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Check out our key concepts here, which will help you to apply a critical thinking lens to this topic, and articulate your ideas about it. These concepts are highlighted.

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A IFLScience article, looking at news that the first millennial saint has been recognized - a 15-old Italian computer programmer - and offering some background on how saints are appointed. 

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A IFLScience article, looking at news that the first millennial saint has been recognized - a 15-old Italian computer programmer - and offering some background on how saints are appointed. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE “Faith and Reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of Truth”. How does the concept of sainthood support John Paul II’s assertion?

KEY TERMS Officially recognized, Vox populi, The devil’s advocate, Skeptical view, Evidence, Miracle, Inexplicable

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The Vatican Is Set To Recognize The First Millennial Saint - So How Do I Become One?

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A BBC article, covering new guidelines issued by the Vatican that the Catholic Church should take a more cautious approach to recognizing supernatural phenomena. 

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A BBC article, covering new guidelines issued by the Vatican that the Catholic Church should take a more cautious approach to recognizing supernatural phenomena. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How are religions evolving in order to cope with the impact of social media on our relationship with the world?

KEY TERMS Truthfulness, Carefully assessed, Fraudulent, Disinformation and rumour, Debunk, Authentication, Mysticism

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When are reports of a weeping statue fake news? How credible is the claim that a holy relic led to a miraculous healing? And how should a divine apparition be confirmed?
These are the themes addressed in the Vatican's new guidelines on supernatural phenomena, which urge the Catholic church to take a more cautious approach.

The document, compiled by the Vatican's Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, lays out stricter rules to assess the truthfulness of such claims.

The new guidance was presented at a media briefing on Friday and replaces rulings last set out in 1978.

The document recommends incidents of phenomena should be carefully assessed, to make sure that they are not fraudulent or an attempt to make money.

The paper warns against creating "damage to the unity of the Church" and serious errors that could "cause scandals and undermine the credibility of the Church".

Reports of such phenomena are said to have soared in recent years in an era of social media - sometimes spread through disinformation and rumour.

The new guidelines say that as a rule, bishops should issue a "nihil obstat" - or no obstacle - in such cases. This means that the incident would not be formally recognised as supernatural but that there would be no barrier to worship. Supernatural recognition by the Vatican is rare.

The document goes on to say that five other decisions can also be issued by bishops, including rejecting the event as supernatural altogether or even banning the worship of some phenomena.

Under the new rules, Vatican approval should always be sought by bishops before any conclusions are published, with the Pope able to intervene in exceptional cases.

Apparitions have been reported across the centuries. Those recognised by the Church have prompted pilgrims, and popes, to visit spots where they are said to have taken place.

Millions flock to Lourdes in France, for example, or Fatima in Portugal, where the Virgin Mary is alleged to have appeared to children, promising a miracle - after which crowds are said to have witnessed the sun zig-zagging through the sky.

The visitation was officially recognised by the Church in 1930.

But other reports have been found by church officials to be baloney. In 2016, an Italian woman began claiming regular apparitions of Jesus and Mary in a small town north of Rome after she brought back a statue from Medjugorje in Bosnia, where the Virgin Mary is also said to have appeared.

Crowds prayed before the statue and received messages including warnings against same-sex marriage and abortion. It took eight years for the local bishop to debunk the story. The shrine was not mentioned in the new guidance.

The new rulings say many pilgrimage sites linked to supposed phenomena have not received authentication from the Vatican but that this does not pose problems for the Church.

And so the Vatican, an institution peppered with mysticism, and which still communicates via smoke signals when electing a new pope, will be hoping its new rules can regulate claims of the supernatural.

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Vatican tightens rules on supernatural phenomena

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The new guidelines are expected to tighten the criteria for what counts as a divine apparition.

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A Big Think article, considering when it is, and when it isn’t, acceptable to break moral rules. 

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A Big Think article, considering when it is, and when it isn’t, acceptable to break moral rules. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why does the writer, Jonny Thompson argue humans are morally inconsistent? How does he align our moral decision-making with Daniel Kahnman’s concept of ‘thinking fast’ and ‘thinking slow’? As a final question, What does this statement about ethics mean, and do you agree: “we must live in dissonance, our beliefs wrestling one another. We must assume laws are unbreakable, yet accept that they need breaking from time to time”?

KEY TERMS Inconsistent, Golden rule, Thinking fast & thinking slow, Deontological, Consequentialist, Absolutist rules, Dissonance

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If there's one thing that human history teaches us, it's that's we're an inconsistent lot. Humans are capricious, unreliable, and wayward. Whimsy governs life more than rigid rules. As George Bernard Shaw put it, when it comes to human nature, "the Golden Rule is that there is no golden rule."

As such, our attitudes toward following rules are not uniform. We generally accept that most rules will have their exception, or that most laws need to be at least a bit flexible. But how do our views on rule-breaking differ? And which rules should bend more than others? Our willingness or reluctance to break rules is determined by our upbringing, culture, and personality. And as a new study reveals, it even depends on the kind of reasoning we use.

No cutting!

In early 2022, a study published by Awad et al. collected data on how humans judge the acceptability of breaking well-established norms. The team was motivated, in part, by the increasing need to program ethics into AI - to make "morally competent machines." Since it's obvious that humans will break rules under certain circumstances, we have to resolve when and why that happens if we are to have AI mimic human behavior. In other words, we need to identify what second-order rules determine when to break to the first-order ones.

The team took a real-world example of rule-breaking: cutting in line. On the face of it, waiting in line is governed by a simple maxim: Everyone gets helped in the order they arrive. And yet, there are all kinds of exceptions. One example the paper gives is someone who forgets their cutlery after they placed a food order. In this case, most people would allow you to quickly pop in front to get the item.

The team presented participants with a range of scenarios in different contexts of waiting in line: at a deli, airport, or bathroom. Participants were then asked to judge whether an excuse or reason given from a list justified someone cutting in line. The participants were further invited to "tap into the underlying cognitive mechanisms" by considering what determined their decision, for example the length of delay, the benefit to the cutter, and so on.

Systems of ethical reasoning

In 2011, Daniel Kahneman introduced the non-psychology world to the idea of Thinking, Fast and Slow. In his book, Kahneman argued that human reasoning operates on two models. The "thinking fast" (System 1) approach uses predefined rules, or shortcut mental heuristics. "Thinking slow" (System 2) reasoning requires deliberation, thought, and a decision process.

Kahneman's distinction maps well onto the existing moral literature. In deontological (rule-based) ethics, we are expected to follow the rules, or satisfy some duty. This falls under System 1. In consequentialist (outcome-based) ethics, we should perform actions that maximize the best kind of outcomes, which resembles System 2 deliberation much more closely.

What the 2022 study argues is that rule-breaking considerations are governed overwhelmingly by System 2 reasoning. The team subdivided System 2 reasoning into two kinds: outcome-based thinking (e.g. "the cutting in line will help someone a lot") and agreement-based thinking (e.g. "it's socially accepted that cutting in to get tap water is okay"). People who break rules will most often exploit one or another of these System 2 models.

So, people who use their quick-fix System 1 reasoning will often consider rules to be inviolable. Inversely, whenever we consider a rule worthy of breaking, we use our deliberative System 2 reasoning: calculating consequences and social acceptability.

Living with dissonance

Awad et al. show that humans do not sit well with absolutist rules. It seems that we even reach different moral outcomes depending on whether we're using our System 1 or System 2 reasoning.

The psychological concepts found in Thinking, Fast and Slow serve as an analogue to the wider world. Our brains will sometimes need to operate instinctively from System 1-type rules, and so, too, does society. Civilization needs laws to operate. For instance, no one would ever leave the house if you thought someone would steal everything the moment you did. We need to know that we won't be killed, exploited, or betrayed the moment we let our guard down. Following rules is what allow us to get about and do things.

Yet, unreflective and inflexible laws can sometimes be just as bad. In a world of nearly 8 billion people, making around 35,000 decisions every day, it's ridiculous to assume a single rule can determine every situation. As the British philosopher, John Stuart Mill, wrote: "the complicated nature of human affairs [mean] that rules of conduct cannot be so framed as to require no exceptions, and that hardly any kind of action can safely be laid down as either always obligatory or always condemnable." We need System 2-type reasoning to make sure our rules actually work.

So, we must live in dissonance, our beliefs wrestling one another. We must assume laws are unbreakable, yet accept that they need breaking from time to time. In other words, we sometimes need to think fast about ethics, and sometimes, think slow.
Jonny Thomson runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.

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Thinking fast and slow about ethics: When is it okay to cut in line?

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If there's one thing that human history teaches us, it's that's we're an inconsistent lot. Humans are capricious, unreliable, and wayward. Whimsy governs life more than rigid rules. As George Bernard Shaw put it, when it comes to human nature, "the Golden Rule is that there is no golden rule."

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A DW article, exploring what ‘compassion fatigue’ is, and how it can shape the way we view the world. 

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A DW article, exploring what ‘compassion fatigue’ is, and how it can shape the way we view the world. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What research did Brad Bushman carry out, what were his results, and how convincing do you find his evidence? What does the work of Yasmin Aldamen reveal about the role language plays in desensitization? How can social media affect (in both a negative and positive way) compassion fatigue? Overall, to what extent is it our responsibility to resist compassion fatigue in order to properly understand and interact with what’s going on in the world? How best can this be done?

KEY TERMS Compassion fatigue, Overexposure, Empathy, Unstable emotion, Desensitize, Humanistic perspective

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February 23, 2023

Images of the death and destruction in Ukraine are everywhere. Compassion fatigue is a natural response to such overexposure, but empathy can be rebuilt. It's all in the way media and social media users represent crises.

Many people have become desensitized to images of the suffering in Ukraine

It's easy to turn away from another news article or social media post about war and violence. After all, we're constantly bombarded with images of traumatic events when we're online.

The phenomenon, known as compassion fatigue, or empathy burnout, causes us to lose our capacity to react and help those in need.

"I felt this after the invasion of Ukraine," said Jessica Roberts, an assistant professor of communication studies at the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa in Lisbon. "When I first heard about the atrocities it was horrifying, but then I heard about another town and my reaction was less extreme."

Compassion fatigue does not have to be permanent. As Susan Sontag wrote in her 2003 essay "Regarding the Pain of Others": "Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers."

So just how can we translate compassion into action? Here we take a look at how compassion can both fatigue and be rebuilt.

Compassion fatigue and violence numbness

Brad Bushman, a media researcher at Ohio State University in the US, has conducted experiments illustrating how violence in digital media formats like video games and films can desensitize people's responses to suffering or violence in real life.

In one study, Bushman and his colleagues had 320 students play either a violent or nonviolent video game for 20 minutes. After playing, participants were instructed to answer a questionnaire, but during this time they heard a fight break out in the hallway outside.

"In reality this was a recording of professional actors having a fight. We also had a research assistant outside the room kick a trash can and start groaning," Bushman told DW.

They then measured how long it took participants to help the groaning assistant. On average, it took people who played the nonviolent game 16 seconds, whereas those who played the violent game took 73 seconds.

What's more, said Bushman, those who played the violent video game reported the fight to be less serious than those who played the nonviolent game.

It would be too simple to conclude here that violent video games cause violence, but in Bushman's experiments, they did appear to temporarily change people's responses to violence in the real world.

"The consequence of seeing violent images is that you become numb to it and you think violence is no big deal. The real-world consequences are that you're less likely to help someone who's a victim of violence," said Bushman.

Compassion fatigue is a form of emotional protection

According to Bushman, the underlying psychological mechanism behind compassion fatigue is desensitization.

"Really, it's a kind of emotional or attentional filtering that protects us from suffering becoming too stressful or traumatic to cope with," said Bushman.

It's also possible to detect desensitization to violent images in people's physiological responses to stress.

"If you measure peoples cardiovascular arousal responses or startle brain waves (using electroencephalography), you see that people's physiological shock responses to violent images are dampened in those people who've just been playing a violent video game," said Bushman.

But, he argued, desensitization to violence and trauma can be an important adaptive strategy for people whose work involves frequent exposure to traumatic events, like soldiers, aid workers and doctors.

The problem arises when this desensitization is detected in the "ordinary" population.

"This adaptation is one of the mechanisms that actually drives further aggression and violence in society," said Bushman, referring to research showing how conflict in Israel and Palestine escalates violence in children.

Compassion fatigue toward refugees

Yasmin Aldamen, at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul, emphasized the dangers of how compassion fatigue can lead to greater violence and hate speech in society. Aldamen's research focuses on the impact compassion fatigue and negative media representations have on Syrian refugees in Turkey and Jordan.

"We found that framing negative images and messages of refugees in the media opens the door for audiences to lose empathy for them or even have hatred for refugees," Aldamen told DW.

Sadly, this is not new or surprising. Violence toward refugees and migrants has existed as long as humans have fled conflict and been transplanted. But what is new is how quickly media and social media can drive compassion fatigue and subsequent hate speech and racism.

It's something we see time and time again, after refugees fleeing the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, with the crisis in Ukraine and with refugees fleeing conflict and climate change in North Africa.

"There's evidence showing that people give less aid money after a disaster over time. It's already happening with the earthquake in Turkey and Syria," said Roberts of Universidade Catolica Portuguesa.

Compassion fatigue is temporary and can be reversed

Compassion fatigue can be reversed, according to Roberts and Aldamen. They say you can rebuild your capacity for compassion over time.

"We can use social media to create empathy and compassion between people. In our research, we looked at Humans of New York, where a guy focused on the positive and relatable stories of people's lives, instead of their trauma. It helped to create great empathy, " Roberts told DW.

Aldamen has a similar mission. She is calling for media outlets and people on social media to change the way they represent refugees and other vulnerable populations.

"My study recommends reporting of the Syrian refugee crisis (and other crises) from a more humanistic perspective. Media outlets need to display some of the more positive stories from the refugee crisis to ensure that people do not suffer compassion fatigue to exposure to tragic stories," Aldamen told DW.

She also said it's important for news articles to involve calls to action on individuals or policymakers so readers can help those in need rather than observing a crisis they feel cannot be solved.

Here's how to donate to earthquake aid efforts in Turkey and Syria.
Edited by: Clare Roth Correction, February 20, 2023: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Yasmin Aldamen. DW apologizes for the error.

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One year of Ukraine war: Why we get compassion fatigue - DW - 02/23/2023

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Images of the death and destruction in Ukraine are everywhere. Compassion fatigue is a natural response to such overexposure, but empathy can be rebuilt. It's all in the way media and social media users represent crises.

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A Vox article, exploring why every generation seems to think that people in the past were nicer than those living in the present. 

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A Vox article, exploring why every generation seems to think that people in the past were nicer than those living in the present. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How did the researchers define the term ‘morality’? How did they set out to objectively determine whether morality has really declined over time - and do you think they succeeded? Why do people (incorrectly, according to this study) believe that morality has declined over time? To wrap up: How important is it to apply objective methods in order to understand the way people treat each other? What are the consequences of not doing so?

KEY TERMS Morality, Declining, Illusion, Objectively, Biased exposure effect, Biased memory effect

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This story is part of a group of stories called

Finding the best ways to do good.

Pretty much every generation seems to believe that morality is declining. In ancient Judaism, the rabbis had a saying: "The earlier generations are to the current generation as men are to donkeys." The Victorians imagined that people living before the Industrial Revolution were more respectful, civil, and honest. After World War I, Europeans looked back to the Victorians as paragons of moral superiority.

And in this century, surveys have shown that people in at least 60 countries around the globe believe that morality is declining.

But that idea is just an illusion, according to a new paper published in Nature.

Its lead author, the psychologist Adam Mastroianni, says the paper was born out of his own emotional reaction to constantly hearing people grumble about how humanity is going downhill - "Back in the day, you could leave your door unlocked at night," "Used to be you could trust someone's word," "Kids these days!" - without any real evidence for thinking that.

"I had a lifetime of spite build-up!" he told me, laughing. But, more seriously, he added, "If people are less kind than they used to be, that's a disaster. Interpersonal morality is the glue that holds our society together; lose that glue and it all falls apart. If that's really going on, then that's the story of the century and social scientists should be trying to get to the bottom of it."

So together with Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, Mastroianni decided to find out: Has morality actually declined? And if it hasn't, why do people think it has?

Nope, morality hasn't declined

For starters, we should clarify that "morality" means different things to different people.

Mastroianni and Gilbert are not using it to refer to sweeping changes, like the abolition of slavery or the granting of rights to women and LGBTQ people. (By that standard, there's no doubt most societies, including the US, have improved morally.) They're using the word to mean something like everyday kindness, honesty, and basic human decency.

That tracks with the definition used in the many, many surveys covering this topic since 1949. In US surveys alone, Mastroianni and Gilbert found 177 questions asking a total of 220,772 Americans things like: "Do you think that over the last few decades our society has become less honest and ethical in its behavior, more honest and ethical, or has there been no change?" On 84 percent of the questions, a majority of participants said morality had declined.

