The Cyber Think Tank is a digest of quality articles, interviews, and other musings compiled by Paul Kurtz Institute Board Member Robert B. Tapp. This edition includes over 40 resources for your perusal.
Predicting the Future by Making It, by Michael Werner: “We can never surrender to the forces of chaos and despair because it violates everything we humanists care about on this one precious planet and the one life we have.”
The ISHV Cyber Think Tank is a digest of articles, interviews, and other musings compiled by ISHV Board Member Robert B. Tapp.
Secular organizers started their own congregations. But to succeed, they need to do a better job of imitating religion.
The Internet Gives Doubters a Home. “Well, if in-person gatherings rarely work for skeptics, I think there’s a better “glue” to unite millions of freethinkers worldwide. It’s the colossal Internet, the enormous portal for all of humanity. … Further, there’s scientific evidence that the Internet actually creates atheism….There you have it: The Internet provides a worldwide haven for freethought – and it also creates more freethought. If in-person meetings can’t make a sanctuary for doubters, cyberland can.”
What secular humanism can do that atheism can’t: Here is a good survey of current US organizations and positions.
Just 12% of Brits are affiliated to Church of England, major survey reveals. . . .
It took centuries to fulfill James Madison’s unique vision of religious freedom. Donald Trump threatens to undo it. . . .
It’s difficult for sincere doubters to talk with sincere believers without causing bad feelings. . . .
“Epstein told Campolo about Varun Soni, the dean of religious life at U.S.C., and in 2014 Campolo began talking with Soni on the phone. After a few conversations, Campolo had been offered an office, an email account and a title: humanist chaplain at the University of Southern California. No salary, but it was a start.”
The ISHV Cyber Think Tank is a digest or articles, interviews, and other musings compiled by ISHV Board Member Robert B. Tapp.
Dialectics of Enlightenment. by Kwame Anthony Appiah. “In particular, what if the effort to shore up rationality invites its opposite? What if light is destined to generate shadows, Enlightenment a Counter-Enlightenment? That’s the thesis of Justin E.H. Smith’s new book, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason. The difficulty posed by reason, he suggests, is. . . . Should we conclude that rational solutions—improved algorithms, better voting systems—are bound to worsen the underlying irrationality? Smith says that irrationality is “humanly ineradicable, and that efforts to eradicate it are themselves supremely irrational”; but the efforts he largely has in mind, it seems, are efforts to manage human irrationality, not to eradicate it, and such efforts can be given old-fashioned, rationalist names: good governance, prudent policy. . . . We can’t solve all human problems with reason alone; but we can’t solve any of them without it.”
The ISHV Cyber Think Tank is a digest or articles, interviews, and other musings compiled by ISHV Board Member Robert B. Tapp.
Tali Sharo, The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others; Richard Feynman: Entropy, Past And Future, History Of The Universe; Hemant Mehta, After Marriott Merger, Sheraton and Westin Hotels Will Offer Holy Books in Rooms, and many other links of interest.
The ISHV Cyber Think Tank is a digest or articles, interviews, and other musings compiled by ISHV Board Member Robert B. Tapp.
Amy Couch , Pursuing Truth with Anjan Chakravartty (new professor at Univ. of Miami) “The thing I’m most unsure about is what response we will get, in a society that is so polarized in so many ways, but I’m hopeful that everyone, whatever their personal view of the Chair for the Study of Atheism, Humanism, and Secular Ethics, will join me in thinking that the ideal of excellent education and research is crucial to our wellbeing as a society and to our collective future.”
Michael Shermer, For the Love of Science: “That liberals are just as guilty of antiscience bias comports more with accounts of humans chomping canines, and yet those on the left are just as skeptical of well-established science when findings clash with their political ideologies, such as with GMOs, nuclear power, genetic engineering and evolutionary psychology—skepticism of the last I call “cognitive creationism” for its endorsement of a blank-slate model of the mind in which natural selection operated on humans only from the neck down.”
“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.” — Walt Whitman
“I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” In this way, Einstein was unifying science and religion, and referred to himself as a “deeply religious nonbeliever. Moreover, being open-minded and inclusive in his worldview, he found Jesus, Buddha, and Moses equally compelling as prophets.”
Following Jean-Luc Nancy, “If you don’t have freedom and rights, I don’t have freedom and rights—all I have is domination. And domination isn’t freedom _or_ rights. Being exists because of being-with—I exist because you exist as a free agent in community exactly as I do, and visa-versa. That’s community. That’s freedom . . . . .It’s an American problem. Perhaps the US simply can’t reach consensus on this sort of social imaginary. Might one tiny little religion? Hmmmmm.”
“We will always be vulnerable to urges like revenge, anecdotal thinking, and demonization. The question is whether our institutions and norms can keep them at bay. The habits of journalism are to always focus on the present. We can be misled by the availability and vividness of current news, and the fading of bad memories, into an inaccurate picture of which way the world is going. Although I’m a political centrist, I apportion the lion’s share of the blame for the challenging of those norms to Trump and the Republican Party. The key point of the book is that the values of the Enlightenment embolden us to solve problems. Human nature allows for the possibility of cumulative improvement, even as it faces the constant drag of primitive impulses that work against it. It’s an ongoing struggle. . . . The position that we can’t solve the problem [climate change} is completely consistent with the denialist position that nothing should change whatsoever. Different premises, but they reach the same conclusion.”
