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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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POPSSolomon’s House from the article :"When I think, however, of the young children who are unprepared to critically assess the museum, my sense of humor fades. It is one thing to offer alternative histories, but to link huge branches of science with moral corruption is not going to be good for the cultivation of open-minded, curious citizenry"
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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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POPSSam Harris: Yahweh Belongs on the Scrapheap of Mythology I’d like to begin this exchange by making the observation that “atheist” is a term that should not even exist. We do not, after all, have a name for a person who does not believe in Zeus or Thor. In fact, we are all “atheists” with respect to Zeus and Thor and the thousands of other dead gods that now lie upon the scrapheap of mythology. ... Did someone around the time of Constantine discover that the pagan gods do not actually exist, while the biblical God does? Of course not. There are thousands of gods that were once worshipped with absolute conviction by men and women like ourselves, and yet we all now agree that they are rightly dead. An “atheist” is simply someone who thinks that the God of Abraham should be buried with the rest of these imaginary friends. I am quite sure that we need only use words like “reason,” “common sense,” “evidence,” and “intellectual honesty” to do the job.
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