This isn't an American exception. In dozens of other nations, surveys have found similar results. So, people all over the world believe that humanity is becoming less kind and ethical over time. And as Mastroianni and Gilbert discovered by running their own surveys, it's not just old people or conservatives who believe this. Liberals believe it, as do young people, who don't even have first-hand memories of how people used to be.

When Mastroianni and Gilbert asked respondents what was causing the supposed moral decline, they didn't attribute it all to "kids these days!" It's not just that old nice people are dying and being replaced by young selfish people - it's also that humans in general are becoming less nice in everyday interactions, they said.

But is that true?

The answer, as best we can tell, is no.

There's no measuring device, like a thermometer for morality, that we can use to objectively determine shifting levels of morality over the centuries. So Mastroianni and Gilbert pored over the next best thing: decades' worth of surveys. If morality had been declining for years, as respondents in every generation claim, then meaningful changes over time should be visible in people's answers to questions like, "Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?" and, "Are people generally helpful, or are they looking out for themselves?"

But the researchers found no significant changes. Not in the US surveys, and not in the surveys of other countries, either.

We also have a lot of data from economists, who for decades have been bringing people into the lab to participate in the Prisoner's Dilemma or the Public Goods Game, where you can make a generous choice or a greedy choice, like giving some money away or keeping it for yourself.

In 2022, a separate research team published a meta-analysis of over 500 of these social dilemmas, going back to 1956. They suspected they'd find that cooperation rates had declined, with people becoming greedier over time. Instead, they found that cooperation rates have increased by about 10 percentage points over the past six decades.

Mastroianni acknowledges that these lab games take place in an artificial environment and they may not perfectly reflect how people act in the real world. Still, he told me, "It's certainly at odds with the idea that people are fundamentally less prosocial today than they were a generation ago."

Why people wrongly believe that humanity is becoming less moral

Okay, so everyday morality isn't really declining. Then why do people believe it is?

​Mastroianni and Gilbert hypothesize that two well-known psychological phenomena are working together to produce the illusion.

First is the biased exposure effect. We know from previous studies that humans pay more attention to negative information than to positive information, and the media reinforces that tendency by focusing on bad news. (As the newsroom expression goes, "If it bleeds, it leads.") Because we're mostly exposed to negative data about society, we get the impression that moral behavior is at a low.

Second, we've got the biased memory effect. When people think of positive and negative events from the past, they're more likely to forget the negative ones or misremember them in a positive light. The negative events are also more likely to lose their emotional potency over time. This could be partly why we have such a rosy view of morality in the past - we've quite literally forgotten the bad times.

Put these two biases together, and you can see how we might end up with the illusion of moral decline. The hypothesis also accurately predicts that both old and young people will perceive moral decline and that people will perceive more decline over longer spans of time.

So next time someone starts bemoaning "kids these days" - or, more importantly, next time you hear a politician claim, "Our country is garbage right now, but elect me and I'll make our country great again!" - remember this. You'll be ready with your comeback, and you'll have the evidence to back it up.
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Why every generation thinks people were nicer in the past

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Reports that we're becoming crappier humans over time are greatly exaggerated.

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A Conversation article, arguing that humility is the key to leading a virtuous life. 

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A Conversation article, arguing that humility is the key to leading a virtuous life. 

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Humility is the foundation to a virtuous life

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Humility doesn't get the fanfare of virtues like courage, compassion or generosity. But without humility, those other virtues won't get much traction in the quest to live a good life.

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A Big Think video, in which Kelly Richmond Pope explores the parameters of people’s ethical behaviour. 

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A Big Think video, in which Kelly Richmond Pope explores the parameters of people’s ethical behaviour. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE  What does Kelly Richmond Pope do for a living, and how might that impact on her approach to ethics? What does she mean when she says, “We need to own the unethical aspects of our decisions” - and what examples does she give to support this? To what extent is your own moral code based on the extent to which you can get away with things? To wrap up: Should we assess the morality of a decision via its impact on the world (consequentialism), or based on its inherent rightness and wrongness (deontology)?

KEY TERMS Rationalize, Honest, Internal controls, Opportunistic

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What would you be willing to do if you thought you'd get away with it? Kelly Richmond Pope, a forensic accountant, delves into how we often unintentionally ignore our moral compasses and veer into unethical behavior when possible consequences are intangible. Kelly says we do this mainly by convincing ourselves that everyone else behaves similarly. But is that true?

She shares the results of an ethics survey she uses in her class, where her students found themselves divided about whether a social lunch with a colleague, discussing personal and work matters, should be expensed as a work-related activity. She also shares her experience of accidentally receiving an extra handbag and how different people advised her to proceed.

Maybe we're all a little unethical. But Kelly assures us that there's no need to panic. She believes that acknowledging these vulnerabilities and implementing internal controls can help us prevent unethical behavior. Fostering an environment of self-awareness and accountability can help us all make better decisions in the future.

KELLY RICHMOND POPE: I think we are not always as honest with ourselves as we may need to be. Because if we think that we're not gonna get caught, a lot of us rationalize what we do. "Everybody's ethical!" Right, everybody's ethical. You're not as ethical as you think. For example, a lot of us plan parties during work hours. A lot of us take work supplies home. A lot of us use our work computers for personal. So it's interesting how we rationalize what we do.

But if we really are honest and ask ourselves, "If I had to report this, would it be a problem?" When we're honest about that, that will prevent us from making future mistakes. Something I do in my class is at the very beginning, they have to do an ethics survey- this is the one that gets people. I ask them, "You and a colleague in the same industry go to a work lunch. You spend five minutes talking about work stuff, and an hour talking about personal stuff. Is this a work lunch that you would expense out?" I have never gotten 100% agreement. About 50% say that it is a work lunch, 50% say it's personal. The 50% that say it's a work lunch say, "Oh, this is networking, and your intention was to talk about work." The other 50% say, "It's totally personal because you already knew the person and this was strategic."

We need to own the unethical aspects of our decisions, because if we can own it and be honest about what we would get away with, then I think that can protect us.

I'll tell you something that happened to me. I got a handbag that I had ordered, and I was so excited to get it, in a big box at my door, unwrapped it, there was a handbag. And then the next day, another handbag came and I didn't order two handbags, I ordered one handbag. What shocked me was what my village said to me about it. "Guess what happened? I got two bags, but I only purchased one. I'm gonna send the bag back." They were like, "Are you crazy? You could sell that bag on eBay. Who's gonna find out?" So I started asking people: No one told me to send the bag back.

What if I sell the bag on eBay, and then the company contacts me? Now, I'm in a tough position. What am I gonna say? Am I gonna say I sold the bag? Am I gonna say, "Oh, I didn't get a bag delivered to me, you must have a mistake." What if the girl lost her job? Do you have to think about how your decisions impact a larger issue? So I sent the bag back. I went back to everybody I talked to and told them I called the store, they didn't even know that they sent the bag and you know what they all told me. You're crazy, Kelly, you could have gotten away with it.

So it just goes to show you when no one's looking, that we think that we're not gonna get caught, we're not as ethical as we think. I think the path forward is to recognize that no one is ethical, and we all need internal controls around us to protect us, because that's the only way we're going to really own up to our opportunistic selves. We are so ethical that we would never do anything wrong- until we're caught.

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How do you rationalize your unethical behaviors?

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Kelly Richmond Pope, a forensic accountant, shares a simple test that puts your ethics under the spotlight.

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A Conversation article*, exploring the difficulties of reconciling the moral obligations of a religious faith with the laws of the society in which it exists.  

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A Conversation article*, exploring the difficulties of reconciling the moral obligations of a religious faith with the laws of the society in which it exists.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What examples does it offer of tensions between immigration policies and religious groups’ commitments to humanitarian care? What arguments do some religious leaders accused of breaking immigration laws present to defend their actions? What does this story indicate about the different priorities for governments and religious traditions? Overall, which perspective should take precedent when we form our moral outlooks on the world: the religion, or the state, to which we belong? How can they be reconciled when they clash?

KEY TERMS Religious freedoms, Violated, Motivations, Cultural, Globalizing world

*We're proud to work in partnership with The Conversation. To sign up for their newsletter, which we draw on widely to create TOK lesson material, follow this link.

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Many religious traditions preach the need to care for strangers. But what happens when caring for the stranger comes into conflict with government policy?

After Title 42 restrictions at the U.S. border ended on May 11, 2023, debates about immigration have heated up again - focused mostly on reform, border security or refugees' needs.

But the treatment of immigrants is deeply intertwined with religious freedom as well. As a scholar of religious ethics who studies immigration, I am interested in recent cases that highlight growing tensions between immigration policies and religious groups' commitments to pastoral and humanitarian care.

Ministry at the border

One high-profile example centers on Rev. Kaji Douša, senior pastor at Park Avenue Christian Church in New York City, who traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, in 2018 to provide pastoral care to asylum seekers.

Her work was flagged by Customs and Border Protection after a Honduran woman allegedly said that Douša told migrants that marrying each other would make it easier to receive legal papers in the U.S. As Douša later testified, she did perform religious ceremonies, but only for couples who were already in common-law marriages and without claiming to provide any legal status.

Douša's name and photo were added to a Department of Homeland Security watch list that included lawyers, journalists and activists, and she was detained and questioned by CBP officers upon her return to the U.S. A CBP official also sent an email to Mexican authorities asking them to ban Douša from entering Mexico because she lacked proper documentation - which the official later acknowledged had no basis in fact.

Douša filed a lawsuit accusing DHS of unjust surveillance and retaliation, and in March 2023 a federal judge ruled in her favor. Judge Todd Robinson agreed that DHS had violated Douša's right to freedom of religious expression by instructing Mexican authorities to detain her.

Both Douša and the United Church of Christ, which ordained her, argued that her actions were based in her religious commitments. Douša previously stated, "To reject a migrant is to cast away God's angels, which I am unwilling to do."

Shifts in the legal landscape

This is not the first time religious leaders or groups providing pastoral and humanitarian care to migrants have come under scrutiny.

One famous example is the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, an informal network of up to 500 churches whose members provided safe haven to undocumented asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America.

Several members of the movement were convicted of conspiring to smuggle immigrants into the U.S. They appealed, arguing that their work was inspired by their religious convictions and that the government was violating their First Amendment rights. Yet their claims were largely unsuccessful.

Over the past few decades, however, religious freedom claims have often found more favor in U.S. courts.

In part, this is because of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which has made it easier for people and institutions to claim religiously based exemptions from generally applicable laws. One of the best-known examples is the 2014 Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the court, citing the owners' religious convictions, exempted the national chain of crafts stores from providing employee health insurance that included contraception coverage.

Help on the ground

This shift has opened new lines of defense for religious actors, including humanitarian groups.

No More Deaths is a nonprofit associated with a Unitarian Universalist church in Tucson, Arizona. Members leave supplies along desert routes traveled by migrants, provide first aid and occasionally offer services such as temporary shelter to migrants who are suffering from exposure.

In 2018, volunteers were charged with littering, driving on protected lands and, in one case, harboring undocumented immigrants.

Four volunteers were initially convicted, but their charges were dismissed after they argued that they were compelled by religious convictions and that the government had violated their freedom of religious expression. The appeals court judge cited the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as well as the Hobby Lobby case in holding that the volunteers were protected under U.S. law.

A more recent dustup between a religious humanitarian organization and government officials occurred in December 2022. A group of Republicans in Congress sent a letter to Catholic Charities, a humanitarian nonprofit affiliated with the church that provides food, shelter and bathing facilities on both sides of the border.

In U.S. border cities, the organization also provides transportation from shelters to bus stops and money exchanges. The representatives' letter cited this work as a reason to suspect Catholic Charities of encouraging illegal border crossings and required staff to preserve records of their work.

The organization argued that the charges were " both fallacious and factually inaccurate." Caring for people in need, "including vulnerable people on the move," leaders wrote, "is a part of the fabric of the global Catholic Church and is mandated by the gospel."

Yet another sticking point between religious groups and immigration law has emerged in Florida in recent weeks. A bill recently signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis was modified after religious groups protested against its proposed criminal penalties for knowingly transporting or concealing an undocumented immigrant. Religious leaders argued that this would violate their religious freedom by preventing them from providing rides to religious services or from finding aid for people in need.

National vs. universal mandates

It is not surprising that these conflicts keep happening, considering the U.S. government's and religious organizations' different motivations around migration.

One main driver for politicians is simply that many voters are nervous about newcomers, especially if they have different cultural, religious or racial backgrounds. The nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute has found that while 55% of Americans think immigrants strengthen American society, 40% believe a growing number of newcomers "threatens traditional American customs and values." In the past few years, multiple Republican politicians have even embraced some version of the "great replacement" conspiracy theory. Once limited to extremist and antisemitic groups, replacement theory alleges that immigrants are either replacing native-born American citizens or are intentionally being used to facilitate electoral and social change.

Political scientist Seyla Benhabib has argued that another reason some leaders focus on border policies is that national sovereignty has been weakened in a globalizing world. Multinational corporations, for example, are sometimes influential enough to shape government policies, such as lobbying for weaker labor laws and environmental protections.

But whereas sovereignty and citizens are priorities for governments, many religious traditions teach adherents to care for people regardless of what community they belong to. Religious thinkers do argue over whether their traditions encourage greater attention to people in their own communities. Still, when it comes to people's most basic survival needs, most emphasize that care should know no borders.

For the foreseeable future, these priorities will continue to clash - and some religious people may push back by claiming a First Amendment right to freedom of religious expression.

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When faith says to help migrants - and the law says don't

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As governments crack down at their borders, religious groups' teachings to help the stranger remain unchanged.

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A Conversation article, focusing on the struggle of native Americans for control over their sacred land. 

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A Conversation article, focusing on the struggle of native Americans for control over their sacred land. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the policy of ‘co-management’, and why are some states introducing it? How do indigenous beliefs determine the relationship indigenous peoples have with the natural world? Why is this at odds with the way the US government views both ‘sacred land’ and indigenous religion? Overall, why is it important to build in multiple outlooks and perspectives when we try to understand and manage the environment?

KEY TERMS Origin narrative, Truly religious, Culturally important

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Native Americans’ decadeslong struggle for control over sacred lands is making progress

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Native Hawaiians see Mauna Kea mountain as sacred. Scientists use its summit for research. A new policy called co-management may help resolve this land conflict and similar ones across the US.

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A Big Think video, featuring Paul Bloom, who reiterates why he is ‘against empathy’. 

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A Big Think video, featuring Paul Bloom, who reiterates why he is ‘against empathy’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Should empathy be the basis of moral judgements?

KEY TERMS Moral guide, Moral capacities, Distinct, Rational compassion, Reconfigure

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PAUL BLOOM: I'm against empathy. I'm not against empathy for everything, I think empathy is a lot of fun when you're watching a movie, empathy for a fictional character. I think empathy is an important part of all sorts of exciting activities, but I'm against empathy as a moral guide. I think we could do better. The sense of empathy I'm most interested in is when you, in a sense, put yourself in another person's shoes and feel what they feel. Psychologists call this 'Emotional empathy.' A lot of people think this is core to being a good person.

A few years ago, I wrote a book called "Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion," and I argued this form of empathy, though it might seem wonderful, is actually a very poor moral guide. Who do you feel empathy for? Who do you most naturally put yourself in the shoes of? Well, we know the answer to this from study after study, after study- we naturally feel empathy for people who look like us, who speak our language, who we feel are safe, and because of that, empathy is, of all of the human feelings, perhaps the most biased and parochial. When you put a book out with a title "Against Empathy," you gotta expect a certain amount of blow back, and a lot of people responded to me with their own experiences and their own arguments, sometimes people agreed with me, sometimes they argued against me.

So one argument against the purpose of my book is: Although empathy could have negative effects, could be biased, could provoke us into violence, could cause all sorts of trouble, it also could have good effects, and I concede this in my book. And so some people have said, "Look, if you add it all up, the positive benefits of empathy outweigh the negative." I'm not always convinced about that sort of math, but even if it were true, we have moral capacities that are better than empathy. Another objection is that empathy, whatever you think of its role when it comes to war and charity and broad, moral decisions, is a necessary part of an intimate relationship. One philosopher in a critique of me said, "If my wife comes in and she's mad at somebody at work- it's all well and good for me to say, 'I love you very much and I understand where you're coming from,' but isn't what she wants me to share her anger, get angry with her?" And my response to that is, 'It's kind of right.' I don't deny that.

