The tendency to spiritual feeling and religious belief lies deep in human nature and seems to have its own neurological basis, though it may be very strong in some people and less developed in others.Remember though that the frame can interpret very differently. Is the spiritual tendency simply an evolutionary quirk or is it sign of a spacetime centred round the strange attractor of an Incarnation? Both readings could make sense.
Our experiments showed that if people plainly see that to lie in a given situation would be fraudulent, they shy away from it. However, if people are given "wriggle room," they can convince themselves that their behaviour is not fraudulent and this does not attack their sense of who they areIn a sense it seems to link 'back' to the question "Did God really say '...'?" in which the serpent, by that question, precisely opens up the kind of wiggle room uncovered in this research. This strengthens my hunch that evil is essentially social not individual.
Eichmann's evasiveness seems to be characterised by what Kierkegaard called "a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing". Kierkegaard argued that, on the question of evil, the key difference between ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity was that the Greeks (Plato in particular) equated immorality with ignorance, whereas Christians insist that this is a matter of the will.Certainly I recognise the decisive importance of willedness in defining what is truly evil and distinguishing such from what is merely 'unfortunate' or simply suffering unhappy eventualities. Suffering chance or unavoidable harms is different from suffering malicious or malevolent harms which are of a greater degree of evil than ignorant or insouciant harms. They may all hurt 'as much' on the level of pain felt through the sensorium interacting with the brain -though I suspect that is a theoretical construct for the sake of argument rather than an actuality because (and this is the second point) pain is mitigated or exacerbated by the social dimensions of others' attitudes which affects how much we suffer the pain. By that I am drawing on an insight which I draw from what I understand of some Buddhist reflection that pain and suffering are not the same thing. The former is done to us, so to speak, the latter is centrally about our response to and internalisation /representation /construal of pain.
Local England has reverted to the middle ages, with the clergy as its most public face. The clergy are the ones who tend to know who is in trouble, who is a villain, who a saint. Their workplace is a church. They apparently mobilise 1.6 million parish volunteers for what amounts to social work, from caring for the elderly to hospital visiting. This output must be worth billions to the state. And all the state does in return is impose VAT and health and safety regulations on church repairs.It's just a shame that the stats hadn't been read a bit more carefully: Simon says,
This month, the census appeared to confirm a Religious Trends reportthat church attendance was falling so fast that by 2035 there would be more active Muslims than Christians in Britain, and by 2050 as many Hindus.Thing is, the report is from 4 years ago and the census is reporting a drop in nominal Christianity while the active Christian population seems to be more stable than the earlier report indicated -in some places and organisations it is growing. My own diocese seems to be seeing more churchgoing even while nominal Christians fall in number. I suspect that journalists will need to think a bit harder about the cliched categories they think in about religion in this country.
Overall, then, the structure of the question was deemed to have hoovered up a lot of people who were only Christians atmospherically, neither cleaving to its beliefs nor upholding its practices. Personally, I didn't mind that – one of the many joys of being an atheist is that you don't have to pretend to be inclusive. Organised religions have to take all comers. I am proudly exclusive in my belief system – I only want other people to be atheists if they're committed to not believing in God, and are prepared to say so. I don't want to scrabble madly among the "don't knows" for people who might be in my club on a particularly trenchant day. The Jedi Knights are welcome to them.That's a good point, and at my university when the possibility of entrance documentation asking for religious information, I felt that it was important to put down a marker that the way that the census asked the question was not very helpful and that we might want to catch some nuances that would be more useful for guiding thinking in an institutional context.
self-described Christianity is disintegrating – not because anything's happened to make God's existence less likely, but because, as a badge of respectability and cultural identity, it no longer cuts it.
As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce. We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.But the interesting thing in this article is that it nuances the Milgram experiments (where people were apparently asked to deliver huge electric shocks to other seeming-subjects) by noting that there is not only a conformity to authority thing going on, but that this is in conflict with empathy for suffering victims. Thus lessening the 'defence' that genocidalists, for example, might offer: that they were subsumed.
