material conditions and social relations, in turn, give rise to the alienated consciousness which is at the heart of Marx’s theory or critique of religion. [...] Because social relations are always reflected back into people’s lives, unified societies make for unified individuals. People are not alienated they have direct, productive, and creative relationships with resources, work, things, and others. This communalism is, for Marx, most conducive to human happiness and well-being." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

""Precisely as a consequence of man’s loss of spontaneous self-activity, religion arises as a compensatory mechanism for explaining what alienated man cannot explain and for promising him elsewhere what he cannot achieve here. Thus because man does not create himself through his productive labor, he supposes that he is created by a power beyond. Because man lacks power, he attributes... more... - Eivind

"Behind a disguised offshore company structure, the church's international portfolio has been built up over the years, using cash originally handed over by Mussolini in return for papal recognition of the Italian fascist regime in 1929. Since then the international value of Mussolini's nest-egg has mounted until it now exceeds £500m. [...] The surprising aspect for some will be the lengths to which the Vatican has gone to preserve secrecy about the Mussolini millions." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

...I knew that was Lord Vader after all! - Harold Cabezas from Android

"And without Adam and Eve, the Koran would not be literally true, and therefore could not be the perfect word of God. Islam would be founded on a man-made book." ~Mo - Eivind from Bookmarklet

I agree with both of you :) - Eivind

"In 1959, psychologist Milton Rokeach assembled three mentally ill patients each of whom believed he was Jesus Christ" - Eivind from Bookmarklet

"In his 1964 account of the experiment, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, Rokeach writes, “We have learned that even when a summit of three is composed of paranoid men, deadlocked over the ultimate in human contradiction, they prefer to seek ways to live with one another in peace rather than destroy one another.”" - Eivind

"Over at the Atlantic, Evolution of God author Robert Wright wonders why he feels “happy” after a one-week Buddhist meditation retreat. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me: a week away from work, computers, phones, texts, tablets, noise, writing, stores, appointments, meetings, transactions, traffic, machines, and routines should have this effect. Still, Wright struggles to make sense of it: 'I’m not sure how to explain this irony of detachment-induced warmth. Maybe, though in theory you’re distancing yourself equally from positive and negative emotions as you meditate, you’re actually cheating, and doing selective distancing. Or maybe a feeling of affinity–with our environment, with other creatures–is a kind of default state, and we revert to it when more transient and superficial feelings, both negative and positive, are stripped away. But that doesn’t make immediate sense to me in terms of evolutionary psychology, my basic paradigm for viewing the mind, and I’m not sure it even... more... - Eivind from Bookmarklet

From the comments: "I have a really bad feeling about this: three of the most morally bankrupt organisations in the known world, the Roman Catholic Church, Apple Computers and Fox News, coming together in some sort of trinity of evil." :) - Eivind

Full French quote: <<Il y a eu des gens qui ont dit autrefois: Vous croyez des choses incompréhensibles, contradictoires, impossibles, parce que nous vous l’avons ordonné; faites donc des choses injustes parce que nous vous l’ordonnons. Ces gens-là raisonnaient à merveille. Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste. Si vous n’opposez point aux ordres de croire l’impossible l’intelligence que Dieu a mise dans votre esprit, vous ne devez point opposer aux ordres de malfaire la justice que Dieu a mise dans votre coeur. Une faculté de votre âme étant une fois tyrannisée, toutes les autres facultés doivent l’être également. Et c’est là ce qui a produit tous les crimes religieux dont la terre a été inondée.>> - Stephen Mack #TeamMomo

Translated: "Formerly there were those who said: You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is unjust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust. If the God-given understanding of your mind does not resist a... more... - Stephen Mack #TeamMomo

The headlined rephrasing of the quote is pithier, but "atrocity" may be a bit stronger than Voltaire intended. - Stephen Mack #TeamMomo

Uh-oh. I'm in trouble. - Tinfoil 2.0

Hm. You're not allowed to mistreat foreigners, but you're allowed to keep them as slaves? I guess you have to be really good to your slaves, then :) - Eivind

"In 1903, Kentucky-based newspaper "Blue-grass Blade" asked its readers to write in and contribute to a forthcoming feature named, "Why I am An Atheist."" - Eivind from Bookmarklet

:D http://www.itvs.org/films... - Cyber Wanderlust

"The Forer effect (also called the Barnum Effect after P.T. Barnum's observation that "we've got something for everyone") is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality tests." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

Prompted by Norway's national healer/psychic informing us through the papers that most of the other witches and wizards are faking it. - Eivind

http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news... - Eivind

No words. Just no words. - Friar Ticket to Ride