Book-in-Progress: Spirit on the Brain: The Paleolithic, Neolithic, Neurological and Magical Origins of Religion
This forthcoming book (c. 2012) will trace the evolution of religion and meditation-based spirituality from paleolithic, pre-scientific times into our own—from shamanic rituals and healing, through alchemy, into the neuroscience underlying higher-state-of-consciousness experiences.
Recent Posts:
March 15: Aristotle’s Error
February 15: The Happiness Hypothesis
From Pope slams Irish church, no Vatican blame in abuse:
Pope Benedict XVI rebuked Irish bishops Saturday for “grave errors of judgment” in handling clerical sex abuse cases and ordered an investigation into the Irish church. But he laid no blame for the problem on the Vatican’s policies of keeping such cases secret….
The God-Father turns against his own Family, how unfortunate….
The letter directly addressed only Ireland, but the Vatican said it could be read as applying to other countries. Hundreds of new allegations of abuse have recently come to light across Europe, including in the pope’s native Germany, where he served as archbishop in a diocese where several victims have recently come forward. One priest suspected of molesting boys while the future pope was in charge was transferred to a job where he abused more children.
While a cardinal at the Vatican, Joseph Ratzinger penned a 2001 letter instructing bishops around the world to report all cases of abuse to his office and keep the church investigations secret under threat of excommunication. While the Vatican insists that secrecy rule only applied to the church’s investigation and didn’t preclude reporting abuse to police, Irish bishops have said the letter was widely understood to mean they shouldn’t report the cases to civil authorities.
You know how people like Ann Coulter react to stuff like this, right? By pointing out that the abuse rate of students by teachers in public schools is higher than it is in the Church—the implication being that the only reason why the RCC’s never-ending abuses are front-page news, while public schools’ aren’t, is ’cause of the anti-god biases of the liberal atheist media. Not because of serial abusers being reassigned without punishment to where they can leaves their sins unconfessed, and abuse some more; not because of the deliberate cover-ups; not because the victims of those priestly abuses launch class-action lawsuits—even though none of those issues have counterparts in public-school abuses. And also never mind that, unlike taking it up the ass for God from your neighborhood Holy Pedophile, few if any teenage boys would ever feel psychologically harmed by being taken advantage of by an older woman, even if she’s his teacher.
You remember the line in the first American Pie movie, when the protagonist wakes up alone with an inflatable dinosaur after having spent the night with Alyson Hannigan’s character? “She took advantage of me. [Smiles.] She took advantage of me! Cool!!” Also consider Van Halen’s song, “Hot for Teacher”: Few are the guys who can’t relate to its juicy sentiments. (Full disclosure: Growing up in the Land without Sunshine, I never had any cute female teachers in high school.)
But no, when priests sodomizing altar boys makes it into the news, it’s only because of those damned, god-hating atheists.
Thing is, it’s always worse when you’re ruining other people’s lives with God on your side. How can that not be obvious, even to religious lunatics like Coulter?
Victims have been demanding that bishops resign, and three Irish bishops have offered to step down. Benedict hasn’t accepted the resignations.
Damned atheists.
Alright, it’s really not much of a video. But it does offer one more point of data in my thesis that David St. Hubbins’ name and hair was based on David Lee Roth.
On Carol Leifer (former write for Seinfeld).
Leifer recently became vegan, saying “I recently became vegan because I felt that as a Jewish lesbian, I wasn’t part of a small enough minority. So now I’m a Jewish lesbian vegan.”
That’s fantastically insightful, in terms of how minority-group membership (and the associated grievance-mongering) works.
In my inbox this afternoon:
Don’t miss Sting on his world tour this summer, accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra.
See him perform his most celebrated songs re-imagined for symphonic arrangement, including fan-favourites “Roxanne,” “Every Breath You Take” and “Fields of Gold.”
Uh, pass.
I like Sting’s music a lot. But an orchestral version of “Roxanne”? What was he smoking when he came up with that idea?
Aside from the LSO playing the music of Jethro Tull (with Ian Anderson fluting away), there are very few orchestral arrangements of pop songs that actually work. Including Peter Gabriel’s recent album (which I only got halfway through, before abandoning the attempt).
The LSO/Tull CD is seriously brilliant.
This (from a thread on Slashdot concerning immigration) is funny:
As for jobs, given the current ~10% unemployment rate, a lot of these businesses don’t need to hire intruders from Mexico or Canada anymore. There are plenty of hungry or homeless Americans willing to pick crops or defeather chickens or whatever else it takes to earn money to survive.
First time I’ve ever heard it suggested that impoverished Canadians were crossing the border to do unskilled gruntwork in the Great and Free United States!
Our economy is growing faster than yours, guys, and our housing market is in far better shape, too. And that differential is only going to increase over the next three years, while you’ve got President Halfblack Cipher Golfclub at the helm, versus our minority Conservative government.
Harpernation rules! Obamanation sucks! Deal with it:
[T]he Canadian economy is performing better than the U.S. economy, which reflects well on the [dollar-parity] currency valuation.
“The reality is the domestic side of the Canadian economy is much stronger, (and) the Canadian financial system is operating normally, whereas the U.S. system isn’t“….
