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.
No comments:
Post a Comment