Tag: religion

Art/Aesthetics · Performativity · Social/Politics

Porno-graphics and porno-tactics: desire, affect and representation in pornography. An interview with Emilie Jouvet.

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Pornography’s inscriptions in representation have troubled feminist writers, who since the 1970s have been critically addressing issues related to the presentation of the female body. Porn, it was contended, is for the most part a heterosexist genre, and its market circulation serves male libidinal pleasure, fixing the position of pleasure for both wo/men and abiding by patriarchal, gendered and sexually imposed norms. Later, the term was reclaimed under a critical re-perception of porn, cast as a gaze upon different others. This time race, religion, class came to the forefront. From Rosi Braidotti (m.s.) who addresses issues of racism in islamophobic representations such as the documentary ‘Fitna’, to the many commentators who related pornography to acts of torture, most notably in Abu-Ghraib (McClintock 2009) – pornography becomes a ‘concept metaphor’ that haunts autonomy (the laws of the self) through an heteronomous (laws of the other) affect (cf. Nancy 2007). Similarly, in debates over forced sex-work, the voyeuristic humanitarian gaze produces its Others either by sexualizing the other’s body, or by desexualizing the human in it.

On the other hand, many newly emerging artworks, documentaries, and porn productions, attempt to exscribe from porn its initial, normatively repressed qualities, and re-inscribe a feminist or queer perception of enjoyment and pleasure through feminine jouissance and the possibilities to push the limits of representation. In such tactics (de Certeau 1984), porn does not only become a concept-metaphor but, rather, it is being worked through a radical metonymic approach which seeks to transgress norms, explore desires and open up to affects. Tactics thus become tactile.

Continue Reading at Re-Public HERE

Human-ities · Philosophy · Science · Theory

Faith in the Unseen: Curtis White’s ‘Science Delusion’

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Existential angst: The German idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling, circa 1820.

Most works in philosophy enter the world quietly, but not Thomas Nagel’s recent “Mind and Cosmos.” With its chin-leading subtitle, “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,” the slim volume met with a firestorm of indignation from critics who thought Nagel had lost his mind or, worse, had thrown in with intelligent design theory. (Steven Pinker tweeted: “What has gotten into Thomas Nagel? . . . a once-great thinker.”) What incited the reaction was Nagel’s questioning whether advances in neuroscience are on the verge of resolving the mysteries of consciousness, and with it issues that have fueled philosophical speculation for centuries, from subjectivity to free will.

Rather like Nagel, but angrier, is the novelist and critic Curtis White. Though neither a research scientist nor a trained philosopher, he is infuriated by the sunny confidence of neuroscience, arguing that it is not just a product of ambitious overreach but, more, a willful act of arrogance. In his rambling book “The Science Delusion,” he writes that the coming battle in this neo-Darwinian culture war will be an all-out assault against imagination by scientists and popular science journalists: “Freed at last from the limits imposed by religion, science has extended its ambitions beyond the debunking of Christian dogma. It has now turned its attention to another old competitor, the secular world of the humanities and the arts.” This may come as news to some of White’s would-be shock troops, who generally haven’t announced their hostile intentions to art and the imagination, but White sees their pernicious effects spreading across contemporary American life.

Excerpt from an article written by ERIC BANKS at NYT. Continue THERE

Earthly/Geo/Astro · Human-ities · Science · Technology

Iron in Egyptian relics came from space: Meteorite impacts thousands of years ago may have helped to inspire ancient religion.

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The 5,000-year-old iron bead might not look like much, but it hides a spectacular past: researchers have found that an ancient Egyptian trinket is made from a meteorite.

The result, published on 20 May in Meteoritics & Planetary Science, explains how ancient Egyptians obtained iron millennia before the earliest evidence of iron smelting in the region, solving an enduring mystery. It also hints that they regarded meteorites highly as they began to develop their religion.

“The sky was very important to the ancient Egyptians,” says Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester, UK, and a co-author of the paper. “Something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods.”

