Tonight I caught most of a National Geographic documentary on PBS. It is called Stress: Portrait of a Killer. It brings together sociological, medical, genetic and other relevant studies and talks about what the evidence clearly shows: that whether you are a baboon or a human, stress – and particular the stress related to where you are in the social hierarchy – affects you and lowers your life span. Jesus is supposed to have said “Can any of you add... Read more
I know that the 40% discount coupon I shared might seem like a good enough reason to go ahead and order yourself a copy of the book which was just released, Religion and Science Fiction. But die-hard fans of science fiction sometimes need a geekier form of motivation. And so I am planning on blogging about precisely such reasons. And so here’s #1: The book is highly sought after among extraterrestrial beings who were worshiped by “simple shepherds and tribesmen... Read more
I found this suggestion for a CAPTCHA challenge for people who want to use the internet funny (via The Daily What). If you failed to answer correctly, you would see this: If you are concerned that this might disadvantage not only native speakers of English (apparently among them also designers of Apple’s “auto-correct” feature) who should know how to use apostrophes properly, but don’t, but also non-native speakers of English, this CAPTCHA from Facebook suggests that, as the... Read more
Tonight I re-watched the Doctor Who TV movie from 1996 – only the second time I’ve watched it. It was actually at least as good as, and in some respects better than, I remembered it having been. The most controversial element in the movie (which was filmed in Canada in the hope of reviving the series in the Americas after its long hiatus in the UK) is the suggestion that the Doctor was half human (on his mother’s side). I... Read more
My copies of Religion and Science Fiction arrived today. And even though it will be a few weeks until Amazon itself has the book for sale, one enterprising seller already has listed the book there! Read more
Because not one but two blogs recently decided to reproduce without attribution or credit a poster I made and shared on my blog a few years ago, I thought I should share it again. It was created to illustrate the circularity of arguments for Biblical inerrancy. Read more
via that jeffcarter was here Read more
IO9 shared this Comic-Con trailer for the new Disney animated TV show, TRON: Uprising. On the subject of science fiction that explores religion, the original TRON and the sequel TRON: Legacy both fall into that category. I wonder whether any of that will make it into the TV animated spin-off. Read more
Many of the sci-fi blogs I read (IO9, Biology in Science Fiction, and SF Signal) mentioned NPR’s choice of their top 100 science fiction and fantasy books, and then asked for people to vote for their top 10. When working on the book Religion and Science Fiction that was just released, we adopted from the outset an approach that would make the book interesting and useful to those whose own choice of favorites might be different from those of a... Read more
Jim Kidder pointed to and quoted from a piece in Discover Magazine by Chris Mooney, and this quote from it is worth circulating widely: If you understand motivated reasoning, then you understand that high levels of knowledge, education, and sophistication are no defense against wrongheaded views like climate change denial and anti-evolutionism. What I’ll call “sophistication” may even make these phenomena worse, at least among those with deeply ideological or religious views. The reason is that when we “reason” in areas where we have... Read more
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