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POPSDoes Religion Make You Nice?Does atheism make you mean? It is at this point that the "We need God to be good" case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.
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POPSTowards a neuropsychology of religion: 'Doctrinal' rituals help create semantic memories of key concepts and emotional response through associative learning, while 'imagistic' rituals help create episodic memories of specific situations that may involve altered states of consciousness and the experience of other realities.
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POPSThe Mind-Altering Role of Incense in Religion Under the influence of a good snoot full of incense, mice in scary situations, such as being put in a swimming pool, remain calm, anxiety-free. At the alter, too, people feel the same sense of peace that comes from either the comforting words of the clergy, or from the intoxicating, brain altering, smell of incense. In an age of endless anxiety, no wonder religion works; it is both cultural and biological. Karl Marx claimed that organized religion was the "opiate of the people," meaning it dulls us into complacency, but that might not be such a bad thing.
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POPSRadical Life Extension and Religious Evolution "Technology will inject competition into religion and force religious authorities to clarify what they mean by immortality." This is important, according to Cole-Turner because "there is currently a lot of evasiveness about what immortality means."
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POPSDuelity Just go to http://www.duelity.net/ & click "watch". There are three short movies.
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POPSAsk the Atheist This site was created to provide a resource for people who are curious about atheism and to counter some misunderstandings about this way of looking at the world
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POPSIs there an Artificial God? - Douglas Adams
So, my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it's worth remembering that the fictions with which we previously populated our world may have some function that it's worth trying to understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water; because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, or something like them, to be there. I suspect that as we move further and further into the field of digital or artificial life we will find more and more unexpected properties begin to emerge out of what we see happening and that this is a precise parallel to the entities we create around ourselves to inform and shape our lives and enable us to work and live together. Therefore, I would argue that though there isn't an actual god there is an artificial god and we should probably bear that in mind.
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POPSWhy Are Americans Afraid of Being Naked? Not all Americans seem to be afraid of being naked. See http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/FB61BFCC-2C0B-40FA-A0DB-38449512EE0D/ :) See also: http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/CA5F01AE-20C4-406A-9483-775687B6BBAE/
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POPSDarwin’s God “All of our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs . . . are equally organically founded,” William James wrote in “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”
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POPSKilling the Buddha a fascinating and interesting read:from the article: "It is as yet undetermined what it means to be human, because every facet of our culture—and even our biology itself—remains open to innovation and insight."
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