The tube-shaped bead is one of nine found in 1911 in a cemetery at Gerzeh, around 70 kilometres south of Cairo. The cache dates from about 3,300 bc, making the beads the oldest known iron artefacts from Egypt.

Text and Image via Nature. Continue reading HERE

Ancient Egyptians accessorized with meteorites. Via The Open University.

Human-ities · Science · Vital-Edible-Health

Religious Trauma Syndrome: How Some Organized Religion Leads to Mental Health Problems

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Dr. Marlene Winell is a human development consultant in the San Francisco Area. She is also the daughter of Pentecostal missionaries. This combination has given her work an unusual focus. For the past twenty years she has counseled men and women in recovery from various forms of fundamentalist religion including the Assemblies of God denomination in which she was raised. Winell is the author of Leaving the Fold – A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving their Religion, written during her years of private practice in psychology. Over the years, Winell has provided assistance to clients whose religious experiences were even more damaging than mine. Some of them are people whose psychological symptoms weren’t just exacerbated by their religion, but actually caused by it.

Two years ago, Winell made waves by formally labeling what she calls “Religious Trauma Syndrome” (RTS) and beginning to write and speak on the subject for professional audiences. When the British Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Psychologists published a series of articles on the topic, members of a Christian counseling association protested what they called excessive attention to a “relatively niche topic.” One commenter said, “A religion, faith or book cannot be abuse but the people interpreting can make anything abusive.”

Is toxic religion simply misinterpretation? What is religious trauma? Why does Winell believe religious trauma merits its own diagnostic label?

Excerpt from an interview with Dr. Marlene Winell by Valerie Tarico at IEET. Continue THERE

Human-ities · Science

The Science of Compassion

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ALL the major religions place great importance on compassion. Whether it’s the parable of the good Samaritan in Christianity, Judaism’s “13 attributes of compassion” or the Buddha’s statement that “loving kindness and compassion is all of our practice,” empathy with the suffering of others is seen as a special virtue that has the power to change the world. This idea is often articulated by the Dalai Lama, who argues that individual experiences of compassion radiate outward and increase harmony for all.

As a social psychologist interested in the emotions, I long wondered whether this spiritual understanding of compassion was also scientifically accurate. Empirically speaking, does the experience of compassion toward one person measurably affect our actions and attitudes toward other people? If so, are there practical steps we can take to further cultivate this feeling? Recently, my colleagues and I conducted experiments that answered yes to both questions.

Excerpt of an article written by DAVID DeSTENO, NYT. Continue HERE

Book-Text-Read-Zines · Earthly/Geo/Astro · Eco/Adaptable · Human-ities · Philosophy · Science

Nature, Science, and Religion: Intersections Shaping Society and the Environment

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This book is about the complicated and provocative ways nature, science, and religion intersect in real settings where people attempt to live in harmony with the physical environment. Scholars of philosophy, religious studies, and science and technology have been at the forefront of critiquing the roles of religion and science in human interactions with the natural world. Meanwhile, researchers in the environmental sciences have encountered disciplinary barriers to examining the possibility that religious beliefs influence social–ecological behaviors and processes simply because the issue resists quantitative assessment. The contributors to this book explore how scientific knowledge and spiritual beliefs are engaged to shape natural resource management, environmental activism, and political processes.

Table of Contents

1.) Intersections of Nature, Science, and Religion: An Introduction / Catherine M. Tucker and Adrian J. Ivakhiv
2.)Suffering, Service, and Justice: Matters of Faith and How Faith Matters to the Environmental Movement in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest / Colleen M. Scanlan Lyons
3.)On Enchanting Science and Disenchanting Nature: Spiritual Warfare in North America and Papua New Guinea / Joel Robbins
4.)Technologies of the Real: Science, Religion, and State Making in Mexican Forests / Andrew S. Mathews
5.)Surviving Conservation: La Madre Tierra and Indigenous Moral Ecologies in Oaxaca, Mexico / Kristin Norget
6.)Syncretism and Conservation: Examining Indigenous Beliefs and Natural Resource Management in Honduras / Catherine M. Tucker
7.)Do You Understand? Discovering the Power of Religion for Conservation in Guatemalan Mayan Communities / Anne Motley Hallum
8.)Believing Is Seeing: A Religious Perspective on Mountaineering in the Japanese Alps / Scott Schnell
9.)The Productivity of Nonreligious Faith: Openness, Pessimism, and Water in Latin America / Andrea Ballestero
10.)Zimbabwe’s Earthkeepers: When Green Warriors Enter the Valley of Shadows / Marthinus L. Daneel
11.)Religious (Re-)Turns in the Wake of Global Nature: Toward a Cosmopolitics / Adrian J. Ivakhiv