There are cases where what we look for in a relationship with others is that sort of shared feeling. You're mad, you want me to be mad too. My critical response is there's all sorts of cases where that's not what we want. My favorite example here is anxiety. I go to my partner and I'm very anxious, I'm stressed out. Do I want her to start sharing my feeling of anxiety? To look at me and say, "Oh my God, it's horrible. Yeah, it's horrible." No! I want her to be calm. I want her to say, "I love you. Calm down. Let me tell you how to think about it differently." Sometimes what we want from people isn't a mirror of us, it's rather, another intelligent, caring, loving person responding to us as a distinct being, and working to make our life better. And I think, sometimes, empathy is exactly what we do not want.

Now, if I'm gonna say this, I have to come up with something that will replace empathy, I'm not saying we should give up on morality. So my book is called "Against Empathy," but the subtitle of my book is "The Case for Rational Compassion," and therein lies the substitute, I think. And the substitute is two parts: One is rationality. If I'm going to help somebody, I have to know what's the best way to help them, sometimes what might seem to be the best way to help them simply makes things worse. Sometimes figuring out what to do to make the world a better place is an extraordinarily difficult task, too big for one brain, and we do our best when, as communities, we work together to think about that. So that's rationality. Rationality itself is great at pursuing ends, but it doesn't provide ends, it doesn't provide goals.

What you need is compassion- you need to care. So what I argue in the book is that our best decisions, our fairest, our most equitable ones, are done through a combination of a rational judgment of how does one make the world a better place plus compassion, love, caring. But not the sort of love and caring that requires you to put yourself in another person's shoes. Even if empathy is, on balance, has a positive effect, compassion does better. If we could reconfigure our moral attitudes to be less biased, less parochial, more with our head and less with our heart, we would do better.

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PAUL BLOOM: I'm against empathy. I'm not against empathy for everything, I think empathy is a lot of fun when you're watching a movie, empathy for a fictional character. I think empathy is an important part of all sorts of exciting activities, but I'm against empathy as a moral guide.

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A Conversation article, exploring the concept of ‘personhood’, which it argues is at the heart of the abortion debate. 

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A Conversation article, exploring the concept of ‘personhood’, which it argues is at the heart of the abortion debate. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How should ethical questions be justified?

KEY TERMS Personhood, Hotly contested, Full moral value, Defining death, Right, Hypothetical example, Shifting the conversation

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Debate about abortion is often a debate about rights - but whose? AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Controversy over abortion reached a fever pitch on May 2, 2022, when the leaked draft of a U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion was published by Politico. If the draft's key points are reflected in the final ruling, this would strike down Roe v. Wade, a landmark decision that nearly 50 years ago established the right to choose an abortion.

Current constitutional law grants a right to have an abortion until a fetus becomes viable - in other words, until there is a reasonable probability it could survive outside the womb with care. Today, this typically occurs between the 22nd and 24th weeks of pregnancy.

The ruling in Roe v. Wade was grounded on the idea that the U.S. Constitution protects privacy, stemming from the 14th Amendment. However, the draft majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, argues Roe v. Wade should be overturned because the Constitution makes no mention of abortion.

While a final ruling is not expected before June 2022, the decision will not put to rest controversy over abortion. Why does the legalization of abortion continue to be hotly contested, nearly a half century after Roe v. Wade? This question is of great interest to me, as a philosopher and bioethicist, since I study philosophical problems that lie just beneath the surface of contemporary controversies like abortion.

Defining personhood

One underlying ethical concern is, "What is a person?" How people answer this question shapes how they think about a developing human being. When philosophers talk about "personhood," they are referring to something or someone having exceptionally high moral status, often described as having a right to life, an inherent dignity, or mattering for one's own sake. Non-persons may have lesser rights or value, but lack the full moral value associated with persons.

To be a person means having strong moral claims against others. For instance, persons have a claim to be treated fairly and a claim not to be interfered with. A healthy adult human being is often considered the clearest example of a person. Yet, most philosophers distinguish being a person from being human, pointing out that no one disputes the fetus's species, but many disagree about the fetus's personhood.

In current law, fetal viability is often used to mark the beginning of personhood. However, viability varies based on people's access to intensive medical care. It also changes as medicine and technology advance.

Some state laws restricting abortion identify the presence of a "fetal heartbeat" as morally significant and use this as a basis for personhood. However, many living things have beating hearts, and they are not all considered persons. And as physicians point out, though they may use the term "fetal heartbeat" in conversations with patients, the fetus does not yet have a functioning heart that generates sound during early development.

Defining the limits of personhood is especially dicey due to its far-reaching consequences. Personhood carries implications for how we treat animals, ecosystems and anencephalic infants, who are born with their cerebral cortex and large parts of their skull missing. It also shapes the rights of people who will be born in the future, people with disabilities and individuals in a persistent vegetative state. Debates over personhood have recently extended to robots.

Personhood is also important for issues at the end of life, such as disputes over defining death. Physicians have disagreed with families over whether to declare a patient dead or continue to offer medical interventions. Philosophers have debated whether a person's death occurs as soon as "higher" brain activity ceases - activity associated consciousness and cognition - or only after all brain activity ends.

When personhood begins

In short, there are plenty of reasons to figure out what personhood requires. Doing so demands wrestling with at least three common opposing views.

The first holds that fetuses qualify as persons from the moment of conception. Supporters say that from conception on, the developing fetus has " a future like ours," and abortion takes that future away. A variation on this theme is that at conception, a fetus has the full genetic code and therefore the potential to become a person, and this potential qualifies the fetus as a person.

A second view regards personhood as arising at some point after conception and prior to birth. Some people reason that a human being's moral status is not all-or-nothing, but, like human development, a matter of degree. Others say that what matters is consciousness and other cognitive capacities, thought to develop late in the second trimester.

Finally, a third view maintains that personhood begins at birth or shortly thereafter, because this is when an infant first acquires a sense of themselves and an interest in their own continued existence. Another source of support for the third view is Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant's claim that what makes human beings morally special is their rationality and capacity to be autonomous.

Conflicts between persons

Which view about personhood is right? If a society can't agree about personhood, another strategy would be to imagine that one's opponent's view is right, and consider the implications.

Suppose, for example, that fetuses are persons. Since pregnant people are too, how should conflicts between them be settled? Suppose a pregnant person's life were in jeopardy: whose right to life prevails? Some hold that under these conditions, abortion is justified by appealing to self-defense, but others say killing in self-defense is not justified if the threat is "innocent," without intention of doing harm.

Even when a pregnant person's life is not in danger, some philosophers argue that a fetus's right to life would not automatically override a pregnant person's right to live their life as they wish. In a famous article, ethicist Judith Jarvis Thomson used the hypothetical example of someone extremely ill, who could only be saved by actor Henry Fonda touching their brow. Must Fonda attend to them? She argued no: a right to life is not usually understood as a claim to whatever one needs to stay alive. Instead, it requires not having one's life unjustly ended.

When weighing rights, it is important to consider the toll exacted when people wishing to terminate a pregnancy are prevented from doing so. A decade-long study showed people in this situation suffered adverse health effects; were less likely to have money for basic living expenses like food, housing and transportation; and were more likely to remain with violent partners. Since the risk of dying from childbirth is much greater than the risk of dying from legal abortion, a ban on abortion is projected to increase maternal mortality.

The constitutional right to abortion will likely soon be settled. If the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, this will raise yet more ethical questions - about fairness, for example, considering, that people living in poverty and members of minority groups would be among those most affected, and that a majority of Americans support abortion rights.

Only by shifting the conversation from politics and law to ethics will Americans start to reckon with what truly matters in abortion debates.

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What is 'personhood'? The ethics question that needs a closer look in abortion debates

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Controversy over abortion reached a fever pitch on May 2, 2022, when the leaked draft of a U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion was published by Politico. If the draft's key points are reflected in the final ruling, this would strike down Roe v.

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A Conversation article, looking at the ‘battle’ over the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. 

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A Conversation article, looking at the ‘battle’ over the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do Buddhists view consciousness and ‘rebirth’, and how do their beliefs contrast with Communist party doctrine? Why will a Communist party-appointed ‘Panchen Lama’ have no authority as a religious leader? Why do you think governments throughout history have often tried to control the way religion is practiced? To wrap up: Who or what should be in charge of the way people practice their religious beliefs?

KEY TERMS Appropriate beliefs and practices, Sole legitimate arbiter, Rival ideologies, Revere

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In China, a group of atheists (the Chinese Communist Party) has long dictated how the country's religious groups should practise their faiths.

Chinese Christians are told to reject salvation by faith and the Resurrection; their core beliefs should be patriotism and love of the party. The party has also published several pamphlets detailing appropriate beliefs and practices for Buddhists and ordered them to adjust their thoughts accordingly.

Communist officials are particularly concerned with one politically sensitive element of Buddhism: the succession of the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, whose reincarnation lineage began in the 16th century. He will be 88 years old in July and has reportedly experienced health problems, though he claims he is in good health.

In official news outlets like the Global Times, the party maintains the Chinese government is the sole legitimate arbiter for all reincarnations of Buddhist lamas, regardless of where they are born or their traditional regions of influence.

The Chinese state is deeply suspicious of religious believers and the potentially persuasive power of rival ideologies, which is why it insists on appointing and educating all prominent religious figures. They learn the propaganda of Chinese patriotism and become adept at parroting the party line, but they generally have little knowledge of their purported religion. True believers recognise this.

The Dalai Lama highlighted the absurdity of the party's stance earlier this year when he recognised an eight-year-old Mongolian boy as the tenth Jetsun Dampa, the most influential reincarnation lineage in Mongolia.

Read more: Dalai Lama identifies the reincarnation of Mongolia's spiritual leader - a preview of tensions around finding his own replacement

The move angered Chinese officials because it demonstrated the Dalai Lama's continuing authority among Buddhists in the region. It also showed that despite decades of persistent claims the Communist Party exercises sole authority in these matters, it is merely an official fabrication.

In 1995, the Dalai Lama issued a proclamation that a Tibetan boy named Gendün Chökyi Nyima was the Panchen Lama, the second-most prominent reincarnate lama in his order, the Geluk. The party responded by arresting the boy, then six years old, along with his family. They have not been seen since.

The Golden Urn

Tibetan Buddhists believe that after death a person's consciousness transmigrates to a new body. For most people, this happens involuntarily, but advanced masters can choose their life situations. These are referred to as "tulkus" ("emanation bodies"). Traditionally, tulkus have exercised ultimate authority over their own successions. Many lamas issue predictions regarding the circumstances of their rebirths, including place and timing.

The Dalai Lama, hoping to counter Communist Party plans to name his successor, has declared he will not take rebirth in any region under Chinese control. He argues the main task of a new tulku is to carry on the unfinished work of their predecessor, and this would be impossible in occupied Tibet.

The party cites precedents, mostly invented or exaggerated, that it claims give it a historically determined right to adjudicate all matters of tulku succession.

Many of these hinge on the " Golden Urn", which was sent to Tibet in 1792 by the Qianlong Emperor, along with instructions on its use. The names of prospective tulkus were to be inscribed on lots and placed in the urn. The officiating lama would then choose one at random as the successor tulku.

Despite claims by party officials that the urn has been used in all tulku selections since it was delivered to Tibet, historical sources indicate it was only used sporadically.

Moreover, I have not seen any Tibetan document that presents the urn as the sole factor for determining tulku succession. In every case I've examined, traditional tests were administered first.

For instance, a prospective child was presented with two sets of items - one belonged to the predecessor, the other did not but appeared similar. The real successor should be able to correctly identify the ones owned by his predecessor.

Lots were then drawn from the Golden Urn as one of a series of measures to ensure the correct candidate was selected - or to placate Chinese officials.

The Dalai Lama has indicated he is open to a process that includes lots drawn from the urn, but also insists on the standard succession methods developed under Tibetan Buddhism.

Clashes over philosophy

Most public discussions of succession focus on historically based claims and counterclaims, but the underlying logic of both sides is seldom mentioned.

Tibetan Buddhism holds that as death approaches, the coarser levels of consciousness drop away. At the moment of death, the most subtle one, the "mind of clear light," manifests. After this, one enters the "intermediate state" ( bardo) and is reborn in another body.

The main basis for rebirth is consciousness, which is compared to a river. It flows from moment to moment, with each moment conditioned by those that preceded it. It is not like a soul or self because it is impermanent and changing.

Most Buddhists believe that rebirth is determined by their past karma, but tulkus can consciously choose their next life situations.

One of the core absurdities of the Communist Party's claims to authority over this process is its members adhere to a Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism, which rejects the idea of rebirth or consciousness being transferred between bodies.

So, when the party designates someone as "Dalai Lama," it is similar to naming a postmaster: it is a position overseen by the government, and it can be conferred on anyone.

Tibetan Buddhists, however, believe that the recognition of a Dalai Lama is much more than this. It is the end result of a series of rigorous tests designed to determine one unique person, whose consciousness is the continuation of his predecessor's.

What's at stake for Tibetan Buddhism?

After the disappearance of Gendün Chökyi Nyima in 1995, the government held a ceremony to anoint another boy as Panchen Lama. Panchen Lamas have often played key roles in the recognition of Dalai Lamas, and the party has declared it plans to use its Panchen Lama to choose a Dalai Lama who will be under its control.

The Dalai Lama has declared on a number of occasions the Tibetan people will reject China's choice. And Tibetan exiles plan to employ traditional methods to identify Tenzin Gyatso's successor.

Inevitably, other countries will be drawn into this arcane conflict, based on centuries-old religious precedents, which few will understand.

Read more: There's a religious revival going on in China -- under the constant watch of the Communist Party

So, after both sides have announced their respective Dalai Lamas, what effect will this have on Tibetan Buddhists in Tibet and their religious practices?

Probably very little. The party's Panchen Lama is viewed by Tibetans as a high-ranking government official and is treated with the appropriate respect. But he has no authority as a religious teacher.

And despite government attempts to promote him as one, he lacks the training, knowledge and charisma that would be required for him to function as a tulku. He rarely visits Tibet, and has shown no aptitude for the religious aspects of his role.

The future Dalai Lama born in exile will receive traditional training from the most esteemed figures in Tibetan Buddhism, while his or her Communist Party rival will be trained in a government-run school and become a mouthpiece of the party.

The former will probably follow in the footsteps of Tenzin Gyatso and become an internationally prominent Buddhist spokesperson. The latter will emulate the party's Panchen Lama and repeat whatever messages his overlords command him to deliver to Tibetan Buddhists.

The question of Tibetan Buddhism's future survival is by no means assured. Tibetans overwhelmingly identify as Buddhists, and most deeply revere the Dalai Lama despite decades of propaganda demonising him.

The government is increasingly imposing restrictions on religious practice. There are also economic disincentives for those who want to retain their traditional religious commitments. This struggle between tradition and Communist Party control is likely to play out over the course of the next few decades, and the future looks increasingly grim for those who want to resist.

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Succession on the Tibetan plateau: what's at stake in the battle over the Dalai Lama's reincarnation?

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Tibetan Buddhists may face a future of duelling Dalai Lamas: one born in exile who will receive traditional religious training, the other a mouthpiece of the Communist Party.

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An Aeon/TED animation, looking at how Zen Buddhist ‘Koans’ help us to embrace uncertainty, rather than asking questions about the unknowable. 

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An Aeon/TED animation, looking at how Zen Buddhist ‘Koans’ help us to embrace uncertainty, rather than asking questions about the unknowable. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE A really nice animation, which outlines one of the key aspects of Zen Buddhism. First get students to understand what the ‘Koans’ were - perhaps focusing on how they help us to avoid binary thinking. Next think about what they tell us about the struggle to explain everything: is this a futile quest? Do they agree that enlightenment means resisting the urge to know the seemingly unknowable?

KEY TERMS Answer, Unexplainable, Interpretations, Grey area, Observable world vs. deeper knowledge, Binary thinking, Understanding

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Is seeking an explanation for life's deepest mysteries a worthy pursuit? Many scientists and theologians would say yes. Zen Buddhists practising in China from the 9th to 13th centuries CE, however, believed that it was important to embrace uncertainty instead of always seeking answers. For these monks, achieving enlightenment meant resisting the urge to know the seemingly unknowable. To foster this way of thinking, they meditated on paradoxical riddles called kōans to raise doubts about the very meaning of knowing and, through this, find deeper truths about existence. This playful animation from TED-Ed provides a brief history of kōans, and offers two rich examples from the roughly 1,700 kōans written to illustrate the key role of ambiguity on the path to enlightenment.

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What Zen Buddhist riddles reveal about knowledge and the unknowable | Aeon Videos

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To achieve enlightenment, resist the urge to know the unknowable with these unsolvable riddles from Zen Buddhist monks

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A Conversation article, exploring how “spiritual but not religious” people in America are finding new ways of pursuing meaning.

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A Conversation article, exploring how “spiritual but not religious” people in America are finding new ways of pursuing meaning.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What does it say is currently happening in the US in terms of those who identify as ‘SBNR’? How are they finding ‘spiritual fulfillment’? How is technology driving the change? Overall, what does the rise of secular forms of spiritual practice indicate about people’s need for meaning in life?

