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Some New England election day humor, from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rawrin.
rawrin.A friend of mine loaned me his password to read the subscription-only continuation of the Pinker/Lakoff feud on The National Review's website. You're not really missing much. But then memegarden posted a link to Geoffrey Nunberg's commentary on this flame war (which I haven't read yet) from a section of the TNR site called Open University. This is a non-subscription weblog for academic research-oriented political topics, and looks to be pretty interesting, so I added its feed to Google Reader and have already added a couple other posts to my shared items page: articles about the disproportionality of the Senate and gerrymandering.
memegarden posted a link to Geoffrey Nunberg's commentary on this flame war (which I haven't read yet) from a section of the TNR site called Open University. This is a non-subscription weblog for academic research-oriented political topics, and looks to be pretty interesting, so I added its feed to Google Reader and have already added a couple other posts to my shared items page: articles about the disproportionality of the Senate and gerrymandering.Two more articles about religion, via zosa's friend dave: a Wired article called "The Crusade Against Religion", about "The New Atheists" (e.g. Dawkins and Dennett) and an Atlantic Monthly article called "Is God an Accident?".
The Wired article is kind of shallow and not especially enlightening, other than to show what Wired thinks about atheism: it's trendy, but not worth pissing off your friends for. It portrays Dawkins as a fanatical atheist who wants to remove freedom of religion from the Bill of Rights; to be fair, Dawkins himself does not seem to emphasize enough the difference between speaking out against religion (or simply speaking up for atheism) and outlawing religion, but I'm pretty sure he's all about the former and not the latter. Or maybe I'm just projecting.
The Atlantic Monthly article discusses the biological roots of religion, but I think it goes a little too far in calling our instincts for religion an "accident". Besides being deliberately provocational—creationists love to attack the strawman that evolution is just a series of "accidents"—it seems premature to conclude that supernatural belief is just a side effect or byproduct of the way our brains have separate subsystems for objects and people rather than having its own evolutionary benefits. Dawkins mentioned this in his talk at Harvard as well, so maybe there has been some research to prove that a propensity for religion is not by itself a survival characteristic, but common sense says that, for example, belief in an afterlife could make someone be more willing to die for an altruistic cause (i.e. to benefit his family, tribe, or species), or less willing to "sin" when it would otherwise have no negative effect on himself. This is the sort of thing that I imagined Dennett's Breaking the Spell would have discussed, but after hearing some ofdictator555's reviews I'm not so sure.
The Wired article is kind of shallow and not especially enlightening, other than to show what Wired thinks about atheism: it's trendy, but not worth pissing off your friends for. It portrays Dawkins as a fanatical atheist who wants to remove freedom of religion from the Bill of Rights; to be fair, Dawkins himself does not seem to emphasize enough the difference between speaking out against religion (or simply speaking up for atheism) and outlawing religion, but I'm pretty sure he's all about the former and not the latter. Or maybe I'm just projecting.
The Atlantic Monthly article discusses the biological roots of religion, but I think it goes a little too far in calling our instincts for religion an "accident". Besides being deliberately provocational—creationists love to attack the strawman that evolution is just a series of "accidents"—it seems premature to conclude that supernatural belief is just a side effect or byproduct of the way our brains have separate subsystems for objects and people rather than having its own evolutionary benefits. Dawkins mentioned this in his talk at Harvard as well, so maybe there has been some research to prove that a propensity for religion is not by itself a survival characteristic, but common sense says that, for example, belief in an afterlife could make someone be more willing to die for an altruistic cause (i.e. to benefit his family, tribe, or species), or less willing to "sin" when it would otherwise have no negative effect on himself. This is the sort of thing that I imagined Dennett's Breaking the Spell would have discussed, but after hearing some of
dictator555's reviews I'm not so sure..