Text and Image via:
Nature, Science, and Religion
Intersections Shaping Society and the Environment
Edited by Catherine M. Tucker

Human-ities · Science · Social/Politics · Theory

Religious People Are Less Compassionate Than Atheists

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A series of three new studies indicates that less religious people, agnostics and atheists are more likely to be generous to those in need while driven by compassion than highly religious individuals. The works call into question widespread assumptions about the link between religion and compassion.

Researchers from the University of California in Berkeley (UCB) found that people in the latter category are less likely to be driven by compassion when they are generous. Social scientists at the university say that compassion is unrelated to generosity in this group.

On the other hand, people in the first category are very likely to give to the poor, or help others out simply because they are compassionate. In other words, their actions come from a genuine interest for helping others out, not because their religion calls for this behavior.

Details of the three studies appear in the latest online issue of the esteemed journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. The researchers say that acts of generosity and charity may not be driven by feelings of empathy and compassion, as some studies had suggested.

“Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not,” UCB social psychologist Robb Willer says. He was a coauthor of the new paper.

“The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns,” the expert goes on to say.

For the purpose of this investigation, compassion was defined as the emotion that individuals feel when they see others suffering, an emotion based on which they act to help the latter, regardless of personal cost or risk, and without expecting rewards. Religious people expect a reward in the afterlife.

This is one of the main critiques associated with the stance organized religion takes on helping others. Believers are encouraged to be generous with those in need by being told that this will help them after death.

Atheists, agnostics and less-religious people help others due to a genuine sense of compassion, without expecting the get into the good graces of God for their effort. They are also not guided by a moral obligation instilled in them by religious leaders, churches and doctrines, but rather by their impulses.

The study results can be interpreted as providing additional evidence that morality, good conduct, compassion and generosity, among other behaviors, do not stem from religion, as many religious and spiritual leaders would have people believe. Rather, they stem from our human nature.

An article written by Tudor Vieru at Softpedia

Highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than are non-believers

Human-ities · Performativity · Public Space · Social/Politics

The harm of hate speech

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Eurozine: Free speech advocates opposed to the prohibition of hate speech tend to underrate the harm hate speech causes, argues Jeremy Waldron. Where it exists, such legislation upholds a public good by protecting the basic dignitary order of society.

“We speak openly and with civility about all kinds of human difference” is the fourth draft principle for global free expression proposed by the Free Speech Debate project. That is something we can all applaud. But as Timothy Garton Ash’s commentary indicates, it raises further issues that are not conveyed in the formulation of the principle itself. Should “speaking openly” mean speaking without any legal constraint, even when the speech is manifestly uncivil? So the discussion raises the issue of hate speech and the difficult question about whether it is ever appropriate to legislate against it.

The most striking thing about Timothy’s commentary on this issue is the absence of any substantial consideration of the harm that hate speech may do to those who are its targets. The message conveyed by a hateful pamphlet or poster, attacking someone on grounds of race, religion, sexuality, or ethnicity, is something like this:

“Don’t be fooled into thinking you are welcome here. The society around you may seem hospitable and non-discriminatory, but the truth is that you are not wanted, and you and your families will be shunned, excluded, beaten, and driven out, whenever we can get away with it. We may have to keep a low profile right now. But don’t get too comfortable. Remember what has happened to you and your kind in the past. Be afraid.”