KEY TERMS Meaning, Unaffiliated, SBNR, Sense of belonging, Secular and atheist churches, Supernatural vs. self-improvement, Digital spiritual

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From atheist churches to finding healing in the ‘sacred flower of cannabis,’ spiritual but not religious Americans are finding new ways of pursuing meaning

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America’s religious landscape is getting more diverse as people find new ways of expressing spirituality.

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A Conversation article, exploring the limitations of our moral circle, and how it can be enlarged. 

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A Conversation article, exploring the limitations of our moral circle, and how it can be enlarged. 

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A cost-of-living crisis, the ongoing impact of COVID, climate change, and numerous global conflicts and refugee crises. When it feels like so many people are doing it tough, how do we decide where to direct our compassion?

In a world that seems increasingly fractured, we wanted to find out if people can bridge the divide between "us" and "them" - to grow their feelings of wanting to help others, who would be typically beyond their "moral circle".

We discovered that a surprisingly short period of compassion training can expand how much someone cares about people far beyond their immediate circle.

Measuring who matters most to us

Not all moral connections are equal. If the person suffering is our child, our partner, our friend, we are quick to help. But when faced with the suffering of a complete stranger, or someone on the other side of the planet, our motivation to help is likely reduced.

Taking this further, what if the person suffering was actually someone we disliked, or even someone who may have caused harm to others? Would we care then?

Philosophers such as Peter Singer have developed the popular term " moral circle" to refer to those we consider worthy of our concern and those we do not. Typically we prioritise the moral needs of our family and ingroup (the social group we belong to) first, and we care much less about those different or distant to us.

Read more: How we decide who and what we care about - and whether robots stand a chance

Researchers have found we order groups in this fairly predictable way: family/friends, ingroup, revered, stigmatised, outgroup, animals (high sentience), environment, animals (low sentience), plants, and villains.

Research also shows Australia is not particularly high in terms of moral expansiveness - the size of one's moral circle. In a 2022 study, Australia ranked 32nd on a moral expansiveness scale (MES), with countries like Canada, France and China ranking much higher.

But are our moral boundaries fixed, or can we move up the moral expansiveness ladder? The question of whether our moral concern for others is stable or zero sum (that is, "my concern for someone comes at the expense of another") is an empirical one.

Can we expand our moral circles?

When thinking about ways to grow our moral circle, things like empathy and mindfulness may come to mind. But our work shows that compassion is stronger than both at predicting the size of one's moral circle.

Our work also shows that compassion predicts our willingness to help those we dislike. And other research shows compassion training increases feelings of closeness toward a disliked person.

Building on this, our latest research found that a brief compassion training intervention can increase our moral expansiveness.

In this study, 102 participants were randomly assigned to complete a brief two-hour seminar on compassion training, or to a control group who didn't attend a seminar.

In the seminar, we focused on defining compassion. The message was: things like anger, anxiety and sadness are normal human emotions, but we have a responsibility to learn and practice how to work with these feelings in helpful and supportive ways.

Participants then had two weeks to continue to practice what we did in the intervention by listening to guided audio exercises, which were a combination of compassionate breathing and imagery exercises, as well as meditations.

Compassion meditations typically follow a set structure. We begin by expressing compassion to a target - someone we like - but then expand out to other targets, such as strangers or disliked others, to other sentient beings like animals, and to elements of the natural environment, such as coral reefs or forests.

We found that two weeks after the program, participants who had completed compassion training has greater moral expansiveness towards family and revered groups in society (for example, charity workers).

At the three month follow-up, these outcomes improved further. Moral concern for others had increased across the board, including towards outgroup members (such as political opponents), stigmatised members of society, animals, plants, the environment - and even towards supposed "villains" in our society (for example, convicted criminals).

This shows compassion and moral expansiveness are closely connected. We don't know for sure, but the improved results at the three month mark may have been due to continuing the audio exercises, or perhaps due to a "sleeper effect" - it takes time for people to shift their moral view.

A hopeful future?

The year 2024 is full of big choices, with 4 billion people eligible to vote on who should lead their country.

Election years often spiral into divisions of " us" and "them ", with "we" the public having to choose between the people and policies we hope will improve our world.

Compassion might offer one way to ensure we don't fall into the trap of turning against one another. We can all recognise the right for people and sentient creatures to live a life free of suffering.

And if compassion helps guide us in our decisions and actions, and even expand our moral sensibilities, we may be better placed to tackle some of the big challenges we are facing - and ensure those who are suffering most don't get left behind.

Read more: 'Do-gooders', conservatives and reluctant recyclers: how personal morals can be harnessed for climate action

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Who we care about is limited - but our research shows how humans can expand their 'moral circle'

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When it feels like so many people are in need of compassion, how do we decide where to direct it?

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An Aeon article, which looks at the extent to which Buddhism can be updated for the modern world - particularly in terms of its belief in reincarnation.

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An Aeon article, which looks at the extent to which Buddhism can be updated for the modern world - particularly in terms of its belief in reincarnation.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE To what extent can religions be ‘cleaned-up’ to suit modern outlooks and ways of life?

KEY TERMS Stereotypes, Complexity, Cleaned-up version

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When people outside of Asia think of Buddhism, they tend to think about just philosophy and meditation. Buddhists are often said not to have gods, wars or empires. Their religion isn't about ritual or belief, but a dedicated exploration into what causes suffering and how to end it through meditation and compassion. Although there's some basis for this image, Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism have been at pains for decades to show that it's largely untrue, or at least very partial. The Buddhism that non-Buddhists know today is less an accurate vision of its history than a creation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In that time period, Buddhists and their sympathisers created this modernised Buddhism. They discarded from it the elements of Buddhist history that didn't fit the rational, scientific worldview that accompanied colonisation and modernisation. In a remarkable feat of historical reinvention, Buddhism went from degraded other to uplifted saviour in a matter of decades.

While there's much wrong with colonisation forcing such changes, there's nothing inherently wrong with Indigenous thinkers recreating their religions. Religions reinvent themselves all the time in response to changes both internal and external. What Buddhists such as D T Suzuki did wasn't particularly different from what Martin Buber did for Judaism, Paul Tillich for Christianity, Muhammad Iqbal for Islam, or Swami Vivekananda for Hinduism. All of these thinkers returned to elements of their traditions to create a version of their religion that spoke better to the modern world. They also effectively rebutted claims from outsiders about their inferiority. Buddhists, here, were extremely successful, especially in the eyes of non-Buddhists, for whom Buddhism became the modern, rational religion par excellence. Indeed, they were so successful that Buddhism is often said to be just a philosophy that one can embody, regardless of one's religious affiliation.

This success, however, has come with costs. At the very least, it has turned outsiders' understandings of Buddhism into a set of rather unfortunate stereotypes, such as when the Tibetan studies scholar Robert Thurman spoke of Tibetans as 'the baby seals of the human rights movement'. At worst, it has provided cover for atrocities committed by Buddhists in countries such as Myanmar and Sri Lanka. It has also had potentially negative effects on those who engage with modern Buddhism. Critics today write of 'McMindfulness', a pop version of mindfulness that, rather than overcoming suffering and delusion, in fact makes them worse by letting people believe that they can do whatever harm they want, so long as they meditate once a day. According to the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, this means that Buddhism's advice to 'let things go' and focus on your breathing equates to letting go of fighting against all the cruelty and injustice in the world. By focusing on the presentness of your own breath or body posture, you might very well come to feel at ease in a world that's full of disease and devastation.

People who want to really understand Buddhism in all of its complexity should spend time in Buddhist countries (not just at monasteries), learn ancient and modern languages, and study the works of scholars around the world who offer a more detailed history of Buddhism and Buddhists. But for those who are interested only in the modern, cleaned-up version of Buddhism, yet want to avoid the problems of modern Buddhism - both in terms of its ignorance of history and its politics of the present - I would offer this advice: take reincarnation seriously.

That probably doesn't sound right. Reincarnation (also called transmigration or rebirth) is the idea that some part of consciousness lives on after death, and keeps returning to this or other realms of existence until liberated by Buddhist practice. And it seems like exactly the kind of thing that modern, secular Buddhists would reject, often with good reason. After all, reincarnation has often been used to justify why some people deserve good or bad things, based on the actions that they supposedly made in their past lives. But when I say that people should take reincarnation seriously, I don't mean that they should embrace every detail of the classical doctrine. Whether or not one does is a question for practising Buddhists and others - a question about which I have neither the right nor the capacity to speak. What I mean, rather, is that we should seriously consider what a contemporary version of the idea of reincarnation would look like.

Thinking about reincarnation today is, first of all, a reminder of the complexity of Buddhism, and the fact that individual practices can't be neatly separated from broader institutional histories. Any change in our personal lives is inseparable from change in the world around us. Second, reincarnation offers a way of thinking about the present as connected to the deep past and to any potential futures as well. We needn't think of the specifics of the reincarnation doctrine to realise that we're all the inheritors of a past that we didn't create and the bequeathers of a future we won't live to see. Third, this temporal relation is also an ethical one, because it suggests that we're the products of other lives and the creators of other futures, and thus share a global and temporal interdependence. And fourth, it follows that part of our task as humans is to be aware of what we might accidentally replicate from our past and thus unknowingly recreate in the future.

The Buddhist ideal of ending the cycle of reincarnation has a secular corollary in the ideal of removing all traces of our past mistakes - truly living in a society without patriarchy or poverty or violence. If we take reincarnation seriously, then we can move past injunctions to just 'be more in the present moment' and understand how real presence means being connected to much more than our breathing. It forces us to come to terms with the possibility that we're connected to many more lives and beings - across both time and space - than we can ever realise.

In Tibet, the doctrine of rebirth was used to identify the consciousness of a deceased monk in a newborn child

Rethinking reincarnation isn't unprecedented. As with other elements of Buddhism, the concept has changed over time. And it's worth recalling that part of the origin of Buddhism was to challenge prevailing theories of reincarnation in the place where Siddhartha Gautama was born - in what is now the India-Nepal border, around the 5th century BCE. In these belief systems, some part of the person (which part is interpreted differently both across and within religious movements) would live on in a cycle of rebirth called samsara. There's also diversity of thought about the meaning of this cycle, but Gautama and his followers criticised a variety of their contemporaries' ideas. One was the notion that only a few were able to leave this cycle and become part of the divine. Another was that the aim was, indeed, to become part of something. According to Gautama, everyone, regardless of their place of birth, is capable of exiting the cycle of reincarnation. And to do so doesn't mean joining with something; it means disjoining entirely, or 'extinguishing' the fire of life. In one image, consciousness is like a flame being passed from candle to candle. After enlightenment, no more candles will be lit.

Buddhism, then, began in part as a new set of views about reincarnation. And throughout its history, Buddhists have debated and expanded the potential for what reincarnation entails. For example, in Tibet, probably beginning in the 13th century, the doctrine of rebirth took a significant twist: it was used to identify the consciousness of a deceased monk in a newborn child, and thus grant to that child the religious and political title of the previous monk. This is the background for what became the tradition of the Dalai Lamas. Although this was based on the existing doctrine that someone who had achieved nirvana could 'emanate' their consciousness on Earth in order to guide humans to liberation, it took on a whole new meaning and history in Tibet.

More recently, Buddhists, as well as outsiders seeking to modernise Buddhism, have continued to reinterpret the doctrine of reincarnation for their own times. From the mid-19th century, as the theory of evolution developed, thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson began to suggest that the doctrine of transmigration was an intimation of the understanding of the transmutation of species. As he put it: 'The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were; but men and women are only half human.' This kind of assimilation was also advocated by Buddhists such as the Chinese reformer Taixu, who spoke of evolution as describing 'an infinite number of souls who have evolved through endless reincarnations'. And contemporary, ecologically minded Buddhists such as Thich Nhat Hanh have extended this to the whole of the planet: 'I know that in the past I have been a cloud, a river, and the air. And I was a rock. I was the minerals in the water ... gas, sunshine, water, fungi, and plants.' This fits within the contemporary understanding that the components of a human body pre-existed that body in the natural world. It also expresses a genuine sense of interdependence between humans and their environment.

Reincarnation has also been used to think about politics. In his essay 'The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte' (1852), Karl Marx wrote:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

I'm not sure what Marx might have known of Indian doctrines of reincarnation. He more likely had in mind the ideas of transmigration that one can find in Pythagoras and Plato. But he was closer to the Buddhist critique of Brahmanism than anything else, because the Platonic system - like the Brahmanic one - had no particular end: people could reincarnate forever. Marx's point wasn't that reincarnation went on forever, but that we needed to take concrete steps to end it: we should awaken to something new, beyond the nightmare of histories of oppression.

But taking reincarnation seriously doesn't just mean thinking about the ecological or political potential of its doctrines. It also means thinking seriously about the failure of any doctrine to realise its mission. This is another reason why we shouldn't excise reincarnation from the modern understanding of Buddhism. Consider, as an example, the work of the writer and scholar Robert Wright and his popular book Why Buddhism Is True (2017). According to Wright, Buddhism is true because it understands something very specific about the effect of natural selection on the human condition. Namely, that evolution is driven by fleeting pleasure. Humans seek satisfaction through eating and copulating, only to find that the pleasure from these activities is remarkably evanescent. And yet, nevertheless, we get up and try to find satisfaction through them every day. Wright says that this is a neat trick of natural selection, which is driven simply by the blind will of the species to continue. If we were completely sated by our meals or sexual encounters, we wouldn't have the same urge to keep doing them. So evolution tricks us into thinking that we'll achieve satisfaction, when we never will. The trouble is that this cycle of pleasure, satisfaction and dissatisfaction is, well, rather unsatisfying. And this is what Buddhism understands and what mindfulness meditation can help cure. To perpetually pursue satisfaction is suffering. To become aware of this process and gain distance from it through mindfulness provides relief.

Early in his book, Wright makes a qualification about what he thinks is true in Buddhism. He writes: 'I'm not talking about the "supernatural" or more exotically metaphysical parts of Buddhism - reincarnation, for example.' But if we look at the story that he's told us about the truth of Buddhism, we will actually see reincarnation at work. First, in the sense that every human bears traces of historical processes that happened long before any of us were alive. Second, in that humans are driven by a fundamental process of the endless reincarnation of pleasure. Third, that when we think we're moving past a problem, we're often just creating a new version of it. Thus evolution, for example, solved the problem of how to keep the species going by creating other problems of survival for that very species - whether through epidemics of obesity or the greed for pleasure that leads people to pillage and destroy others. This tendency to recreate failures was Marx's point in his essay about the failure of revolutionaries in France. And it would later become the devastating problem of many who followed Marx himself.

To take reincarnation seriously isn't only to develop a more sophisticated understanding of where we come from and what we owe to what comes after us, but also to face up to our tendency to bring screaming into the future the mistakes that we've made in the past. The hope of this reckoning is that we might better understand these conditions and awake from these nightmares. This is the point at which Gautama and Marx and many others agree: for there to be progress in ending suffering, some elements of the world - poverty, racism, hatred - simply must cease to be reincarnated.

The politics of reincarnation refuses to see the world as broken up into friends and enemies, victors and losers

The political demands to end negative reincarnations are, in part, made possible by the ethical view of human interdependence that reincarnation affords us. One of the ideas that we learn in the classical doctrine is that reincarnation links many of us across the histories of our being. In the words of Steven Collins, one of the most important Anglophone interpreters of the doctrine, stories of reincarnation are 'narrative ways of connecting identities one to another'. Someone whom we don't know, and might never know, could very well be part of our chain of existence. Indeed, one of the most intriguing elements of the classical view is that not everything or everyone is actually connected. Some other humans and elements are connected to us as individuals, in that we're linked across time through our past or future selves. But some people and things always remain separate. Collins points out that, except for the enlightened few, most of us never know whether or how we're related to others. The ethics here is thus not one in which I act kindly to others because I know that I am related to them, but rather precisely because I don't know.

Reincarnation, then, isn't about providing certainty, but a means of developing ethics within conditions of uncertainty. We might think of it as a kind of Pascalian wager. That is, just as the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal wagered that it would be better, after this life has ended, to have believed in God, just in case God is real, the ethics of reincarnation suggests that we're better off believing in our interconnectedness to any given person or animal or plant - whether we ever meet them or not - just in case we are. The immediate payoff of the wager is this: because I don't know how I'm connected to the Universe, and the people, plants, animals and bacteria that I share it with, it's best that I act kindly and calmly toward everything and everyone.

