Dr. Andrew Newberg – “God and the Brain”

Monday, January 23, 2012, 7:00 PM

SELECTED BY: GEORGE

Free Library of Philadelphia

1901 Vine St, Philadelphia, PA (map)

In lower level, Montgomery auditorium

SELECTED BY: GEORGE

Physician, educator and author Dr. Andrew Newberg will present “God and the Brain.” His presentation will discuss current knowledge about brain processes as they relate to religious and spiritual phenomena. Topics will include religious belief systems, the experience of God, and practices such as prayer and meditation. The implications of this research for both science and religion will also be presented.

Dr. Andrew Newberg is Director of Research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College. He is also Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is Board-certified in Internal Medicine and Nuclear Medicine. and is considered a pioneer in the neuroscientific study of religious and spiritual experiences, a field frequently referred to as – neurotheology. His work attempts to better understand the nature of religious and spiritual practices and experiences.Principles of Neurotheology

This work has been compiled into his latest book, Principles of Neurotheology, which reviews the important principles and foundations of neurotheology. Believing that it is important to keep science rigorous and religion religious, he has engaged the topic like few others. He has been fascinated by the implications of this research for the study of the mind, brain, consciousness, morality, theology, and philosophy. He has also been particularly interested in the relationship between the brain, religion, and health. His research has included brain scans of people in prayer, meditation, rituals, and various trance states. He has also performed surveys of people’s spiritual experiences and attitudes. Finally, he has evaluated the relationship between religious and spiritual phenomena and health. This includes a recent study on the effect of meditation on memory.

In his career, he has also actively pursued neuroimaging research projects on the study of aging and dementia, Parkinson’s disease, depression, and other neurological and psychiatric disorders. He has also researched the neurophysiological correlates of acupuncture, meditation, and alternative therapies, and how brain function is associated with mystical and religious experiences. Dr. Newberg helped develop stress-management programs for the University of Pennsylvania Health Systems and received a Science and Religion Course Award from the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences for his program entitled “The Biology of Spirituality” in the Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania. He is currently teaching a course in the Department of Religious Studies entitled, “Science and the Sacred: An Introduction to Neurotheology.”

And then equally as wonderful, in celebration of Ben Franklins birthday:

The Curiosity of Ben Franklin: Freethought and Citizenship

Monday, January 23, 2012, 7:00 PM

SELECTED BY: MICHAEL TWEED

Philadelphia Ethical Society

1906 Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA (map)

SELECTED BY: MICHAEL TWEED

With the anniversary of Ben Franklin’s 306th birthday, the Philadelphia Ethical Society is co-hosting with the Ben Franklin Thinking Society a conversation with Roy E. Goodman, Curator of Printed Materials, Library, American Philosophical Society. Hugh Taft-Morales, Leader of the Ethical Humanist Society of Philadelphia, will hosts the dialogue, followed by questions from the audience, refreshments, and socializing.

This event is free and open to the public, so come on out and celebrate Ben’s birthday.

I hope to see as many of you out there as possible!

Dine and Discuss: Women in the Workplace
Start Date:     1/18/2012       Start Time:     5:00 PM
End Date:       1/18/2012       End Time:       6:30 PM
Event Description
Social Justice Week 2012, a week of events showcasing social justice
issues presents, “Dine and Discuss: Women in the Workplace” with
Drexel University administrators and faculty members- Dr. Rebecca
Weidensaul, Dr. Stephanie Brooks, Dr. Shivanthi Anandan, Lieutenant
Maura A. Gillen, and Yolanda Udvardy.

Come join us for dinner and a panel discussion with women representing
leadership positions at Drexel University, discussing experiences of
being a woman in a traditionally “male dominated” society and
workplace issues specific to the female sex.

Co-sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Programs and Steinbright
Career Development Center.
Contact Information:
Name: Kerry Hooks
Phone: 215-895-2662
Email: kmh373@drexel.edu

Location:
James E. Marks Intercultural Center- First Floor Gallery
Audience:
Current Students
Faculty
Public
Staff

http://events.drexel.edu/EventList.aspx?fromdate=1/18/2012&todate=1/18/2012&display=Day&type=public&eventidn=716&view=EventDetails&information_id=1836

Afterwards we will continue to talk on the theme in the Cresse Student Center.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMmvu9eMrg

Dear Prime Minister,
Merry Christmas! I mean it. All that “Happy Holiday Season” stuff, with “holiday” cards and “holiday” presents, is a tiresome import from the US, where it has long been fostered more by rival religions than by atheists. A cultural Anglican (whose family has been part of the Chipping Norton Set since 1727, as you’ll see if you look around you in the parish church), I recoil from secular carols such as “White Christmas”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and the loathsome “Jingle Bells”, but I’m happy to sing real carols, and in the unlikely event that anyone wants me to read a lesson I’ll gladly oblige – only from the King James Version, of course.

