Religion

Many Singulatarians hold that their soon-to-be-realized technology will be indistinguishable by the rest of us from magic.   Are they serious? Well, in 2005, Kurzweil said that the magical Harry Potter stories “are not unreasonable visions of our world as it will exist only a few decades from now.” when, due to AI, “the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence.”  Keas warns that this type of thing encourages people “to expect the experiential equivalent of occult phenomena.” More. Mike Keas’s new book Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion discusses how AI and ET are merging, to create a religion of futurist magic: See also: Historian: Darwinists Kept The “Flat Earth” Myth Going, To Attack Read More ›

Some of us try not to wade into theology as such very much for the same reasons as we try to avoid taking a whack at the tarbaby. Where theology is directly relevant – for example if someone claims that there is an “artistic license to lie” about traditional religious ideas about the universe, well, we don’t have much choice, do we? Just recently, a troubling statement emerged: A notion of theology that suggests it is somehow counter-real or anti-real. A priest explains, in a post mainly devoted to issues in the Vatican’s media office: But on the communications front, 2018 demonstrated amply that it is not the supposed “enemies” of the pope who cause the Holy Father the most Read More ›

Social scientist Rodney Stark offers an alternative to the Sunday magazine truisms about the relationship between Christianity and science: The basis for much of the antipathy toward Christianity is the image of the medieval Catholic Church fostered by “distinguished bigots,” as Stark calls Edward Gibbon and Voltaire among other Enlightenment notables. Stark, relying on primary source historians like the renowned Marc Bloch, shows, on the contrary, that medieval Catholicism was the breeding ground for modernity. Most, if not all, ancient societies believed in fate. However, Yahweh gave humans the wondrous and terrifying attribute of free will, freedom. Individual freedom in the West then merged with the legacy of Athenian democracy and the Roman republican tradition to form “the new democratic Read More ›

It became impossible to ignore the fact that traditional religious lifestyles were associated with Intro of longer life and better health: For anyone who took a college course in psychology more than a decade ago or who is even casually acquainted with the subject through popular articles, a close examination of today’s field would undoubtedly prove surprising. The science that for most of the 20th century portrayed itself as the enlightened alternative to organized religion has taken a decidedly spiritual turn. Bowling Green State University professor Kenneth Pargament, who in 2013 edited the American Psychological Association’s Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality, notes just how dramatically his profession’s attitude towards faith has changed in recent times. As a young academic Read More ›

A recent lecture in Mumbai raises the question: Organized by a group called “Bharatam Reawakening,” the meeting — and the group — aim to glorify India’s past and the contributions of their ancestors to the world, even if it means taking a detour into the fantastic and the unlikely. The talk itself was titled “Vaimanika Shastra,” which means “Aeronautical Science” in Sanskrit, and at its heart is the claim that an ancient Indian civilization had developed aeronautical technology centuries before the Wright Brothers flew their first plane. A small but significant number of Indians believe that the mention of flying vehicles in Indian mythology is evidence that such technology was already created by their ancestors. It’s just one of numerous Read More ›