There are analogies in other traditions. In the Gospel of Matthew, for example, Jesus said that all who fed or clothed or cared for him, when he was downtrodden, would go to heaven. When someone asked how they could do this for him, he replied: '[J]ust as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.' There's also a Jewish tradition that speaks of 36 hidden, just people who maintain the stability of the world. The scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem argued in 1971 that this myth led to 'a somewhat anarchic morality: your neighbour may be one of the hidden just men.' The version of reincarnation that I'm advocating for here adds to these traditions by urging us to extend this ethics beyond how we treat our neighbours or those we meet. Our lack of knowledge about our specific connections to the world should make us behave ethically toward the whole world. The politics of reincarnation that one can develop from this ethics refuses to see the world as broken up into friends and enemies, victors and losers. It suggests that we're all patchworks of each other, bound together on a wheel of time. Our task in such a world can't be to defeat each other, for there's no one who is an other.

Of course, there are ways to arrive at all of these thoughts without engaging reincarnation. The basic ideas can be formulated through any number of traditions. And, as I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the doctrine of reincarnation has its own potential downsides, especially when it's used to justify people's positions within a social order. But the value of taking reincarnation seriously is that it might lead us to grasp more readily where and how we're recreating such troubled social formations. Perhaps we see this in today's supposed meritocracies, which create new, caste-like justifications for hierarchy and inequality, as several recent critics have suggested. Or perhaps we see it in some modern Buddhist monasteries in the West, where histories of sexual harassment keep recurring. To take reincarnation seriously is to think about how we can end these histories of suffering. This means working not just on a personal or even national scale, but through a global ethics based on our interdependence to all creatures and the natural world. It's hard to think of anything less 'McMindful' than that.

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Why modern Buddhists should take reincarnation seriously | Aeon Essays

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When people outside of Asia think of Buddhism, they tend to think about just philosophy and meditation. Buddhists are often said not to have gods, wars or empires. Their religion isn't about ritual or belief, but a dedicated exploration into what causes suffering and how to end it through meditation and compassion.

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In this short Independent article, Nick Perham considers why people believe in God, looking at the way in which it fulfills many of our psychological needs, and how religious thinking impacts on our personal and societal behaviour.

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In this short Independent article, Nick Perham considers why people believe in God, looking at the way in which it fulfills many of our psychological needs, and how religious thinking impacts on our personal and societal behaviour.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Understanding religion can be tricky, particularly for those who subscribe to no religious faith. Many people have tried to explain it via psychological or evolutionary terms - as Perham begins to do here. Is this a valid way of trying to explain why people believe in God? What are his key arguments? Or do we have to somehow ‘go beyond’ reason when we seek to understand religious knowledge systems? Can religion be explained via the human sciences? What constitutes ‘reality’? How can we tell what knowledge we should question? Are religious knowledge systems ‘beyond reason’?

KEY TERMS God-shaped hole, Cognitive decoupling

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The quick and easy answer to why people are religious is that god - in whichever form you believe he/she/they take(s) - is real and people believe because they communicate with it and perceive evidence of its involvement in the world.

Only 16 per cent of people worldwide are not religious, but this still equates to approximately 1.2 billion individuals who find it difficult to reconcile the ideas of religion with what they know about the world.

Why people believe is a question that has plagued great thinkers for many centuries. Karl Marx, for example, called religion the "opium of the people". Sigmund Freud felt that god was an illusion and worshippers were reverting to the childhood needs of security and forgiveness.

A more recent psychological explanation is the idea that our evolution has created a "god-shaped hole" or has given us a metaphorical "god engine" which can drive us to believe in a deity.

Essentially this hypothesis is that religion is a by-product of a number of cognitive and social adaptations which have been extremely important in human development.
Adapted for faith
We are social creatures who interact and communicate with each other in a cooperative and supportive way. In doing so we inevitably have stronger attachments to some individuals more than others.

British psychologist John Bowlby demonstrated this influence of attachments on children's emotional and social development, and showed how these can suffer when they are threatened through separation or abuse. We continue to rely on these attachments in later life, when falling in love and making friends, and can even form strong attachments to non-human animals and inanimate objects. It is easy to see that these strong attachments could transfer to religious deities and their messengers.

Our relationships depend on being able to predict how others will behave across situations and time. But the things that we form attachments to don't necessarily need to be in front of us to predict their actions. We can imagine what they would do or say.

This ability - known as cognitive decoupling - originates in childhood through pretend play. It is a small leap from being able to imagine the mind of someone we know to imagining an omnipotent, omniscient, human-like mind - especially if we have religious texts which tell of their past actions.

Another key adaptation that may help religious belief derives from our ability to anthropomorphise objects. Have you ever seen the outline of a person only to realise that it is actually a coat hung on the door? This capacity to attribute human forms and behaviours to non-human things shows we also readily endow non-human entities, such as gods, with the same qualities that we possess and, as such, make it easier to connect with them.
Behavioural benefits
In addition to these psychological aspects, the ritual behaviour seen in collective worship makes us enjoy and want to repeat the experience. Dancing, singing and achieving trance-like states were prominent in many ancestral societies and are still exhibited by some today - including the Sentinelese people, and Australian aborigines.

As well as being acts of social unity, even more formal rituals also alter brain chemistry. They increase levels of serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin in the brain - chemicals that make us feel good, want to do things again and provide a closeness to others.

These cognitive adaptations are facilitated by educational and household norms which don't tend to dispute religious ideas. While we are encouraged to challenge other ideas presented to us early in childhood that may not have a strong evidence base - such as Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy - this is not the case with religion. These challenges are often discouraged in religious teachings and sometimes regarded as sinful.

Regardless of your point of view, the impact of religion and religious thinking on human functioning and evolution is a captivating intellectual debate that shows no sign of ending. Of course, one might argue that god creates everything outlined above but then this leads us onto another, bigger question: what is the evidence for god?
Nick Perham is a senior lecturer in psychology at Cardiff Metropolitan University. This article first appeared on The Conversation (theconversation.com)

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Why people are religious, according to a psychology expert

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The quick and easy answer to why people are religious is that god - in whichever form you believe he/she/they take(s) - is real and people believe because they communicate with it and perceive evidence of its involvement in the world.

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A New Statesman article, which explores the way in which science and religion try to achieve the same aims, via similar thought processes. 

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A New Statesman article, which explores the way in which science and religion try to achieve the same aims, via similar thought processes. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This long article seems tailor-made for critical thinking, so it’s worth investing the time in reading and unpacking it. Rather than assessing the extent to which science can learn from religion as the title says, focus instead on thinking about the “connection, rather than a boundary” between science and religion as outlined in the article, which is illustrated in a number of ways. First, how have religious thinkers tried to pursue knowledge in a scientific way? Second, what examples does the article give of scientists who view science as having a spiritual dimension? Third, to what extent does science and religion ask the same questions? Fourth, how do scientists approach science in an ‘evangelical’ way? Finally, in what way have scientists drawn on the experience of religious thinkers to explore human awareness of the world?

KEY TERMS Conflict, Faith, Spirituality, Neogeocentrism

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Over the first half of the 20th century, the Catholic priest and prehistorian Henri Breuil transformed our understanding of early humans. Armed with a pared-down travel kit and a folding umbrella, this diminutive figure in a worn cassock criss-crossed France, then Europe, then the world, in search of painted caves. Having wriggled his way into hundreds of them, he re-emerged bearing his own renditions of the art with which our Stone Age ancestors decorated their interiors.

Nicknamed the Pope of Prehistory, the bright-eyed, sharp-tongued, chain-smoking Breuil was the first to systematically document Palaeolithic cave art: the scenes involving bison, horses and aurochs, tens of thousands of years old, that still take our breath away today. His thinking on the meaning of this ancient art, which he saw as linked to rituals for ensuring the success of the hunt, has since fallen out of favour, but more than any other individual he persuaded the world that humankind's most distant ancestors were capable of symbolic thought and that they believed in other worlds.

We're used to those ideas, now that the cave art of Lascaux and Chauvet is so well known. But in 1902, when Breuil first presented the paintings of Spain's Altamira cave as the work of Stone Age artists, academics were shocked. Prehistorians believed then that if ancient humans produced art it was essentially to satisfy a passing aesthetic urge. Some thought the rock paintings might be relatively modern, and possibly a hoax. Breuil forced them to look at those paintings anew, and as a result to entirely re-evaluate the ancestors they had once regarded as boneheaded brutes. "What we saw plunged us into an inexpressible stupor," Breuil wrote, years later.

Changing the paradigm wasn't easy. There were bitter struggles, and Breuil - who was himself accused of forgery - had to call attention to the art of many other caves before his idea was accepted. In doing so, he incurred the disapproval of both the Church - then fighting modernising forces within - and the fiercely anticlerical posse that dominated prehistory at the time, who objected to his suggestion that the paintings held religious significance. For them, religion was an abomination invented only in the past 10,000 years or so.

[See also: What the New Atheists got wrong]

Breuil saw no conflict between science and religion. He considered himself an empiricist who tested his hypotheses against the facts. His view of Palaeolithic art was undoubtedly coloured by his faith. He was drawn to the caves - which he regarded as Stone Age sanctuaries - by the spiritual charge he felt in them. A number of other priest-prehistorians working in Europe in that period were, too, as the French historian Fanny Defrance-Jublot argues in a forthcoming book, but they did not necessarily share Breuil's or the anti-clericals' interpretation of the evidence. Their diverse motives stimulated rather than stifled debate.

You could even make the case, as Breuil's biographer Arnaud Hurel has, that being a priest equipped Breuil for his scientific work. He was a talented draftsman with a prodigious visual memory. These were skills that were needed in the early 1900s, when hardly any of the caves had been documented, and because the Church exempted him from looking after a parish, Breuil had time to hone them. He was often the first on the scene when new cave paintings were discovered, thanks to his formidable network of informers among the parish priests of Europe and missionaries further afield. And, having no family ties, he could spend long stretches of time on the road.

In the 60 years since Breuil's death, the divide between science and religion seems only to have deepened. Ultra-religious groups deny the reality of evolution while New Atheists dismiss religion as irrational. Yet even scientists are beginning to ask if the existential threats facing humanity - climate change, the coronavirus pandemic - are beyond the remit of science alone, and require an exploration of the points where science and religion intersect.

That suggestion sounds radical, but it isn't new. Breuil and his fellow priest-prehistorians were among the last to take it for granted. As Defrance-Jublot puts it, they "felt a connection, rather than a boundary, between their faith and their scientific research".

Many historians now agree that the notion that science and religion must be in conflict was a Western invention of the 19th century, and yet this idea still distorts popular understanding of scientific history. Most people know about Galileo's persecution at the hands of the Roman Inquisition in the 17th century, for arguing that the Earth rotated around the sun and not vice versa. But they know little of the legions of earlier scientists, men and women of faith, on whose scholarship he built. For centuries, science and religion were seen as complementary. They were simply two ways of reading the same book: nature.

At the time that Breuil was working, the relationship between science and spirituality was still fluid. Like other prehistorians, religious or not, Breuil was interested in spiritualism - the belief that the living can communicate with the dead - which he may have seen as a way of entering the minds of the Stone Age artists. Other scientists, such as Marie Curie and Thomas Edison, visited mediums too. Boundaries were particularly elastic in the interwar years, when all kinds of former certainties were challenged, but after the Second World War they began to harden. Religion was gradually relegated to the private realm - to be kept separate from a scientist's day job - and a new narrative took hold, that religion loses legitimacy as science gains it.

That narrative has led us ineluctably to where we are now. New Atheism emerged in this century as a response to the increasingly vocal religious groups who challenge the scientific orthodoxy: the American evangelicals who want creationism taught in schools, the orthodox Muslims who believe God fashioned Adam out of clay. On 16 October this year a French schoolteacher was beheaded by an Islamic fundamentalist for teaching free speech, the bedrock of science. Such violent events strengthen the idea that we live in a polarised world where there is no common ground and one side or the other must win. The reality is somewhat different.

In Secularity and Science (2019), the sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund, of Rice University in Texas, and her colleagues observe that religious belief persists in the group of people you might think would be most resistant to it - scientists themselves. Based on international surveys, they report that not only is religious belief surprisingly common in this group, but religion and science overlap in scientific work, and even atheist scientists may see the pursuit of science as having a spiritual dimension.

One of their most eloquent surveys was conducted in the UK. They wanted to understand how scientists viewed religion in a country that, as the birthplace of the science-infused Industrial Revolution, appears outwardly more secular than the researchers' native US. Of the 115 British biologists and physicists they interviewed, 63 per cent stated they had no religious affiliation (compared to 47 per cent of the general population), yet even the relatively irreligious scientists did not reject all forms of religion. They rejected religious beliefs that challenge scientific claims, while praising those that support them. The majority of those interviewed were also critical of New Atheism, whose proponents include the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Some described Dawkins's efforts as "a form of evangelism or extremism, similar to the kind of evangelistic and extreme behaviour they object to in religion".

For the American rabbi and physicist Jeremy England, the misconception that science and religion have nothing to say to each other arises from a mirrored error whereby each side assumes the other only speaks one language. In fact, there are many languages within each: different scientific disciplines may adopt distinct approaches to the same problem, just as religious scholars may have different readings of the same sacred text. That linguistic multiplicity is a good thing, he thinks - if only it wasn't so often misconstrued - because it's at the boundaries between languages, or world-views, that discovery happens.

At Georgia Tech in Atlanta, England tries to understand how life is generated from inanimate matter. He told me that although he was drawn to that question by scientific curiosity, the Book of Genesis guided the approach he takes to it. "When it says in Genesis, 'And God said let there be light, and there was light,' one of the points surely being made is that the light by which we see the world comes from the way we talk about it," he said. His conclusion, which he lays out in a new book called Every Life is on Fire, is that neither biology nor physics alone can explain the origins of life. The solution to the mystery lies somewhere between the two.

Religion shapes how scientists approach science. But as knowledge accumulates, science can't help but encroach on religious territory, if only because the two ask some of the same questions. Where do we come from? Where are we going? What's the nature of the universe and are we special in it?

In 2020 many astronomers consider it unlikely that rational, intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, though they do think that relatively simple, microbial extraterrestrial life will be discovered before long. In light of that, the Brazilian-born theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser argues that it is time to move beyond the idea that we are merely average residents of the Milky Way. Gleiser, a self-declared agnostic, said in an interview in 2019 that we must accept that we have a moral duty to preserve this exceptional planet because "we understand how rare this whole game is and that for all practical purposes we are alone".

Some see this increasingly explicit tendency of scientists to place humans back at the centre of the universe - from where Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo ousted them - as a symptom of Western science's terminal malaise. They dismiss it as "neo-geocentrism" and worry that it means scientists are running out of ideas. Yet for others, making sense of our age of global crises requires a return to the old fluidity, in which science and religion are free to inspire each other.

Many environmental and social movements have emerged in recent years, in response to fears of climate change-fuelled civilisational collapse. In France, where "collapsology" has grown in popularity since 2015, one of the movement's leaders, the author and former academic Pablo Servigne, has spoken about how the prospect of calamity has forced humans to consider their place in the world. What is our relationship to the rest of nature, or to the future of this planet? "Science offers no solutions to these questions," he told an interviewer earlier this year. For Servigne, a collective spiritual reflection is called for: "If we satisfy ourselves with private beliefs, little spiritual hummingbirds flitting here and there, we will not achieve anything."

Like Greta Thunberg, who has been compared to Joan of Arc, Servigne has been described as a guru with an evangelical message - something that is always suspicious to scientists. But perhaps a mature, confident scientific community should recognise that people ask questions for many reasons, none of them untainted by ideology, and that this is how we muddle towards knowledge. After all, argues the German neuroscientist and agnostic Wolf Singer, there is so much more to know.

"Our reasoning has adapted to the world in which life has evolved, which is a tiny segment of what we know exists," Singer told me over Zoom from his home in Frankfurt. Even within that segment, our cognition and sense organs have been tuned by natural selection to those features essential to our survival, leaving us oblivious to the rest. We probe the broader universe by extrapolation, using maths to enter worlds we can't imagine, but the territory of the unknown remains vast. Singer sees no objection to hearing the same question framed differently - as long as the scientific method is respected in answering it - and has never shied away from dialogue with religion.

[See also: As Christmas approaches, we should remember the pagan rituals that came before it]

A member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences since 1992, he remarked on what he considers the academy's failures - its inability to change the Church's position on birth control, for example - but also its successes. After the Dutch-born chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen described the dire after-effects of nuclear war at an academy meeting in the early 1980s, the Vatican and its embassies helped introduce the concept of a nuclear winter to global governments, influencing the disarmament debate. And Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si', in which he adopted the scientific consensus on climate change, was heavily influenced by the academy's deliberations.

Singer has debated free will and consciousness with Buddhist monks, and even recruited them to his experiments, exploring how their practice of meditation shapes their awareness of the world. This research is an example of another way in which the two realms have inspired each other. The scientists' rationale for recruiting religious individuals is clear: in the differences between those individuals and the rest of us, they hope, lie clues to the inner workings of the human mind. But what motivates the participants?