Token objections to cribs and carols are not just silly, they distract vital attention from the real domination of our culture and politics that religion still gets away with, in (tax-free) spades. There’s an important difference between traditions freely embraced by individuals and traditions enforced by government edict. Imagine the outcry if your government were to require every family to celebrate Christmas in a religious way. You wouldn’t dream of abusing your power like that. And yet your government, like its predecessors, does force religion on our society, in ways whose very familiarity disarms us. Setting aside the 26 bishops in the House of Lords, passing lightly over the smooth inside track on which the Charity Commission accelerates faith-based charities to tax-free status while others (quite rightly) have to jump through hoops, the most obvious and most dangerous way in which governments impose religion on our society is through faith schools – as Rabbi Jonathan Romain reminds us on page 27.

We should teach about religion, if only because religion is such a salient force in world politics and such a potent driver of lethal conflict. We need more and better instruction in comparative religion (and I’m sure you’ll agree with me that any education in English literature is sadly impoverished if the child can’t take allusions from the King James Bible). But faith schools don’t so much teach about religion as indoctrinate in the particular religion that runs the school. Unconscionably, they give children the message that they belong specifically to one particular faith, usually that of their parents, paving the way, at least in places such as Belfast and Glasgow, for a lifetime of discrimination and prejudice.

Psychologists tell us that, if you experimentally separate children in any arbitrary way – say, dress half of them in green T-shirts and half in orange – they will develop in-group loyalty and outgroup prejudice. To continue the experiment, suppose that, when they grow up, greens only marry greens and oranges only marry oranges. Moreover, “green children” only go to green schools and “orange children” to orange schools. Carry on for 300 years and what have you got? Northern Ireland, or worse. Religion may not be the only divisive power that can propel dangerous prejudices down through many generations (language and race are other candidates) but religion is the only one that receives active government support in the form of schools.

So deeply ingrained is this divisive ethos in our social consciousness that journalists, and indeed most of us, breezily refer to “Catholic children”, “Protestant children”, “Muslim children”, “Christian children”, even where the children are too young to decide what they think about questions that divide the various faiths. We assume that children of Catholic parents (for instance) just are “Catholic children”, and so on. A phrase such as “Muslim child” should grate like fingernails on a blackboard. The appropriate substitution is “child of Muslim parents”.

I satirised the faith-labelling of children, in the Guardian last month (26 November), using an analogy that almost everybody gets as soon as he hears it – we wouldn’t dream of labelling a child a “Keynesian child” simply because her parents were Keynesian economists. Mr Cameron, you replied to that serious and sincere point with what could distinctly be heard on the audio version as a contemptuous snigger: “Comparing John Maynard Keynes to Jesus Christ shows, in my view, why Richard Dawkins just doesn’t really get it.” Do you get it now, Prime Minister? Obviously I was not comparing Keynes with Jesus. I could just as well have used “monetarist child” or “fascist child” or “postmodernist child” or “Europhile child”. Moreover, I wasn’t talking specifically about Jesus, any more than Muhammad or the Buddha.

In fact, I think you got it all along. If you are like several government ministers (of all three parties) to whom I have spoken, you are not really a religious believer yourself. Several ministers and ex-ministers of education whom I have met, both Conservative and Labour, don’t believe in God but, to quote the philosopher Daniel Dennett, they do “believe in belief”. A depressingly large number of intelligent and educated people, despite having outgrown religious faith, still vaguely presume without thinking about it that religious faith is somehow “good” for other people, good for society, good for public order, good for instilling morals, good for the common people even if we chaps don’t need it. Condescending? Patronising? Yes, but isn’t that largely what lies behind successive governments’ enthusiasm for faith schools?

Baroness Warsi, your Minister Without Portfolio (and without election), has been at pains to inform us that this coalition government does indeed “do God”. But we who elected you mostly do not. It is possible that the recent census may register a slight majority of people ticking the “Christian” box. However, the UK branch of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science commissioned an Ipsos MORI poll in the week following the census. When published, this will enable us to see how many people who self-identified as Christian are believers.

Meanwhile, the latest British Social Attitudes survey, just published, clearly demonstrates that religious affiliation, religious observance and religious attitudes to social issues have all continued their long-term decline and are now irrelevant to all but a minority of the population. When it comes to life choices, social attitudes, moral dilemmas and sense of identity, religion is on its deathbed, even for many of those who still nominally identify with a religion.

