Marginal Christianity

February 27, 2017 Issue New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason. By Elizabeth Kolbert In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones. Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances. As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been to...

  Via Shutterstock.com , with illustration by Jerod Clark Branson Parler 06/07/15 Even as people have been reflecting on the recent Pew research noting the diminishing numbers of American Christians, a recent National Geographic cover article bemoaned another sort of unbelief, claiming that “we live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge - from climate change to vaccinations - faces furious opposition.” How do we account for the way that the corrosive unbelief of our age is not just limited to matters of religion, but of science as well? Read more at http://thinkchristian.reframemedia.com/how-science-and-reason-created-an-age-of-unbelief-in-science-and-reason  

By Jann Ingmire    http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2014/03/27/brain-scans-link-concern-justice-reason-not-emotion March 27, 2014 People who care about justice are swayed more by reason than emotion, according to new brain scan research from the Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. Psychologists have found that some individuals react more strongly than others to situations that invoke a sense of justice —for example, seeing a person being treated unfairly or mercifully. The new study used brain scans to analyze the thought processes of people with high “justice sensitivity.” “We were interested to examine how individual differences about justice and fairness are represented in the brain to better understand the contribution of emotion and cognition in moral judgment,” explained lead author Jean Decety , the Irving B. Harris Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry.  ...

Into the Expectation (Matt Gunter) http://intotheexpectation.blogspot.com/2012/06/my-prejudices-vs-your-prejudices.html Wednesday, June 20, 2012 The difference between my prejudices and your prejudices is that my prejudices (convictions and values so obvious they don’t need explaining) don’t really count as prejudices. They are just the way reasonable, intelligent, faithful [insert whatever self-congratulatory designation suits you] people know things to be. Thus, those who don’t see it that way must be operating out of sin, ignorance, or blind prejudice. And it is, therefore, not mean when we refer to you as ignorant, stupid, afraid, or nefarious. We are merely stating the truth. This is how most contemporary political rhetoric sounds to me. It is how a fair amount of Facebook status updates sound to me - whether the prejudices reflected are conservative or liberal/progressive. Even more sadly, it is also how too much of the 'conversation' on church blogs and listser...

Opinionator - A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web March 26, 2012 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/citing-chapter-and-verse-which-scripture-is-the-right-one/ The topic this past Sunday on the show “Up w/ Chris Hayes” (MSNBC) was the statistical correlation between deniers of global warming and religious believers. Participants included such luminaries as Richard Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion,” and Steven Pinker, author of “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” a new book arguing that the world has gotten less violent as the tide of fundamentalist faith has receded and given way to the dictates of reason. It was no surprise that the panel’s default position, stated almost explicitly by Susan Jacoby, was that religion clouds the mind of those who, if they were only sufficiently educated, would arrive at the conclusion supported by the overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence and reject the blind adherence to revealed or ecclesiastical authority that c...