At the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center in Chicago, the Religious Orders Study is approaching its fourth decade. This project tracks the physical and cognitive capacity of more than a thousand ageing nuns, priests and monks across the US, on the grounds that, belonging to religious communities, they tend to stay in one place and to lead similar lifestyles. The study's architects claim that it has shed light on the neurobiological pathways that both lead to and protect against dementia.

"Death doesn't worry me," said 79-year-old Sister Lucille Coughlin of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, speaking to me from her parish home in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Michigan. "I'll be watching from above." She told me that the requirement to donate her brain at death did not put her off: she was put here for a purpose and this research may be it. Having taught all her life, the study offers her a way to keep giving in retirement. Then, to my surprise, she quoted the Jesuit palaeontologist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

[See also: The year of the Great Humbling]

Teilhard was a friend of Henri Breuil's, with whom he worked in the painted caves of Spain and elsewhere. His philosophical ideas are outdated, but he, too, added to knowledge of human prehistory in important ways, and both men played their part in driving the Church towards modernisation. That process involved the Church acknowledging that Genesis could be read in ways that were compatible with the discoveries of science, and that its own legitimacy depended on it recognising the legitimacy of science - an acknowledgement that led to the creation of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1936.

Today, there is still no consensus on the meaning of Stone Age rock art. A kind of taboo exists among researchers against projecting intentions on to such distantly related beings who - like any putative extraterrestrials - inhabit such different worlds. Breuil, in his time, recognised no such taboo. "There's something moving about slipping beneath this sleeve of rock, shelter to lost generations, witness to their ceremonies and home life, faithful guardian of their disconcerting art," he wrote of Altamira cave in Spain. Even so, there is today an acceptance that the paintings are in some way religious - that as the prehistorian Jean Clottes puts it, Homo sapiens has always been Homo spiritualis. That's what links humanity through time and space, and it doesn't seem likely to change any time soon.

Laura Spinney, a science writer and an agnostic, is the author of "Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World" (Vintage)

This article appears in the 08 Dec 2020 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas special

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Over the first half of the 20th century, the Catholic priest and prehistorian Henri Breuil transformed our understanding of early humans. Armed with a pared-down travel kit and a folding umbrella, this diminutive figure in a worn cassock criss-crossed France, then Europe, then the world, in search of painted caves.

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An FT article, considering what we can learn by engaging with art that deprioritises western belief and knowledge systems.

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An FT article, considering what we can learn by engaging with art that deprioritises western belief and knowledge systems.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Choose one of the following works of art from the article: The Prophecy, by Fabrice Monteiro; Still Standing, by Victor Ehikhamenor; The world is not what exists but what happens, by Cassi Namoda. What does each work represent? How do they challenge our perspectives? What are your personal takeaways from the work of art you are looking at? When you’ve finished, swap your responses with other members of the class. Overall, do you agree that “we have much to learn from engaging with art that deprioritises western belief and knowledge systems”?

KEY TERMS Perspectives, Sacred, Unlearning and relearning, Memory

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

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As I'm writing this column I'm preparing to go to Sharjah, to view the art at the Sharjah Biennial. One of the things I love about art is how it can challenge our perspectives and invite us to reflect on our allegiances, belief systems and actions. We inhabit a world that has historically valued western knowledge systems over non-western, traditional or indigenous ways of understanding. But we have much to learn from engaging with art that deprioritises western belief and knowledge systems.

Many west African cosmologies share some variation of the idea that the Earth and the natural world are sacred and should be afforded a particular reverence by humans. The Prophecy is a photo series by the Beninese-Belgian photographer Fabrice Monteiro, which he began in Senegal in 2013. "Untitled # 1" is one of several images of mythological-looking characters made from pieces of garbage and transformed into living, walking allegories of ecological and environmental crises in Senegal, among them water pollution and plastic waste.

In this work, a giant female figure rises up from a mound of refuse like a towering deity about to cast a judgment on humanity. She stands above an ominous landscape, dense bushes interspersed with carpets of rubbish and smouldering with smoke. Influenced by the Greek myth of Gaia, Monteiro created a narrative that a tired Mother Earth has sent her spirit children to prophesy to humanity about the consequences of how they are treating the natural world. Inherent in these warnings is the idea that human behaviour towards the rest of creation is partly the result of a broken relationship between the two, and our human inability to recognise any life force other than our own.

Monteiro was also inspired by west African masquerades. Looking at his work, I was taken back to a memory from my childhood when my family lived in Nigeria. It was a season for masquerades. At some point in the day, larger-than-life totem-like figures with masks and streams of raffia would begin to parade through the streets, hollering, beating instruments and dancing in elaborate, colourful costumes - extraordinary even on the vast landscape of my childhood imagination. I was terrified by these figures because I didn't think they were human.

Monteiro created a narrative that a tired Mother Earth has sent her spirit children to prophesy to humanity about the consequences of how they are treating the natural world

In my own Igbo tradition, many masquerades are representative of a relationship between the spirit and the human world, implying ancestors and those in the spiritual world are invested in what we humans get up to. Though I didn't fully understand it or have the language to articulate it, I knew this spectacle was symbolic of the fluidity of borders between the earthly and the transcendent. I have never had trouble believing in a thin line between earthly and spiritual realities.

Monteiro's work draws also on elements of animism, primarily the belief that humans are not the only ones with a life force energy or a spiritual essence. Whatever we might think of that idea, the way we treat creation might be significantly affected if we were open to the possibility that rivers, lakes, oceans, plants, trees, mountains and other animals have the potential to possess some aspect of a soul, and that a spirit world existed that ached at the broken relationship between humanity and the rest of creation.

The 53-year-old Nigerian artist Victor Ehikhamenor has been working for years on pieces that speak to the collision of African and western cultures. Ehikhamenor was born in Edo state, whose capital is Benin City, and was raised with both the traditional religious beliefs of his grandfather and the Catholic faith of his schooling. "Still Standing" (2022) is a 12ft mixed-media image of Oba Ovonramwen, ruler of the Benin Kingdom who went into exile after the 1897 razing and looting of Benin City by British forces. The Oba's traditional gown, headdress and accessories were made in Ehikhamenor's Lagos studio from thousands of orange, red and white rosary beads. Hanging on the gown are miniature Benin bronze ornament masks, a nod to the theft by the British of these precious cultural and religious artefacts; the artist cast them in Benin with traditional bronze-casters. The background is made of thousands of white rosaries that glow in the dark.

Works such as "Still Standing" aim to open a dialogue about how African cultural and religious knowledge was affected by the colonial project. Commissioned as part of a series that asked artists to respond to monuments in St Paul's Cathedral, London, the work was displayed next to the memorial brass of Harry Rawson, the British admiral who led the 1897 Benin expedition. It has now been acquired by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which last year agreed in principle to return its own collection of Benin bronzes to Nigeria.

In "The world is not what exists but what happens", 34-year-old Mozambican artist Cassi Namoda paints an almost folkloric image of a small trail of people moving along a formless waterscape, united by the labour of carrying a large, thick cloth. The figures seem to float across the canvas in front of a curvaceous, tangerine-coloured mountain range. The clouds are swaths of coral, caramel, soft pink and sky blue. A tiny blood-red moon hangs at the top right-hand corner of the frame. In the lower half, on the right hand side, is a faint outline of a ladder in the water; perhaps a portal to another realm, an underworld open to the traversing of beings between different realities.

Some of Namoda's work is inspired by Kenyan philosopher, theologian and writer John Mbiti, an ordained Anglican priest. In his seminal 1969 book African Religions and Philosophy, he suggested traditional African religious ideas should be afforded the same level of respect as other global faiths (although he was criticised by some for applying a Christian worldview to African cosmologies).

Mbiti also posited a uniquely African understanding of time, marked by two distinct time periods, the Sasa and the Zamani. Sasa time includes the present and recent past; Zamani time includes the far past and an immeasurable past. According to his book, when a person dies, they remain in Sasa time until the last person who can remember the deceased also dies. Then the person is considered to be in Zamani time.

When I look at Namoda's painting with this concept in mind, I see a lineage of people, connected by a literal fabric of time. Those at the back carry the events of the past, recognising how they affect how the people at the front exist in present time. The two people at the front are covered and immersed in the wide breath of the present, as they move towards a future no one can see.

I think there are gifts in being open to the belief that the way we live our lives in the present can be deeply marked by patterns and behaviours from our ancestral past, suggesting we inherit more from those who came before us than just physical characteristics. It can be empowering to consider that some of our behaviour or ways of living in the world are inherited from our ancestors, offering an opportunity for unlearning and relearning as we make our way through the world.
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As I'm writing this column I'm preparing to go to Sharjah, to view the art at the Sharjah Biennial. One of the things I love about art is how it can challenge our perspectives and invite us to reflect on our allegiances, belief systems and actions.

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A Sky News video, looking at the relationship between the Kogi people of Colombia and the natural world - and what we can learn from them.

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A Sky News video, looking at the relationship between the Kogi people of Colombia and the natural world - and what we can learn from them.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Who are the Kogi people, and why are they in the news? How different are their beliefs about the natural world to those of us belonging to large-scale, industrialized societies? Why does their approach to the environment have less of an impact than ours? Overall, does having a spiritual relationship with the natural world help us to understand and protect it more effectively?

KEY TERMS Advice, Interconnected, Voice, Living entity

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A member of Colombia’s indigenous Kogi people tells Sky News about a project to restore part of their original land back to them.

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This Big Think story focuses on the assertion of Dartmouth physicist Marcelo Gleiser that labelling yourself an atheist - in other words, stating that something does not exist when you have no evidence either way - is incompatible with a scientific outlook.

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This Big Think story focuses on the assertion of Dartmouth physicist Marcelo Gleiser that labelling yourself an atheist - in other words, stating that something does not exist when you have no evidence either way - is incompatible with a scientific outlook.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Many people link a scientific approach to knowledge with the rejection of religious phenomena, and so call themselves ‘atheists’, but Geiser’s provocative remarks suggest that that is invalid. What do students think - should all ‘true’ scientists call themselves agnositics? After arriving at a conclusion about this RLS, students could think about the wider question, which is: where should the burden of proof lie - on those proving, or disproving an idea?

KEY TERMS Evidence

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Dartmouth College physics professor Marcelo Gleiser has become the first Latin American to win the Templeton Prize in recognition of his "exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works."

Prior to winning the 2019 award on March 19, Dr. Gleiser had exhibited his spiritual side to the press, even arguing why he believes atheism is unscientific.

In an interview that will shock many atheists, Dr. Gleiser told Scientific American why he finds atheism to be a bridge too far for a scientific mind:

"I think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It's a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. 'I don't believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don't believe.' Period. It's a declaration. But in science we don't really do declarations. We say, 'Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.' And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn't know about."

He further explains his stance on not trying to claim that we know everything in a well-reasoned defense of humility in science:

"I believe we should take a much humbler approach to knowledge, in the sense that if you look carefully at the way science works, you'll see that yes, it is wonderful - magnificent! - but it has limits. And we have to understand and respect those limits. And by doing that, by understanding how science advances, science really becomes a deeply spiritual conversation with the mysterious, about all the things we don't know."

In some ways, it is.

Dr. Gleiser reminds us that we are on an "island of knowledge" in the middle of an "ocean of the unknown." As knowledge advances, we become more aware of what we don't know. As he puts it:

The paradox of knowledge is that as it expands and the boundary between the known and the unknown changes, you inevitably start to ask questions that you couldn't even ask before.

His notion that we should not be too proud of what we know and open to the idea that we might discover something tomorrow that changes everything isn't without precedent. Lord Kelvin, a brilliant British scientist of the 19th century, claimed that flight was impossible and that X-rays were a hoax. Albert Abraham Michelson, an American physicist also working just before the relativistic and quantum revolutions in physics, suggested that the laws of physics had all been worked out and that the only task left was to improve accuracy in measurement.

If we listened to these two who thought we'd already figured everything out, we'd be stuck in the 1890s. It may well turn out that the claim "there is no God" could end up being similar to saying, "No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful" in 1902. Similarly, skepticism of the claim "X doesn't exist" is also important in science since "X" might show up someday.

While it remains true that humility can be a good thing, that we don't know what we don't know, and that it is impossible to prove the negative statement that "God doesn't exist," Bertrand Russell reminds us that we can still be rational while saying we don't believe in something we cannot disprove the existence of.

Famous for his well-reasoned atheism, Russell acknowledged that he was technically an agnostic and declaring there to be no God was a step too far. However, he pointed out why that step shouldn't bother anybody:

"I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely."

That quote refers to his famous teapot analogy, excerpted below:

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense."

What Russell is saying is that just because a point that is asserted without evidence cannot be disproved doesn't mean it is unreasonable to think it isn't true. Furthermore, Russell places the burden of proof on the person making the positive claim - God/the teapot exists - and not on the person questioning that claim.

Astronomer and science educator Carl Sagan made a similar point about the dragon in his garage:

"Suppose I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

'Show me,' you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle-but no dragon.

'Where's the dragon?' you ask.

'Oh, she's right here,' I reply, waving vaguely. 'I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon.'

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

'Good idea,' I say, 'but this dragon floats in the air.'

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

'Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.'

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

'Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick.'

And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so."

Sagan, like Russell, is arguing that the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. Since there is no evidence of the dragon, it is hardly anti-scientific to say you don't believe the dragon is there.

Is it going too far to claim that God doesn't exist? That depends on where you want to place the burden of proof and how much evidence (or the lack thereof) is needed to make a claim. In any case, Dr. Gleiser makes a good point about not claiming to know more than you do and the need for a bit of humility.

I for one still won't believe you if you tell me you're off for a cup of tea on Mars with the dragon that lives in your garage.

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Atheism is inconsistent with science, says Dartmouth physicist Marcelo Gleiser

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Dartmouth College physics professor Marcelo Gleiser has become the first Latin American to win the Templeton Prize in recognition of his "exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works." Prior to winning the 2019 award on March 19, Dr. Gleiser had exhibited his spiritual side to the press, even arguing why he believes atheism is unscientific.

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A Conversation article, examining research that investigates the link between people’s religious and non-religious affiliations, and their gender. 

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A Conversation article, examining research that investigates the link between people’s religious and non-religious affiliations, and their gender. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What part does gender play in our religious outlooks - and how can we meaningfully assess this?

KEY TERMS Nones, Life cycle effect

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One of the most consequential stories in American religion in recent years is the rapid and seemingly unceasing rise of "nones " - those who respond to questions about their religious affiliation by indicating that they are atheists, agnostics or "nothing in particular."

According to some recent estimates, around 4 in 10 millennials and members of Gen Z, a group that comprises those born after 1980, do not identify with a religious tradition. In comparison, only about a quarter of baby boomers indicate that they are religiously unaffiliated.

Social scientists are only beginning to explore the demographic factors that drive individuals who no longer feel attached to a religious tradition.

But as someone who follows the data on religious trends, I note one factor appears to stand out: gender.

Scholars have long noted that atheism skews male. Meanwhile, critics have pointed toward the apparent dominance of male authors in the "new atheism" movement as evidence of a " boys club." Indeed, a quick scan of the best-selling books on atheism on Amazon indicates that almost all of them are written by male authors.

According to data from the Nationscape survey, which polled over 6,000 respondents every week for 18 months in the runup to the 2020 election, men are in general more likely than women to describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or nothing in particular. The survey, conducted by the independent Democracy Fund in partnership with the University of California, Los Angeles, was touted as one of the largest such opinion polls ever conducted.

However, tracking the gender gap by age reveals that at one point the gap between men and women narrows. Between the ages of 30 and 45, men are no more likely to be religiously unaffliated than women of the same age.

But the gap appears again among older Americans. Over the age of 60, men are 5 to 8 percentage points more likely to express no religious affiliation.

Moreover, older Americans - both men and women - tend to be far less likely to identify as "nones" compared with younger Americans, according to respondents of the survey.

The 'life cycle' effect

What may be driving this pattern of young women and older women being less likely to identify as nones than their male counterparts?

One theory in social science called the " life cycle effect " argues that when people begin to marry and have children, some are drawn back into religious circles to raise their kids in a religious environment or to lean on support structures that religion may provide.

But once kids grow up and leave the house this attachment fades for many. I make this point in my forthcoming book called " The Nones."

The data on gender and those with no religious affiliation could indicate that this drifting is especially acute for men. One explanation could be that men are more likely to be religious when they are part of a family unit, but when children grow up, that connection becomes weaker. Unfortunately, the survey does not offer a direct test of this hypothesis.

But it would fit with survey research over the past five decades that has consistently found that Christian women are more likely than men to attend church.