It's important to realize that intelligence is not just something that happens inside individual brains. It also arises with groups of individuals. In fact, I'd define collective intelligence as groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. By that definition, of course, collective intelligence has been around for a very long time. Families, companies, countries, and armies: those are all examples of groups of people working together in ways that at least sometimes seem intelligent.This article, Collective Intelligence | Conversation | Edge, explores this, offering examples of collective intellingence which the NT writers might well have applied the language of Principalities and Powers to.
It's clearly possible to view groups of humans and their artifacts, their computational and other artifacts, as intelligent collectively as well. That perspective raises not only deep and interesting scientific questions, but also raises what you might think of as even philosophical questions about what we humans are as groups, not just as individuals.This is interesting for several reasons. One is that the corporate humanity thing is resonant for things like 'for as in Adam, we all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive'. If we are 'wired' to be social then the social is likely to 'wire' us individually, including in matters of spiritual identity and dynamics. And the final sentence points us to what I think is one of the salient perspectives that emerges from the NT: we are responsible both to work with our 'collectively intelligent corporisations' and also to refrain from doing so where they become tyrannical or self-serving.
You might well argue that human intelligence has all along been primarily a collective phenomenon rather than an individual one. Most of the things we think of as human intelligence really arise in the context of our interactions with other human beings. We learn languages. We learn to communicate. Most of our intellectual achievements as humans really result not just from a single person working all alone by themselves, but from interactions of an individual with a culture, with a body of knowledge, with a whole community and network of other humans.
I think and I hope that this approach to thinking about collective intelligence can help us to understand not only what it means to be individual humans, but what it means for us as humans to be part of some broader collectively intelligent entity.
In the mindful attention group, the after-training brain scans showed a decrease in activation in the right amygdala in response to all images, supporting the hypothesis that meditation can improve emotional stability and response to stress. In the compassion meditation group, right amygdala activity also decreased in response to positive or neutral images. But among those who reported practicing compassion meditation most frequently outside of the training sessions, right amygdala activity tended to increase in response to negative images -- all of which depicted some form of human suffering.This would play well with what I think is a Christian noetic principle: what we fill our minds and hearts with changes our attitudes, behaviours and character in turn. So my question is whether (as I suspect) practising prayer related to these meditative practices. For example, how about looking into the effects of self-examination and confession? I'm pretty sure that these have made a difference to my neural 'wiring' over the years in ways that might well show up in the amygdala. Or what about intercessory prayer related to matters of compassion? Come to that what about lectio divina /traditional evangelical Quiet Time?
I hope [God] doesn't exist. And that if he does, I hope he's nowhere near as petty as you make out.'Petty' might be 'arbitrary'. And what I think we need to hear in this is just how implausible our accounts of God seem to others. And if you don't get it, it's explained towards the end of the article:
we've always been good friends. You know I always try to do what I think is right, yet the God you believe in says I deserve to go to hell, and you still sing his praises.Now, of course, I 'know' that there's an issue here about moralism and the concept of fallenness, but we should take note that the concept of 'desert' seems so out of whack with the 'crime'. We really do need to get out of that 'game' in terms of how we try to explain our faith; we have to find another way in not predicated on a sense of sin. You see, our 'gospel' was formed in ages when people did tend to have more a sense of guilt and so we tend to answer questions about forgiveness, atonement etc. Our problem now is that we find ourself in the guilt-arousal business because we have realised that our answers require that we conscientise people to the questions they 'should' be asking for our inherited version of the gospel to work and be good news indeed.
I can never argue back because offending someone's religion is a huge taboo.Because I think for a lot of people, it's true. Yes, there are some who enjoy provoking or 'telling it like it is'. But for most of us, we don't want to offend. And what that makes me think is that we Christians need to get out of the way of the Good News. If people are afraid of airing honest doubts or concerns about our faith, we're in the way of listening and sharing; we've ended up defending ourselves rather than giving an answer for the hope within us -or at least we've given that impression.
