Nov 8, 2015 10:08 PM
Humanism, Doubt, and Optimism
http://thehumanist.com/magazine/november...d-optimism
EXCERPT: [...] Max Planck once said that science advances one funeral at a time. [...] A new generation is always more comfortable dispensing with old ideas than are their predecessors.
So, I [Lawrence Krauss] want to argue here that it is possible to imagine a future without the tyranny of religious myth and superstition, and its chokehold on supposed morality. And it is possible to imagine such a future soon. We are never more than a generation away from change. The key is reaching the next generation when they are young.
[...] Avoiding confrontations with religion is not restricted to politics. Many scientists and teachers do it, too. Recent studies—including a comprehensive national survey in 2007 by researchers at Penn State University—show that up to 60 percent of high school biology teachers shy away from adequately teaching evolution as a unifying principle of biology. They don’t want to risk potential controversy by offending religious sensibilities. Instead, many resort to the idea, advocated by the late Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria”—separate traditions of thinking that need not contradict one another.
[...] Last year, writing in the New York Times, the political scientist Brendan Nyhan explained how “identity often trumps the facts.” We would rather reject evidence than change our sense of who we are. Knowledge is comparatively helpless against identity: as you grow better informed about the issues, you just get better at selectively using evidence to reinforce your pre-existing commitments. A 2014 Yale Law School study, for example, demonstrated that the divergence between religious and nonreligious peoples’ views on evolution actually grows wider among those who are familiar with math and science. Describing Nyhan’s work in the New Yorker, Maria Konnikova summarized his findings by writing that “it’s only after ideology is put to the side” that the facts become “decoupled from notions of self-perception.” If we want to raise citizens who are better at making evidence-based judgments, we need to start early, making skepticism and doubt part of the experience that shapes their identities from a young age.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, an AP-GfK poll revealed that less than a third of Americans are willing to express confidence in the reality of human-induced climate change, evolution, the age of the earth, and the existence of the Big Bang. Among those surveyed, there was a direct correlation between religious conviction and an unwillingness to accept the results of empirical scientific investigation. Religious beliefs vary widely, of course—not all faiths, or all faithful people, are the same. But it seems fair to say that, on average, religious faith appears to be an obstacle to understanding the world.
And it is an obstacle that may begin early. Last summer a new study published in the journal Cognitive Science claimed to find a significant difference in the ability of children as young as five and six years old to distinguish fact from fantasy, depending upon their past exposure to religious education, in church or parochial school. The children with religious training (coming from many different religious backgrounds) were less able to judge that characters in fantasy stories were fictional rather than real compared to children with no such exposure. Unfortunately, the methodology of the study was badly flawed, but I suspect a good scientific study would be likely to demonstrate something similar, and I encourage better scholars to carry out such studies.
By planting the seeds of doubt, education offers the best opportunity to immunize children against the intellectual virus that is associated with dogma and superstition in the world today....
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What the Hell happens after Death?
http://hemanththiru.blogspot.com/2015/11...rlife.html
EXCERPT: Wish there was someone who could share and describe the experience after their death? As much as it is scary, life-after-death is equally thrilling to talk about. Though almost all cultures on Earth believe that the story doesn’t end with one’s death, none of them shows a solid proof of what will really happen after one's death.
While Egyptians believed that the dead left the Earth and proceeded to live in a different Star, and the Greeks believed that the souls had to cross a river and be transported to the Underworld by a mythical boat-man, ancient Indians believed that regardless of caste, creed and race, everyone will be punished after death - for every ill thought and act, as per the laws of Garudapurana. While the righteous get to gracefully glide to the Heaven, the sinners are left to rot in the banks of the terrifying Vaitarani river! I did promise that this will be scary yet thrilling, didn't I? Read on for more....
http://thehumanist.com/magazine/november...d-optimism
EXCERPT: [...] Max Planck once said that science advances one funeral at a time. [...] A new generation is always more comfortable dispensing with old ideas than are their predecessors.
So, I [Lawrence Krauss] want to argue here that it is possible to imagine a future without the tyranny of religious myth and superstition, and its chokehold on supposed morality. And it is possible to imagine such a future soon. We are never more than a generation away from change. The key is reaching the next generation when they are young.
[...] Avoiding confrontations with religion is not restricted to politics. Many scientists and teachers do it, too. Recent studies—including a comprehensive national survey in 2007 by researchers at Penn State University—show that up to 60 percent of high school biology teachers shy away from adequately teaching evolution as a unifying principle of biology. They don’t want to risk potential controversy by offending religious sensibilities. Instead, many resort to the idea, advocated by the late Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria”—separate traditions of thinking that need not contradict one another.
[...] Last year, writing in the New York Times, the political scientist Brendan Nyhan explained how “identity often trumps the facts.” We would rather reject evidence than change our sense of who we are. Knowledge is comparatively helpless against identity: as you grow better informed about the issues, you just get better at selectively using evidence to reinforce your pre-existing commitments. A 2014 Yale Law School study, for example, demonstrated that the divergence between religious and nonreligious peoples’ views on evolution actually grows wider among those who are familiar with math and science. Describing Nyhan’s work in the New Yorker, Maria Konnikova summarized his findings by writing that “it’s only after ideology is put to the side” that the facts become “decoupled from notions of self-perception.” If we want to raise citizens who are better at making evidence-based judgments, we need to start early, making skepticism and doubt part of the experience that shapes their identities from a young age.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, an AP-GfK poll revealed that less than a third of Americans are willing to express confidence in the reality of human-induced climate change, evolution, the age of the earth, and the existence of the Big Bang. Among those surveyed, there was a direct correlation between religious conviction and an unwillingness to accept the results of empirical scientific investigation. Religious beliefs vary widely, of course—not all faiths, or all faithful people, are the same. But it seems fair to say that, on average, religious faith appears to be an obstacle to understanding the world.
And it is an obstacle that may begin early. Last summer a new study published in the journal Cognitive Science claimed to find a significant difference in the ability of children as young as five and six years old to distinguish fact from fantasy, depending upon their past exposure to religious education, in church or parochial school. The children with religious training (coming from many different religious backgrounds) were less able to judge that characters in fantasy stories were fictional rather than real compared to children with no such exposure. Unfortunately, the methodology of the study was badly flawed, but I suspect a good scientific study would be likely to demonstrate something similar, and I encourage better scholars to carry out such studies.
By planting the seeds of doubt, education offers the best opportunity to immunize children against the intellectual virus that is associated with dogma and superstition in the world today....
- - - - - - - - -
What the Hell happens after Death?
http://hemanththiru.blogspot.com/2015/11...rlife.html
EXCERPT: Wish there was someone who could share and describe the experience after their death? As much as it is scary, life-after-death is equally thrilling to talk about. Though almost all cultures on Earth believe that the story doesn’t end with one’s death, none of them shows a solid proof of what will really happen after one's death.
While Egyptians believed that the dead left the Earth and proceeded to live in a different Star, and the Greeks believed that the souls had to cross a river and be transported to the Underworld by a mythical boat-man, ancient Indians believed that regardless of caste, creed and race, everyone will be punished after death - for every ill thought and act, as per the laws of Garudapurana. While the righteous get to gracefully glide to the Heaven, the sinners are left to rot in the banks of the terrifying Vaitarani river! I did promise that this will be scary yet thrilling, didn't I? Read on for more....