So don’t expect us to come begging to be allowed to pluck your chickens anytime soon, damned Yankees!
(Red Sox rule!!!)
You know how the ability of salamanders to regenerate their limbs always comes up when New Age healers are making claims about their own healing abilities? Here’s how it really works, for salamanders and their ilk:
A quest that began over a decade ago with a chance observation has reached a milestone: the identification of a gene that may regulate regeneration in mammals. The absence of this single gene, called p21, confers a healing potential in mice long thought to have been lost through evolution and reserved for creatures like flatworms, sponges, and some species of salamander.
In a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from The Wistar Institute demonstrate that mice that lack the p21 gene gain the ability to regenerate lost or damaged tissue.
Unlike typical mammals, which heal wounds by forming a scar, these mice begin by forming a blastema, a structure associated with rapid cell growth and de-differentiation as seen in amphibians. According to the Wistar researchers, the loss of p21 causes the cells of these mice to behave more like embryonic stem cells than adult mammalian cells, and their findings provide solid evidence to link tissue regeneration to the control of cell division.
“Much like a newt that has lost a limb, these mice will replace missing or damaged tissue with healthy tissue that lacks any sign of scarring,” said the project’s lead scientist Ellen Heber-Katz, Ph.D., a professor in Wistar’s Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis program. “While we are just beginning to understand the repercussions of these findings, perhaps, one day we’ll be able to accelerate healing in humans by temporarily inactivating the p21 gene.”
Bollocks is a word of Anglo-Saxon origin, meaning “testicles.” The word is often used figuratively in British English, as a noun to mean “nonsense,” an expletive following a minor accident or misfortune, or an adjective to mean “poor quality” or “useless.” Similarly, the common phrases “Bollocks to this!” or “That’s a load of old bollocks” generally indicate contempt for a certain task, subject or opinion. Conversely, the word also figures in idiomatic phrases such as “the dog’s bollocks” and “top bollock(s),” which usually refer to something which is admired, approved of or well-respected.
The word has a long and distinguished history, with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) giving examples of its usage dating back to the 13th century. One of the early references is John Wycliffe’s Bible (1382), Leviticus xxii, 24: “Al beeste, that … kitt and taken a wey the ballokes is, ye shulen not offre to the Lord…” (any beast that is cut and taken away the bollocks, you shall not offer to the Lord, i.e. castrated animals are not suitable as religious sacrifices)….
The Teutonic ball- in turn probably derives from the Proto-Indo-European base *bhel-, to inflate or swell. This base also forms the root of many other words, including “phallus.”
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, bollocks or ballocks was allegedly used as a slang term for a clergyman, although this meaning is not mentioned by the OED’s 1989 edition. For example, in 1864, the Commanding Officer of the Straits Fleet regularly referred to his chaplain as “Ballocks.” It has been suggested that bollocks came to have its modern meaning of “nonsense” because clergymen were notorious for talking nonsense during their sermons.
Ain’t that the truth.
In 1977, Professor James Kingsley, a famous linguistics professor at the University of Nottingham, had accredited the word to be used in the early eighteenth century with the Roman Catholic Church priests. His studies show that the actual word “bollocks” means either a priest, or “rubbish spoken by the priest.” Often, there were priests in the early eighteenth century who generally spoke rubbish, which is how the term “bollocks” became associated with verbal diarrhoea. The conviction came from the fact that Professor James Kingsley himself was a reverend and had been doing linguistic history research all his life….
“Ballock” is a variation of “bollock,” which was in everyday usage in the medieval period, albeit rarely heard today. The connection with “ball” in the sense of “testis” is evident.
Well, never mind the dog’s bollocks, then—here’s the Catholic clergy.
During the 1990s, a craze of shouting “bollocks!” swept through UK festivals, for example the Reading and Leeds festivals. Upon hearing someone shouting the word, the etiquette was to repeat the word as loudly as possible. The end result was seemingly spontaneous outbreaks of “bollocks!”-shouting spreading across the campsites. This may have begun at Isle of Wight Festival 1970.
Blimey.
Check this out: A Guide to Monastic Guest Houses.
Here, the militant atheist and uncompromising skeptic in me bumps straight up against the “vagrant gypsy” who’s always looking for a quiet, inexpensive place to stay. (Especially after the idiot in the apartment above me was hammering again at 1 a.m. last night.)
A “room at the inn” on Christmas Eve, as it were….
This “ethnic minority” bullshit is still annoying the hell out of me.
If you’re a white man living in a house full of black women in Chinatown, in a southern city where whites are less than 50% of the population, in a state where the northern half is majority-white but the southern half is overrun by meztizos, how are you benefiting from any supposed “white male privilege”? How does your regular experience of (non-white) racism and (female) sexism differ from that of a person who’s a member of a recognized “ethnic minority” group? How are you not, for all practical purposes, an ethnic-minority group member? (Bonus “minority-group points” for being a gay white man in a house full of straight black women.)
Or, if you’re an Asian living in an Asian-majority community in northern California and attending UC Berkeley, are you still an “ethnic minority”?
(Hint: Berkeley is a majority-Asian school.)