Excerpt of an article written by Jeremy Waldron, Eurozine. Continue HERE Image via Out of the over flow

Human-ities · Philosophy · Technology

Unreasonable Atheist? Robert Wright on Richard Dawkins

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Robert Wright : “…But is Dawkins really pursuing our common goal in a reasonable way? At the Reason Rally he encouraged people not just to take issue with religious teachings, but to “ridicule” religious belief and show “contempt” for it.”

Read at The Atlantic

Part 1

Part 2

Of course, they didn’t even touch any of the muffins and pastries.

Book-Text-Read-Zines · Human-ities · Philosophy · Theory

Is Free Will an Illusion?

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Free will has long been a fraught concept among philosophers and theologians. Now neuroscience is entering the fray.

For centuries, the idea that we are the authors of our own actions, beliefs, and desires has remained central to our sense of self. We choose whom to love, what thoughts to think, which impulses to resist. Or do we?

Neuroscience suggests something else. We are biochemical puppets, swayed by forces beyond our conscious control. So says Sam Harris, author of the new book, Free Will (Simon & Schuster), a broadside against the notion that we are in control of our own thoughts and actions. Harris’s polemic arrives on the heels of Michael S. Gazzaniga’s Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (HarperCollins), and David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Pantheon), both provocative forays into a debate that has in recent months spilled out onto op-ed and magazine pages, and countless blogs.

What’s at stake? Just about everything: morality, law, religion, our understanding of accountability and personal accomplishment, even what it means to be human. Harris predicts that a declaration by the scientific community that free will is an illusion would set off “a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution.”

The Chronicle Review brought together some key thinkers to discuss what science can and cannot tell us about free will, and where our conclusions might take us.

You Don’t Have Free Will
Jerry A. Coyne

The Case Against the Case Against Free Will
Alfred R. Mele

Free Will Is an Illusion, but You’re Still Responsible for Your Actions
Michael S. Gazzaniga

Want to Understand Free Will? Don’t Look to Neuroscience
Hilary Bok

The End of (Discussing) Free Will
Owen D. Jones

Free Will Does Not Exist. So What?
Paul Bloom

Text by The Chronicle Review
Image via Wired’s earlier article on Free Will

Book-Text-Read-Zines · Human-ities · Social/Politics

The Faith of the Faithless: Simon Critchley Interview

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With the publication of his new book The Faith of the Faithless, Jonny Gordon-Farleigh from STIR spoke to philosopher Simon Critchley about why a counterfactual faith is so important to modern politics, why it offers an “archive of possibilities” for those involved in political transformation, why there is still an obsession with “big men”, and what the the true political terrain is today.

STIR: It has been reasoned that the recent theological revival is because of a “theoretical deficit, not a theological need” (Alberto Toscano). Are there more reasons for this unexpected if not unusual upturn in interest in political theology than the catastrophic failure of the communist projects of the previous century?

Simon Critchley: The interest in political theology comes out of a dissatisfaction with liberalism. The notion of political theology as a category or term actually originates in Bakunin. So, it originates in Italian thought in the mid-nineteenth century and is also first used as an abusive term. And when Carl Schmitt picks it up in the 1920s he gives it a different valence but the object of attack for both Bakunin and Schmitt, on the left and on the right, is the same liberalism.

Periodising that, you have the aftermath of the collapse of the Warsaw pact and the Soviet Union, and the period in the early 90s when there is a lot of optimism about the potential within democracy for emancipatory energies that then quickly exhausts itself. Then, there is a return to the theological concerns at that moment, which isn’t so much a return to communist ideas as an attempt to find something at the level of the deep motivational structure of what it means to be a human self and what selves might be together. If you are interested in that question then the history of religious thought is really a place to look — maybe the place to look.

Continue via STIR

Art/Aesthetics · Education · Events · Performativity · Science · Vital-Edible-Health

Individual ecstasies: the revelatory experience conference

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On March 23rd London will host a unique conference on the neuroscience, psychiatry and interpretation of revelatory visionary experiences.

