Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

Over time, as I’ve pondered religion as a phenomenon, I am much less attracted to the idea of borrowing from its vocabulary. If anyone has looked into the work of George Lakoff, a cognitive and linguistic scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, you’ll be familiar ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

It has been far too long since I’ve updated the site…almost an entire year. In part this is because I’ve been spending my time finishing my pre-doc internship while helping to raise my rather, um, enthusiastic toddler. I also had hopes of redesigning the site, including ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

There was, as we all know, a time when religion WAS science…and just now we are coming out on the other side, where science is becoming religion. That is to say, religion is starting to conform (or contort) itself to the scientific understanding of reality. God is harder to find ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.


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Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

Imagine for a moment a hypothetical religion. It is a major one with many millions of followers. One of the tenets of this religion states that wearing red clothing is disallowed, perhaps out of respect to its founder who died the bloody death of a martyr. Many adherents say ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

The core metaphysical stance of Sacred River is naturalism. The shorthand definition of naturalism states that “the real is natural and the natural is real,” which lies in contrast to the supernatural, which naturalism posits is unreal. While this seems simple enough, things ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

A wonderful video expressing the spiritual outlook of an atheist. Normally I don’t link to videos on Sacred River, but this one was too good not to share…

Click to view

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

I have become a major fan of historian and philosopher Richard Carrier. He has done a tremendous job developing a robust set of arguments supporting the naturalistic worldview, and I imagine that he will get regular mentions on this blog. To start out with, I’d like to point you ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

From NPR:

A person’s moral judgments can be changed almost instantly by delivering a magnetic pulse to an area of the brain near the right ear…

That is a finding reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, by neuroscientist Liane Young and colleagues ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

Human culture is full of woo. Basically, woo describes ideas about the nature of reality that are irrational and that often run counter to critical thinking and scientific understanding. Woo is resistant to logic, dismissive of mainstream empiricism, and swims in a fuzzy stew of ( Read more... )