Think of it as the political equivalent of the five stages of grief. The ones that trigger the deepest anguish are the serial defeats and the beatings you didn't expect.So he goes through the stages reading the evidence through the interpretive grid of the stages.
the first stage is denial. ... embodied by the electrifying sight of former Bush guru turned Fox pundit Karl Rove scolding Fox's own number-crunchers for calling the election for Barack Obama, desperately pretending two plus two did not, in fact, equal four.Yes and we the churches of the West do similar things: we cling to the census returns showing high -but still declining- figures of at least nominal Christians (see here for a bit more info), and we carry on trying to do church as if they were still holding hundreds rather than dozens.
Next comes anger, often manifested in lashing out and blaming others. ... When Candy Crowley – the CNN anchor who had moderated the second TV debate, arbitrating at one crucial point in Obama's favour – appeared on the giant TV screens, the Republicans in their suits and evening dresses began booing loudly. "It's your fault!" they howled,I think that this is what a lot of all that stuff with Christian groups protesting at perceived sleights and imagining that they are being treated less favourably than others: it's anger borne of a sense of loss of a previous influence and standing and power.
The third stage of grief is said to be bargaining, accepting that something has to change but seeking to delay or dilute what needs to be done ... In the current Republican case, you can hear it in the time-honoured admission that "we didn't get our message across" or "there is a perception problem". The party agrees to tweak appearances, but remains unwilling to undertake deep reform.I think this is probably where a lot of the churches in GB are at the moment: if only we update our worship, say things in a relevant way, use modern media ... you get the picture. Please note that 'deep reform' in this case doesn't mean changing the basic values or core identity, but it does mean recognising that there may be things that have become quite dear to us which are barriers to us reaching out and connecting beyond our own communities.
After depression – common after a string of losses, such as the five defeats in the popular vote the Republicans have suffered in the last six presidential elections – comes acceptance. In politics, that usually means a recognition that the country you seek to lead has changed and that, therefore, you have to change with it, no matter how painful that process will be.Depression? Yes, that's around. I know I have and do experience this stage (nb, one of the crits of the 5 stages is the observation that, in reality, people seem to re-visit 'previous' stages and go at different speeds in different bits of their lives through the process). To be fair, depression is a kind of acceptance where the loss is still keenly felt.
My real problem, and that of the oppressed in general I think, is not with god himself, but with human beings who act as gods and are so sick with authority that they think and act like gods, be they secular dictators like Assad or Islamic imams.Of course that's not to say there's any theism there, it's probably simply saying that believing in God is not high on the hit list (God may still be 'dangerous' in anarchist terms because God represents some degree of heteronomy) -there are more important issues; one being the way that God is used in human discourse to legitimise tyranny. And that is fair enough: I'm similarly concerned. And of course the converse should be noted too: atheism can be tyrannical (Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao Zedong demonstrate that well enough I think).
God himself is never as deadly dangerous as those who 'speak' for him.
I have never tried to convince anyone to be an anarchist and have always thought that trying to affect others is another way of practicing authority upon them.But now I see this issue from another perspective. It is all about making anarchism 'available' or known to those who want to fight any oppressing authority, be they workers, the unemployed, students, feminists, the youth, or ethnic and religious minorities. It is about trying to build an example — or sample — of the new free life, not only as a living manifestation of its potential presence, but also as a means to achieve that society.I think that articulates quite nicely some issues to do with evangelism and its ethical implications. I wouldn't have used the phrase 'practising authority upon them' of my own accord, but it does say neatly what one of the problems can be. But then so is his 'another perspective' useful to help us to understand how a re-imagined evangelism could be. Working, as I do, in a context where the explicit 'contract' is to avoid proselytism, this perspective is useful: there is a difference between promoting ones views in a harassing or even bullying way and making a perspective or a set of facts and interpretations available to those to whom it may be relevant. I would say the former is proselytism, the latter is part of a free society.
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