One word of caution about the data is necessary. The survey is just a single snapshot of the public in 2019 and 2020. It's possible that this same pattern would look different if data were collected 20 years ago or 20 years from now. Either way, it offers a small window into how age and gender interact with the religious lives of Americans.

[ Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation's email newsletter.]

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Faith in numbers: Behind the gender difference of nonreligious Americans

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One of the most consequential stories in American religion in recent years is the rapid and seemingly unceasing rise of "nones " - those who respond to questions about their religious affiliation by indicating that they are atheists, agnostics or "nothing in particular."

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A Big Think article, considering why we view time as linear, and whether it’s advantageous to perceive it differently. 

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A Big Think article, considering why we view time as linear, and whether it’s advantageous to perceive it differently. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE To start: How would you represent time in a visual way? How many of you offered a ‘timeline’? From the source: What ideas did the Greeks have about the nature of time - and how did Plato differ from the other thinkers? How did Plato’s approach to time fit in with Christian ideology? What is Sacred Time - and how influential has this idea been? What other ways of visualizing time are there - and what advantages do they offer in order to understand the ‘true’ nature of time? To wrap up: “the world is in a ceaseless process of change.” (Carlo Rovelli) How should we build this realization into the way we perceive time?

KEY TERMS Linear view of time, Different ways of seeing the world, Illusion, Deliberate narrative, Sacred Time

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The history of philosophy doesn’t give us a uniform understanding of time. The reason we see time as linear is mostly due to Christianity.

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Nat Case at Aeon considers how it is possible (for him, at least) to be both an atheist and a Quaker. As he explains, this has much to do with the search for ‘truth’.

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Nat Case at Aeon considers how it is possible (for him, at least) to be both an atheist and a Quaker. As he explains, this has much to do with the search for ‘truth’.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a very thought-provoking article, which should get people considering the point of religious knowledge, and how integral believing in God is to being religious. First, how does he summarize the Quaker view of ‘truth’, and what its role is in their organization? Second, what does he mean when he says, “theological differences are not necessarily an issue when there’s work to be done”? Finally, does he succeed in persuading you that not believing in God is perfectly viable whilst belonging to a Christian community? Does religious belief provide us with pragmatic truth?

KEY TERMS Atheism, Quakerism, Community

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I read voraciously as a child, even obsessively. Our family drove across the US when I was 13, and I hardly noticed the scenery, eyes glued to a mammoth book of classic science-fiction stories. As I recall, this ticked off my parents.

Magical stories moved me to tears. I vividly remember, at the age of eight, being surprised at how deeply the second chapter of Astrid Lindgren's The Brothers Lionheart (1973) affected me. The narrator dies and goes to the land where sagas come from, and when he arrives he finds that all that he had wanted - to be strong, healthy and beautiful like his older brother - has come to be, and that his beloved brother is there, too. And this is just the beginning of the story. I remember arriving at the end of Penelope Farmer's The Summer Birds (1962) and weeping bitterly as the children, who have spent the summer flying about the English countryside, return gravity-bound to school while their lonely classmate and the strange bird-boy fly off together over the ocean.

This essay wasn't supposed to be about the stories I read as a child. It was supposed to be about how I manage to be an atheist within a religious community, and why I dislike the term 'atheism'. But however I wrote that essay, the words died on the page. That story comes down to this: I do not believe in God, and I am bored with atheism. But these stories, this magic, and their presence in my heart, they don't bore me - they are alive. Even though I know they are fiction, I believe in them.

My main religious practice today is meeting for worship with the Religious Society of Friends: I am a Quaker. Meeting for worship, to a newcomer, can feel like a blank page. Within the tradition of Friends, it is anything but blank: it is a religious service, expectant waiting upon the presence of God. So it's not meditation, or 'free time'. But that's how I came to it at first, at the Quaker high school I attended.

After almost 15 years away, I returned to Quakerism in 1997. During a difficult patch of my life, a friend said I needed to do something for myself. So I started going to the meeting house on Sunday mornings. What I rediscovered was the simple fact of space. It was a hiatus, a parenthesis inserted into a complicated, twisty life. Even if it held nothing but breath, it was a relief, and in that relief, quiet notions emerged that had been trampled into the ground of everyday life.

'Truth', in the sense that it was used by 17th-century Friends, had less to do with verifiable evidence, and more to do with sense of being a 'true friend', an arrow flying true

I am an atheist, but I've been bothered for a long time by the mushiness I've found in the liberal spiritual communities that admit non-believers such as me. I've spent the better part of two decades trying to put my finger on the source of this unease, but it is not a question to be solved by the intellect: it must be lived through.

Several years ago, Marshall Massey, a fellow Friend, pointed out to me that 'truth', in the sense that it was used by 17th-century Friends, had less to do with verifiable evidence, and more to do with sense of being a 'true friend', an arrow flying true. It was about remaining on a path, not about conforming to the facts of the world. This points to a deep truth: we humans are built for a different kind of rigour than that of evidentiary fact. It is at least as much about consistency, discipline and loyalty as it is about the kinds of repeatable truth that we hold up in a scientific world as fundamental.

This is a large part of what drew me to the Friends rather than the Unitarians or other study groups. Binding oneself to specific patterns, habits, and language seems to have the effect of providing a spine, and Quakers seemed to have more of this spine than other groups I was attracted to. It was a partial solution of my sense of mushiness, but it certainly didn't solve everything.

If you are really going to be part of a community, just showing up for the main meal is not enough: you need to help cook and clean up. So it has been with me and the Quakers: I'm concerned with how my community works, and so I've served on committees (Quakerism is all about committees). There's pastoral care to accomplish, a building to maintain, First-Day School (Quakerese for Sunday School) to organise. And there's the matter of how we as a religious community will bring our witness into the world. Perhaps this language sounds odd coming from a non-theist, but as I hope I've shown, I'm not a non-theist first. I've been involved in prison visiting, and have been struck at the variety of religious attitudes among volunteers: some for whom the visiting is in itself ministry, and others for whom it's simply social action towards justice (the programme grew out of visiting conscientious objectors in the Vietnam era). The point is: theological differences are not necessarily an issue when there's work to be done.

But the committees I've been in have also had a curious sense of unease too, a sense of something missing, and I've now been on three committees that were specifically charged with addressing aspects of a sense of malaise and communal disconnect. The openness of liberal religion resonates strongly with me. It means I do have a place, and not just in the closet or as a hypocrite. But I wonder if my presence, and the presence of atheists and skeptics such as me, is part of the problem.

People need focus. There's a reason why the American mythologist Joseph Campbell chose the hero's journey as his fundamental myth: we don't give out faith and loyalty to an idea nearly as readily as we give it to a hero, a person. And so a God whom we understand not as a vague notion or spirit, but as a living presence, with voice and face and will and command - this is what I think most people want in a visceral way. In some ways, it's what we need.

And I do not believe such a God exists in our universe.

Here's a peculiar sense I've been getting in Friends committee meetings: we often don't know how to seek the will of God; we are uncertain whether God actually possesses will. And yet, I suspect that the way out of our tortuous debates is to stop arguing and submit. That submission - because that's what it is, in the same sense that islam means submission - is what pulls us out of ourselves and gets us lined up to do what needs doing instead of arguing about whose idea is better.

In the 17th century, the Quaker theologian Robert Barclay argued for the bodiless Holy Spirit as the only way to reach Christ and then God. Nowadays, we might find comfort in the spirit alone, or the Light, as Quakers describe an inwardly detected sense of the divine. But submission to something so vague is difficult. We might love and treasure and 'hold our beloved friends in the Light', but that's not a humbling of self, a laying low of ego, and that is what I believe we are missing.

How can we do that? How can I do that? Submitting to something I am pretty sure doesn't exist? How can I bow down to a fiction? I did it all the time as a child. Open the cover of the book, and I'm in that world. If I'm lucky, and the book is good enough, some of that world comes with me out into the world of atoms and weather, taxes and death. It's a story, and sometimes stories are stronger than stuff.

Maybe part of the trick is realising that it doesn't have to be just my little bubble of fiction. I can read a novel, or I can go gaming into the evening with friends. I can watch a ballet on a darkened stage, or I can roar along to my favourite band in the mosh pit. I hated school dances with a passion, yet I have been a morris dancer for 23 years now: I just had to find the form that was a right fit. I don't pray aloud, or with prescribed formulas. But I can ask Whatever-There-Is a question, or ask for help from the universe, or say thank you. And now that I'm in a place with a better fit, sometimes I get answers back. And so there I am, a confirmed skeptic, praying in a congregation.

Maybe that god would tell us not to tramp over the earth in armies, pretending we are bigger than we are, and that dying is OK

A year and a half ago, our family began worshipping with a smaller Conservative Friends group. Conservative Friends are socially and theologically liberal but stricter in adhering to older Quaker practices. The group uses the Montessori-based Godly Play curriculum for the children: it's all about stories. Every session begins with a quieting and a focusing. The leader tells a story from the Bible or from the Quaker story book. Then 'wondering' questions are asked that spur the children to reflect on what's going on, and what they would do in the same situation.

I wish I'd had this great programme as a child. The teacher is a good storyteller who clearly loves the kids, and they love the stories and the time with their friends. To me, it's such an improvement on school-style lessons. It says: this is a different kind of knowing and learning - this is not about facts and theories you need to learn, but about the stories we want to become part of your life.

I love facts and theories, the stuff of the world. I spend most of my life wrestling and dancing with all this amazing matter. As the Australian comic Tim Minchin says in his rant-poem 'Storm' (2008): 'Isn't this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable world?' And yes, it's enough. We don't need to tell lies about the real world in order to make it magical. But we do still need impossible magic for our own irrational selves. At any rate, I do.

Because I don't feel stuff-and-logic-based explanations deep down in my toes. There are no miracle stories of flying children there, or brothers reborn into the land where the sagas come from. The language of 'stuff is all there is' tells me that I can - even ought to - be rational and sensible, but it doesn't make me want to be. 'Atheism' tells me what I am not, and I yearn to know what I am. What I am has a spine, it's a thing I must be true to, because otherwise it evaporates into the air, dirt and water of the hard world.

Maybe I - we - need to start small, rebuilding gods that we talk to, and who talk back. Or just one whom we can plausibly imagine, our invisible friend. Maybe part of our problem is that we don't actually want to talk to the voice of Everything, because Everything has gotten so unfathomably huge. George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, didn't have to think about light years, let alone billions of light years. The stars now are too far away to be our friends or speak to us in our need. Maybe we could talk to a god whom we imagined in our house. Maybe we could ask what is wanted, and hear what is needed. Maybe that god would tell us not to tramp over the earth in armies, pretending we are bigger than we are, and that dying is OK, because it's just something that happens when your life is over. Maybe we would ask for help and comfort from unexpected places, and often enough receive it and be thankful for it.

Maybe we need to name that little god something other than God, because maybe our God has a boss who has a boss whose boss runs the universe. Maybe we name this god Ethel, or Larry, or Murgatroyd. Maybe there is no god but God... or maybe there just is no God. And maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we just tell stories that ring true to us and say up-front that we know they are fiction. We can let people love these stories or hate them. Maybe imagining impossible things - such as flying, the land where sagas come from, God - is what is needed. Maybe we don't need the gods to be real. Maybe all we need is to trust more leaps of the imagination.

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I'm an atheist, so how did I end up such a committed Quaker? | Aeon Essays

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I read voraciously as a child, even obsessively. Our family drove across the US when I was 13, and I hardly noticed the scenery, eyes glued to a mammoth book of classic science-fiction stories. As I recall, this ticked off my parents. Magical stories moved me to tears.

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An Atlantic article, considering the closeness of religious and scientific beliefs about the universe.  

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An Atlantic article, considering the closeness of religious and scientific beliefs about the universe.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a long article, but it’s perfect for TOK, and raises some massive questions. Start by thinking about the way in which our ideas of ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ developed alongside the development of science, and the construction of our ‘laws of nature’. Next think about how recent discoveries in science have shaken all this up - and how scientists lack the evidence to prove many of their hypotheses. To what extent, then, do (and should) we rely on ‘faith’ in order to support our scientific suppositions? How does this differ from religious knowledge? Does knowledge have to be provable?

KEY TERMS Believers and nonbelievers, Miracles, Supernatural, Laws of nature, Faith, Evidence, Falsifiability, Proved

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Recent speculations in physics reveal that believers and nonbelievers may have more in common than they think.

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A Big Think video, arguing that ‘supernatural thinking’ is an integral part of being a complete human being. 

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A Big Think video, arguing that ‘supernatural thinking’ is an integral part of being a complete human being. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the usual view of the relationship between supernatural and rational thinking, according to Clay Routledge? Why does he argue that believing in the supernatural is entirely rational? Which three unique cognitive capacities does he identify that humans possess, and how does this link to being able to create new understandings about the world? How important is ‘intuitive thinking’ for him? Overall, do you agree that supernatural thinking is an important part of “being a complete human being”?

KEY TERMS Supernatural thinking, Transcends the material, Quest for meaning, Teleological thinking, Rational versus intuitive cognitive processes, Agent of meaning

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“Supernatural thinking is actually an important part of being a complete human being.”

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A Discover magazine article, exploring what ‘empathy overload’ means, and why it particularly affects those who work in caring professions. 

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A Discover magazine article, exploring what ‘empathy overload’ means, and why it particularly affects those who work in caring professions. 

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In 1978, Kathy Kleiner was asleep in her bed at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University when serial killer Ted Bundy entered through an unlocked door. After attacking two of her sorority sisters, Bundy found Kathy's door also unlocked.

Kathy survived the attack and is one of only a few Bundy survivors. When we began writing her memoir, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy , she said she wanted to weave in as many stories about the other victims as possible.

For about two years, I researched the more than 30 women and girls Bundy killed. By the time I started compiling their biographies for an appendix, I often felt stressed, saddened and a bit on edge. There were certain victims who I thought about daily.

Later, I learned I had empathy overload, an experience that social scientists are finding can happen to people in both their professional and personal lives.

What is Empathy?

In the 1990s, researchers began to consider secondary trauma and the idea that a person didn't need to witness or experience the trauma to be impacted. From there, scientists started to consider compassion fatigue and how people in helping professions were empathetic to the pain of others, and such constant concern could one day cause them distress.

What is Compassion Fatigue?

Although researchers agree on the concept of compassion fatigue, there isn't one set definition. The (DSM-5) doesn't define compassion fatigue, so clinicians and researchers use different definitions as well as theories as to what causes it.

How Does Compassion Fatigue Develop?

How the person responds to the transfer of trauma can vary, and some scientists think most people fall on a spectrum. On one end are avoidance behaviors such as empathic withdrawal or repression. On the other end are behaviors involving overidentification, enmeshment or excessive advocacy.

Researchers also see empathic disequilibrium as a possibility for some people. With empathic disequilibrium, the transfer of trauma shatters the person's worldview and they aren't sure how to proceed.

What is it Like to Have Compassion Fatigue?

For me, I responded to the Bundy victim research with repressive behaviors. As a journalist, I didn't feel I was allowed to... well, feel. It was my job to report the story accurately and not involve how the story made me react.

In response, I looked for outlets where I could let my emotions flow. I cried, for example, at Hallmark Christmas movies - not because they were sappy, but because I thought there was a sadness to films like Finding Father Christmas. There was also a time when I insisted guests at family parties watch the Toyota Super Bowl Commercial about Paralympian Jessica Long and then agree that it was beautiful.

How to Deal With Compassion Fatigue?

As a journalist, I was able to end my intensive research process and submit the book. My daily, constant inquiry into the Bundy victims concluded. But many people in helping professions aren't able to simply submit a project and end their exposure to secondary trauma.

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Many people can experience empathy overload, but it's mostly present in those with helping professions, such as nurses and therapists.

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This History Today review of Ethan Shagan’s new book, The Birth of Modern Belief, considers that it isn’t just the concept of religion that has changed over time, it is also the concept of belief.

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This History Today review of Ethan Shagan’s new book, The Birth of Modern Belief, considers that it isn’t just the concept of religion that has changed over time, it is also the concept of belief.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE First, students could consider the way in which religion has developed over time, based on the first paragraph of the article (plus their own ideas, and outside reading). Then get them to think about the meaning of belief. What are the implications of this in terms of how we understand and produce religious knowledge?

KEY TERMS Secularism, Belief

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'Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?' This question, posed by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2007), is popular with historians these days. Even as Christianity across the West continues its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, a nagging sense persists that its retreat is not all that it might seem to be. The roots of secularism in Christendom are too manifest for its founding myths to be taken wholly at face value. What could be more Christian, after all, than to boast of toppling the idols of superstition and of bringing a people that had walked in darkness to see a great light? The capacity of Christianity to evolve in unexpected ways is nowhere better demonstrated, perhaps, than the Enlightenment recalibration of fundamental Christian beliefs.

