science and religion

With Kennedy v. Louisiana the highest court in the land has given America a wonderful gift: it has reminded us that life is the highest value there is; the life of humans, of all the species, of nature.

Ultrasound is not rape.

So you want women to get an ultrasound before abortion…

For the research subjects’ sacred values, the ones they wouldn’t give up on for any amount of money (they could ‘auction off their value’ for up to $100), what lit up in the brain were areas known to be involved in right-wrong decisions, not in cost-benefit/utilitarian parts of the brain. That is, we naturally go to right-wrong thinking in making sacred value decisions.

By now, it should be clear that William Broad’s broadside against yoga (sorry about that) in the New York Times is thin on facts and thick on rhetoric. Excerpted from his forthcoming book, the article, “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body,” is a full-on, un-fair-and-balanced…

Another week, another piece of anti-science legislation.

New anti-evolution legislation reiterates this odd agreement.

Ultrasound is now used to treat the malady of not being as opposed to abortion as some people wish you’d be.

Over the past couple years, religionistas of all sorts have attempted to navigate a new media landscape in which old constructions of religious authority, identity, affiliation, and practice are changing almost by the minute.

This year has marked, I believe, the beginning of the end of the war between science and religion. Creationism cannot last. The New Atheists are now old (or departed). And between these camps the middle ground continues to expand. Indeed, many folks have been hard at it, doing a new kind of peace work. Some have done it intentionally, some have not. Outliers, both atheist and religious hardliners, continue to wage battle but they look increasingly irrelevant.