Faith in Popular Themes

The increase in faithbased articles, books, and arguments may be out of control.

On God
By P. J. O'Rourke

"In one way, however, faith in science does come easier than faith in God--if fear is any gauge of how real we believe a thing is. To judge by human behavior, people are not trembling before the Almighty much. But many of those same people are scared silly by science. They are frightened by a climate stuck in the microwave of technological advances, frightened by genetic modifications that may--who knows?--cross cabbages with kings and produce a Prince Charles, and naturally they are frightened by the clouds of mushrooms being grown in the science cellars of Iran and North Korea."

Read the whole piece:

http://www.science-spirit.org/newdirections.php?article_id=744

This is the second posting from this site.

The spirit is in you

Turning vegan led to a rare spree of book buying. The library extended loan program didn't satisfy my need to savor this religion related tomb either:

Doubt: a History by Jennifer Michael Hecht (Harper San Francisco, 2003); 515 pages plus notes, bibliography, and index; $27.95 cloth. (Just $4.50 used, but excellent condition on Amazon)

Look up the reviews for yourself, it is a terrific read.

These two spirit linked articles caught my attention:

http://www.science-spirit.org/newdirections.php?article_id=740
"I disavow the idea of a personal God, do not believe in a soul that lives on after death, and think that religion -- defined as a set of cognitive, linguistic beliefs and creeds that are highly culture specific and historically contingent -- is irrelevant to my experience. So if this mindboggling spiritual experience came not from an encounter with God, what could explain it?

Can science help?

I think it can, although the research is in an early stage. A stunning new description of how the human body and brain communicate to produce emotional states -- including our feelings, cravings, and moods -- has all the elements needed to explain how the human brain might give rise to spiritual experiences, without the necessary involvement of a supernatural presence, according to Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California in San Diego who is also a Zen practitioner."

Details on the sensory and neural pathways could be a book. Writers digesting and processing this fast changing field help, but it is a complex evolving story.

This article gives a technically less challenging viewpoint:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/14/religion.anglicanism

"Once, of course, I was a teenage atheist; and it brings me no shame to say that, but it certainly makes me smile. I grew up, and stopped being an atheist, in my 20s, in the 1980s. But it was only when my parents died, within a year of each other at the turn of the century, that I became religious."

Doubt is a far more entertaining and troubling passage for me.