“The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance, but to overcome it.”
h/t: Planet Atheism
h/t: Pharyngula
MENTAL CHILD ABUSE: “Teaching Creationism is Child Abuse” / Lawrence Krauss
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Tag Archives: science
COGNITIVE SCIENCE: “How Beliefs Resist Change – Christianity and Cognitive Science” / TrustingDoubt / Valerie Tarico
Each religion has what can be called an immune system, a set of teachings and practices that guard against other beliefs or loss of belief. Cognitive dissonance theory and confirmation bias help us to understand how beliefs can remain unchanged in the face of devastating failures of prophecy or moral failings of leaders.
ATHEISM: “In Good Company”
POLITICAL CARTOON: Monte Wolverton / “Republican Science”
h/t: truthdig
ATHEISM: “Breaking Out of the Box”
h/t: TheThinkingAtheist
h/t: The Atheism News Magazine
CLIMATE CHANGE: ThoughtBubbler / “Bill McKibben’s Thought Bubble: The Fight of Our Time”
h/t: MoveOn.org
LITERARY NEUROSCIENCE: Corrie Goldman / “This is your Brain on Jane Austen, and Stanford Researchers are Taking Notes”
In an innovative interdisciplinary study, neurobiological experts, radiologists and humanities scholars are working together to explore the relationship between reading, attention and distraction – by reading Jane Austen.
Surprising preliminary results reveal a dramatic and unexpected increase in blood flow to regions of the brain beyond those responsible for “executive function,” areas which would normally be associated with paying close attention to a task, such as reading, said Natalie Phillips, the literary scholar leading the project.
[…]
Pioneering in a number of respects, her research is “one of the first fMRI experiments to study how our brains respond to literature,” Phillips said, as well as the first to consider “how cognition is shaped not just by what we read, but how we read it.”
Critical reading of humanities-oriented texts is recognized for fostering analytical thought, but if such results hold across subjects, Phillips said it would suggest “it’s not only what we read – but thinking rigorously about it that’s of value, and that literary study provides a truly valuable exercise of people’s brains.”
TEA PARTY: The Newsroom / “Tea Party is the American Taliban” / “The Tea Party and Koch”
TEA PARTY: The Newsroom / “The Tea Party and Koch”
EVOLUTION: Bill Nye / “Creationism is Not Appropriate for Children”
“And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can—we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.”
h/t: Planet Atheism
h/t: Friendly Atheist
REASON: Bill Maher / “My New Rule for Todd Akin and the Republican Party”
. . . Here’s the only thing you need to know about Todd Akin and human anatomy: he’s an asshole. What I want to talk about is how it’s not a coincidence that the party of fundamentalism is also the party of fantasy. When I say religion is a mental illness, this is what I mean: it corrodes your mental faculties to the point where you can believe in tiny ninja warriors who hide in vaginas and lie in wait for bad people’s sperm.
Evangelicals might like to pretend that the magical thinking that they indulge in at home doesn’t affect what they do at the office, but it absolutely does. The brain that believes in angels and miracles and Jesus riding a dinosaur is trained to see the world not as it is, but as you want it to be.
[…]
. . . [B]ecause we’re already such a religious country, our minds are primed for magical, fantasy thinking. The gullibility comes factory-installed. They’ve learned that you appeal not to an American’s head, but to his gut — it’s a much bigger target. But here’s the problem: life is complicated. I mean, I know we know some things for sure, like why Jesus put us here on Earth: to watchHere Comes Honey Boo Boo on a 50-inch TV screen. But what about the Chinese slaves who made the TV? What about carbon from the coal that generated the electricity? What about the Walmart where we bought it, where the workers don’t have health insurance? What about racism, or the oceans turning into nail polish remover? The grown-up answer is: identify problems scientifically, prioritize and solve. The Republican answer is: there isn’t a problem. And anyone who tells you different is a liar who hates America. We don’t have to make hard choices. We just have to ignore the science and the math — that’s why God gave us values.
Always Question Authority 