This is good news. It is good news because if we depended on religion for our values and our sense of cohesion we would be well and truly stuck. The very idea that we might get our morals from the Bible or the Quran will horrify any decent person today who takes the trouble to read those books – rather than cherry-pick the verses that happen to conform to our modern secular consensus. As for the patronising assumption that people need the promise of heaven (or the obscene threat of torture in hell) in order to be moral, what a contemptibly immoral motive for being moral! What binds us together, what gives us our sense of empathy and compassion – our goodness – is something far more important, more fundamental and more powerful than religion: it is our common humanity, deriving from our pre-religious evolutionary heritage, then refined and improved, as Professor Steven Pinker argues in The Better Angels of Our Nature, by centuries of secular enlightenment.

A diverse and largely secular country such as Britain should not privilege the religious over the non-religious, or impose or underwrite religion in any aspect of public life. A government that does so is out of step with modern demographics and values. You seemed to understand that in your excellent, and unfairly criticised, speech on the dangers of “multicul­turalism” in February this year. Modern society requires and deserves a truly secular state, by which I mean not state atheism, but state neutrality in all matters pertaining to religion: the recognition that faith is personal and no business of the state. Individuals must always be free to “do God” if they wish; but a government for the people certainly should not.

With my best wishes to you and your family for a happy Christmas,

Richard Dawkins

http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2011/12/religious-faith-children

So what is the headline finding? It is that whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral insight of mythos than the factual claims of logos, the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value.

Jerry Coyne is boggled. So are Eric McDonald and Ophelia Benson. So am I, a bit.

I think I’d call this the Atheist Delusion. Many of us find it really hard to believe that Christians actually believe that nonsense about Jesus rising from the dead and insisting that faith is required to pass through the gates of a magical place in the sky after we’re dead; we struggle to find a rational reason why friends and family are clinging to these bizarre ideas, and we say to ourselves, “oh, all of her friends are at church” or “he uses church to make business contacts” or “it’s a comforting tradition from their childhood”, but no, it’s deeper than that: we have to take them at their word, and recognize that most people who go to church actually do so because they genuinely believe in all that stuff laid out in the Nicene Creed.

It makes the phenomenon of religion even scarier, doesn’t it?

What brought me to this awareness is that the primary angle of conflict in my religious encounters has been creationism: people who believe against all the evidence that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. There is absolutely no practical reason for this; no moral reasoning; no excuse of community; not even an absolute literal requirement in their holy book. You can have a perfectly functional church that worships Jesus and follows all the traditional conventions and yet also accept that geology tells us that the planet is 4.5 billion years old. The praxis requirement simply doesn’t apply. Yet 40% of the people in our country blithely accept a narrow, modern interpretation that imposes a time limit on the age of the creation.

Yet another example was a trivial little incident in which I desecrated a cracker. I knew that people believed, but I expected that the response would be more of a rationalization: I, as an unbeliever, was completely irrelevant to their beliefs, so I anticipated that what would happen is a solid round of excuses in which I’d be belittled, told I just don’t understand the nature of the sacrament, condescendingly explained down to that as a non-Catholic, my actions were petty and unimportant and that I couldn’t really harm Jesus. I got precisely the opposite: a deluge of mail accusing me of doing great harm to God, ruining their religion in a way that demanded retribution, and intensifying their certainty that Jesus was in that communion wafer.

Basically, they did not bow to social realities and adapt to what was a truly trivial event; they doubled down.

I think this is another important element of the New Atheist movement. We take religious people seriously when they tell us what they believe. We don’t indulge in our own rationalizations, trying to second guess what they say and invent a more sensible excuse for their behavior: when someone tells me that they have faith that Jesus’ second coming is nigh, I accept that they’re a deranged and demented fuckwit rather than trying to cobble together a lofty sociological story about individuals fitting into community mores and building rhetorical interfaces to meld with group dynamics. Nope, they really believe in an apocalyptic messiah and are wishing the world would end in a catastrophe before they die.

I don’t believe in fighting against the little social accommodations people necessarily make to get by. I do believe in fighting hard against bad ideas. And that’s a difference between many atheists: do you see religion as a kind of social glue, or do you see it as a disastrously stupid collection of bad ideas? If you are in the latter camp, you’re a New Atheist.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/12/14/a-common-atheist-delusion/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+freethoughtblogs%2Fpharyngula+%28FTB%3A+Pharyngula%29