Mental health professionals frequently encounter people who report experiences of God or supernatural beings speaking or acting through them to reveal important truths. In some cases it is difficult to know to what extent such experiences are best explained as ‘illness’, or represent experiences which are accepted and valued within a person’s religious or cultural context. Indeed, revelatory experiences form a key part of the formation and development of major world religions through figures such as prophets, visionaries, and yogins, as well as in the religious practice of shamans and others in traditional smaller scale societies. Why are revelatory experiences and related altered states of consciousness so common across cultures and history? What neural and other processes cause them? When should they be thought of as due to mental illness, as opposed to culturally accepted religious experience? And what value should or can be placed upon them? In this one day conference leading scholars from neuroscience, psychiatry, theology and religious studies, history and anthropology gather to present recent findings, and debate with each other and the audience about these fundamental aspects of human experience.

Who should attend: This one day interdisciplinary conference will be useful to academic psychologists, neuroscientists and humanities scholars interested in understanding the possibilities for interdisciplinary understanding of complex human behavior; as well as psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, nurses and any professionals whose work requires them to make sense of the relations between culture, religion, and mental health.

Confirmed Speakers

Dr Quinton Deeley, Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry Kings College London, and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, SLAM

Professor Stephen Pattison, Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Practice at the University of Birmingham

Dr Mitul Mehta, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London

Dr Eamonn Walsh, Post doctoral Researcher, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London

Professor Chris Rowland, Dean Ireland Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture from Oxford

Professor Roland Littlewood, Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at University College London

Professor David Oakley, University College London
The Very Rev Dr Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral San Fransisco

Dr Piers Vitebsky, Head of Anthropology and Russian Arctic Studies, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge

Professor Geoffrey Samuel, Religious Studies, University of Cardiff

Click HERE for more Info. Image source

Human-ities · Philosophy · Science

Are We the Reason for the Universe’s Existence? The Anthropic Principle Reconsidered

Sebastian Alvarez4 Comments

Multiverse by BellaCielo

You are special. Don’t worry, this is not the start of yet another Joel Osteen sermon. I mean only that your existence, itself a wildly improbable fact, increasingly seems to be the only peg on which cosmologists can hang the existence of our Universe.

Oh, and not just you, by the way. I’m special, too. All of us observers capable of wondering why we are here are special, because we contribute to what is known as the Anthropic Principle. Here’s the nub of it, given by Stephen Hawking and a colleague in 1973: “The answer to the question ‘why is the universe [the way it is]?’ is ‘because we are here.'”

There’s something odd about that. As the cosmologist George F.R. Ellis notes, the Anthropic Principle sends the arrow of causation winging, feathers first, back to the bow. It declares, to paraphrase DesCartes, “I think, therefore the Multiverse.”

Written by Clay Farris Naff at the Huffington Post. Continue HERE

Design · Paint/Illust./Mix-Media

Pseudo-Scientific Expressions of Metaphysical Awareness by Minjeong An

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A Study on Pseudo-Scientific Expressions of Metaphysical Awareness

Human beings have acknowledged mental world for a long time, that is, ‘metaphysical awareness’, and endeavored to make it attainable. The purposes of this study are to examine how invisible and abstract figures that people can feel in their daily routine are expressed as art particularly in drawings and how I illustrated them in my drawings.

With a historical consideration of metaphysical expressions in drawings, the research aims at finding that its subjects have been an incantation, religion, eternity, rank, divinity, subjective emotion, and abstract from the primitive age to the present, and proving the metaphysical expressions of mine by pseudo-scientific method on the basis of the previous metaphysics. However, the desire to scientifically express metaphysical awareness eventually becomes mock science at the scientific point of view. This is rather the drawing combined with individual and scientific theories. It looks very dry and scientific but its inner world exceptionally contains author’s own emotional and footloose imagination. Mental world that cannot be scientifically demonstrated is ultimately proved as pseudo-scientific way combined with irrational opinions, and its pseudo-scientific evidence makes another drawings. The collision derived from science and art forms a different dimensional metaphysical abstract drawing. — Minjeong An

Via 50Watts