But what if the very notion of belief has evolved as well? This is the question posed by Ethan Shagan in his bracing new book, The Birth of Modern Belief. Signifiers in the history of religion - as anyone who has studied the prehistory of the word 'religion' itself will know - can be treacherous things. The challenge that this presents to historians is considerable. Indeed, it can sometimes be hard even to recognise it as a challenge. 'Secular historians of Christianity have needed a stable object called "belief" whose decline could be measured, while pious historians of Christianity have needed a stable object called "belief" to certify the identity of believers across time and space.' Both, though, Shagan argues, have been mistaken.

'Belief', which today signifies a private judgement, did not always have this meaning. In medieval Christendom, it signified, not an opinion, but rather the sum of the credenda of the universal Church - credenda which were guaranteed to be true. It allowed Jews, Muslims and heretics to be reckoned to lack belief: to be 'unbelievers'. Only with the Reformation did this change. To Luther, the knowledge of God was a given, imprinted on the souls of all humanity from birth - but belief, the absolute and certain conviction that salvation can indeed be obtained, was an altogether rarer bloom. A condition common to everyone in Christendom was transformed into a privileged experience. Perhaps only one person in a thousand, Luther wrote, ranks as an authentic Christian.

The consequence was the transformation of belief from a state of mind that most Christians had been able to take for granted into a practice that was challenging, exacting, hard. This, Shagan argues, was as true for Catholics as for Protestants. 'The Reformation and Counter-Reformation participated in parallel projects of religious discipline: while Catholics disciplined populations to believe, Protestants disciplined populations of unbelievers.' Belief in the modern sense of the word was bred of the resulting strain. The demands imposed on Christians by inquisitors and Puritans alike proved too much for many of them. Dissidents emerged in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions, who emphasised the subjectivity of religious conviction. Belief was to become opinion.

Shagan's mastery of the sources and his alertness to the shifting rip tides of signification make his book a thrilling read. Certainly, the answer it provides to Taylor's celebrated question is as convincing as any. Our opinions turn out to be even more relative than we might have suspected. 'Western modernity', as Shagan puts it, 'is characterised not by a decline of belief but by its boundless proliferation.'

The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment
Ethan H. Shagan
Princeton
408pp £27

Tom Holland's Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind will be published by Little, Brown in September 2019.

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'Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?' This question, posed by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2007), is popular with historians these days.

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An Aeon article, exploring the way virtue-signalling is a highly ‘evolved tool’ in expressing our ideas.

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An Aeon article, exploring the way virtue-signalling is a highly ‘evolved tool’ in expressing our ideas.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is more important: acting altruistically, or communicating to others that we act altruistically?

KEY TERMS Signalling theory, Dishonesty, Mathematical models, Common knowledge, Intuitions

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As a quick stroll on social media reveals, most people love showing that they are good. Whether by expressing compassion for disaster victims, sharing a post to support a social movement, or denouncing a celebrity's racist comment, many people are eager to broadcast their high moral standing.

Critics sometimes dismiss these acts as mere 'virtue signalling'. As the British journalist James Bartholomew (who popularised the term in a magazine article in 2015) remarks, virtue signallers enjoy the privilege of feeling better about themselves by doing very little. Unlike the kind of helping where you have to do something - help an old lady cross the street, volunteer to give meals to the dispossessed, go door-to-door to fundraise for a cause - virtue signalling often consists of completely costless actions, such as changing your profile picture or saying you don't like a politician's stance on immigration. Bartholomew complains that 'saying the right things violently on Twitter is much easier than real kindness'.

Virtue signalling can be easy - but why does that make it seem bad?

To answer this question, and understand virtue signalling in general, we need to take a couple of steps backs. In everyday discourse, the people who accuse others of virtue signalling are often not interested in doing real moral analysis - mostly, they want to discredit their political opponents. My allies are heroically rallying for a just cause, people on the other side are virtue signalling. It might be more illuminating to look at what science says on the subject. Why do we have the strong emotions we have about virtue signalling, and is it actually good or bad?

Over the past few decades, scientists in a variety of fields have developed sophisticated analyses of signalling as a general phenomenon - how humans (and other animals) send signals designed to convey information to other individuals. The insights of signalling theory can be counterintuitive, and have had a huge impact on biology and the social sciences. They also tell us that virtue signalling is more nuanced and more interesting than the picture painted by conventional wisdom and political rhetoric. As it turns out, there are bad and good things about virtue signalling - but probably not for the reasons you think.

Why do we scold virtue signallers for having it easy? The urge to dismiss someone's actions because they took no effort is powerful. But does it not make more sense to focus on what that action actually achieves? Why do we often focus on the costs people pay rather than how effective they are at making the world better?

A few decades ago, biologists and economists struggled with similar questions. Why are peahens so attracted by the peacocks with the most extravagant tails - which are very costly to maintain but otherwise seemingly useless? Why do employers care that you put yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get an Ivy League degree in sociology with no obvious relevance to the job?

In the 1970s, the zoologist Amotz Zahavi and the economist Michael Spence offered a provocative answer. They argued that the cost paid by the peacock (or the college graduate) is the whole point. Their argument (which won Spence a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001) is a bit subtle, so it is worth carefully looking at how it works. Communication is difficult because individuals have incentives to lie. Employers are looking for certain qualities (intelligence, conscientiousness, ambition) in their employees. They could ask the people they interview if they are intelligent and conscientious, but why wouldn't the job candidates simply lie?

Instead, employers select their employees on the basis of signals that are difficult to fake, such as university degrees. In general, having the qualities that employers value makes it easier to get a degree. People who do not have the right mix of intelligence, conscientiousness and ambition will find college more difficult, and either drop out or spend much more time completing their studies. People who anticipate that getting a degree would be too costly for them will opt out.

So, in principle, even if nothing you had learnt was relevant to the job you want, completing the degree still sends a valuable signal to potential employers: you are the kind of person for whom this high-effort achievement is easy enough. Because it sends a valuable signal, it is in your interest to get a degree, and in the employer's interest to hire you on its basis.

People want to appear good, because it wins them friends and social status

A similar argument applies in the biological domain, but with natural selection in the driver's seat. Growing an extravagant tail is moderately costly for a healthy peacock - but a diseased bird would put its life at risk if he spent that much energy growing the ornament. Therefore, only the peacocks in good enough condition can afford to grow an elaborate tail. As such, natural selection favours peahens who prefer peacocks with a long tail, because these peahens mate with healthy males, and get healthy offspring as a result.

Costly signals - signals that are honest because of the fact that they are costly - are ubiquitous. Why do people give flowers to their romantic interests, or take them to overpriced restaurants? Probably because these acts are costly: were the suitor not interested in a long-term relationship, he would have little incentive to invest such effort. His gifts function not because roses are particularly useful items, but because they are a costly signal of his commitment.

Here is why this matters for virtue signalling. Dishonesty is a major problem in the moral domain. People want to appear good, because it wins them friends and social status. Our moral sense evolved because people who convince others of their moral qualities reap such social benefits. But what prevents someone from pretending to be a good person, reaping all the social benefits, and not following through?

Throughout human evolution, being able to discriminate true allies (who stick with you no matter what) from fair-weather friends (who abandon you when you fall ill) could make the difference between life and death. As such, humans are obsessed with moral hypocrisy. We carefully scrutinise potential romantic partners, friends or team members for signs that they're not only in it for the money. And since - per the logic of costly signalling - the costs that people are willing to pay are a reliable signal of their commitment, we pay extra attention to these costs when we evaluate other people. Social psychologists have found that, when we see someone perform an altruistic act, we're suspicious that they're really being altruistic if they derive some benefit from the act. Clever cognitive psychology experiments even show that we categorise other people on the basis of the costs they are willing to pay to benefit their group - but not on the basis of the amount of benefits they actually provide.

This is probably why we find virtue signallers irritating. They are doing things that might gain them social status - the approval of society, a place on the right side of history. But are they actually committed to the causes they support? Or are they just interested in the social benefits? When they are not paying any meaningful costs, virtue signallers activate the alarm bells that millions of years of evolution put in our heads to protect us from fair-weather friends and other moral hypocrites.

So let's concede that some virtue signalling is fake, but does that mean it is bad? Here it is useful to take a step back from our default mode of thinking. Evolution designed our brain to make us good at small-scale interaction, but we are not very good (or especially concerned) at evaluating the large-scale social effects of things. As such, it is easy for a polemist to throw discredit on someone who virtue-signals by pointing out that there is no guarantee that the person actually shares your moral values. But is this the right yardstick by which to evaluate these signals?

In defence of virtue signallers, research on signalling theory shows that even cheap talk can be useful.

Life is rife with coordination problems. Consider passing someone on the street going the other way. You both have a shared incentive to coordinate about which side of the sidewalk to walk on, so that you don't bump into each other. Even though the other person is a complete stranger, there is no particular reason she would try to deceive you. In such circumstances, people will send signals (eg, stop before making a sudden exaggerated movement toward one side) to successfully coordinate. Mathematical models show that these costless signals can be crucial in helping people solve otherwise thorny coordination problems.

Coordination is crucial in the moral domain too. Imagine you live in a society that practises slavery, and you think you are the only one morally revulsed by it. Should you speak out about your concerns? If you think that everyone else is indifferent, you might be afraid that others will think you are weird, that the people benefiting from the system will punish you, and that you stand no chance to make a difference anyway.

The paradox is that, even if many people are in this situation - everyone is concerned but convinced that no one else is - they might fail to act, despite having the majority opinion. But speaking up can start a chain reaction. The more individuals raise their voice to denounce what they see as a moral problem, the more the initially silent people realise they are not alone and speak up in turn.

When everyone can expect everyone to know, it is harder for you to claim ignorance as a defence

Loud and public signals are especially effective as establishing common knowledge of a moral norm making sure that everyone knows about the moral norm, that everyone else knows that everyone knows about the moral norm, that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows (and so on). Psychology experiments have demonstrated that common knowledge is a powerful determinant of social behaviour: people are much more likely to coordinate on a joint action when everyone knows that everyone knows that working together will generate good outcomes.

In addition to fostering coordination, common knowledge prevents people from hiding behind the veil of plausible deniability. To get away with selfish behaviour, we often pretend to ignore its consequences. If you can plausibly say that you didn't know about the poor working conditions of people in sweatshops, people will judge you less harshly for buying cheap clothes. But if many people virtue signal by campaigning for better workers' rights, the issue rises to common awareness - and, when everyone can expect everyone to know, it is harder for you to claim ignorance as a defence.

Viewing morality as a coordination game suggests that public opinion can undergo rapid shifts, as society coordinates on new moral norms. And this is indeed what we observe: public opinion on a variety of subjects - such as racism and gay rights - has shifted dramatically in a progressive direction over the past few decades (sometimes within a few weeks).

In sum, virtue signalling can be a powerful force for social change, by creating common knowledge around a moral issue that people would otherwise ignore (out of complacency or selfishness). Importantly, this works even when there is no guarantee the people who are sending the signals are particularly virtuous or committed to the cause.

But the signals that are the most effective at convincing others of our virtue are not systematically the ones that have the most impact.

Mark and Bob both made a $1,000 donation to a charity. Before making his donation, Mark read extensively about different charities, seeking the one with the best return on investment - the charity that runs programmes with the most impact on people's lives per dollar invested. In the process of his search, Mark would often read about an organisation that does great things, but then drop it from consideration because there was no evidence that it would use his money in the best possible way. He finally settled on a charity that provides a highly cost-effective treatment against parasitic worms that plague many people in Africa.

Bob was watching TV one evening when he saw an ad for a charity that gives teddy bears to convalescent children in hospitals. Bob was overwhelmed by emotion at the plight of the children, and immediately made a transfer to the charity.

Mark's donation will make a much greater impact on people's lives. But he comes off as cold and calculating, and we can't repress a nagging doubt about the kind of person he is. Would he still have donated if he had found that none of the organisations he read about was effective enough? Bob by contrast leaves no doubt about his good nature: he spontaneously gave his money without the slightest care about crude materialistic concerns such as economic efficiency.

Human altruism is very ineffective - as revealed by what charities people donate to

The tale of Mark and Bob illustrates one of the bleak insights of signalling theory: the concrete impact of an altruistic act (how much it actually helps other people) is often dissociated from the signal it sends about what kind of person we are. This means that, to convince people that you are good, the most persuasive signal you can send is often not what will actually produce the most good.

From this perspective, it is unsurprising that human altruism is very ineffective - as revealed by what charities people donate to, and psychology experiments. In a recent study, researchers gave a small monetary amount to participants, and told them that they could donate any percentage of their endowment to a charity of their choice. They also told participants that any amount they gave would be multiplied - the strength of the multiplier varied from participant to participant. Participants told that their donation would be multiplied by 10 gave almost exactly the same small proportion of their endowment as participants who were told it would not be multiplied. This is not because people are not good enough at mathematics: in a control experiment where, instead of donating, participants could save some of their money for later, they saved significantly more when they were told that the money they saved would be multiplied by a high number.

The researchers also found a possible explanation for why participants did not care about the efficiency of their donation: donating effectively would not have sent a better signal about how good they are. Participants who gave money to a charity when they knew it would be multiplied by 10 were not seen (when judged by another group of participants) as better people than those who gave money in the absence of a multiplier.

Anna and Sarah are two environmental activists who campaign for renewable energy. Anna wants to lobby the government to replace fossil fuels with wind turbines and solar panels. Sarah wants to go further: all sources of energy (including, for example, nuclear power) should be replaced by renewables. Who is most dedicated to the environment?

Just as in the case of Mark and Bob, the signals sent by Anna and Sarah can come apart from the actual impact of their behaviour. People might view Anna suspiciously - is she secretly in the pocket of big nuclear? - while Sarah's dedication to the cause leaves no doubt. But Sarah's opposition to nuclear power might actually leave the environment worse off, if the government needs to temporarily replace the nuclear power plants it shut down with fossil fuel, increasing CO ₂ emissions.

Why might people be motivated to send extreme signals of their commitment to a cause? The answer lies in the fact that, when we send virtue signals, many of the things we seek - such as friends and social status - are rival goods. The people you want to be friends with can have only so many friends, so you want to convince them that they should pick you. The social groups you belong to can have only so many leaders and, in order to gain influence, it helps to show that you are more committed to the group's ideology than is the average member.

Everyone is opposed to killing humans: saying you think people should not kill each other does not set you apart

When individuals send signals to try to convince others that they are better than average, the result is often what signalling theorists call a 'runaway': an arms race toward more and more extreme signals. If peahens want to mate with the peacocks whose tails are more extravagant than the average peacock, natural selection favours peacocks with increasingly more extravagant tails over successive generations. If everyone has a high-school diploma, students need to start getting bachelor's degrees in order to become distinctive in the eyes of employers. Students in the next generation will, of course, pursue a master's to distinguish themselves from the mass of mere college graduates.

In the moral domain, runaway signalling happens when people try to elevate their moral status by doing and believing things that not everyone else does. For example, everyone is opposed to killing humans: saying that you think people should not kill each other does not set you apart from others. But not everyone is opposed to eating animals, so being vegetarian or vegan can effectively increase your moral standing.

Runaway signalling can have positive effects (as in the vegetarianism example), expanding our domain of moral concern to issues that would otherwise be conveniently ignored. But it can often lead people to hold beliefs that are increasingly disconnected from reality. Imagine that you are a follower of a religion that promotes peace, but everyone else in your country also believes that peace is a good thing, regardless of their religious affiliation. Professing your belief in the value of peace would not be the most effective way of signalling your religious virtue, because even outsiders to the faith would say the same thing. Instead, it is most effective to express your belief in moral norms that are not already self-evident to everyone: for instance, the norm that people should not use birth control because it is against the will of God. Exotic beliefs are great signals of loyalty to your group, because it is likely that outsiders will not share them. Unfortunately, the moralisation of such ideals can be very damaging, as when religious bans on contraception facilitate the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

When we see someone virtue signalling, we often have strong reactions - sometimes admiration, sometimes annoyance or contempt. But these intuitions are the product of psychological mechanisms that are designed to help us evaluate if that person could be a good friend or a good ally, not to help us evaluate whether the person's action will have a positive impact on the world. The emerging science of signalling shows that these things can often come apart. Keeping this insight in mind is essential as we navigate an increasingly noisy world.

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Why virtue signalling is not just a vice, but an evolved tool | Aeon Essays

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As a quick stroll on social media reveals, most people love showing that they are good. Whether by expressing compassion for disaster victims, sharing a post to support a social movement, or denouncing a celebrity's racist comment, many people are eager to broadcast their high moral standing.

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A Conversation article, questioning the popular perception of Buddhism as a religion devoted solely to peace. 

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A Conversation article, questioning the popular perception of Buddhism as a religion devoted solely to peace. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE You could begin an exploration of this story by thinking about students’ perceptions of Buddhism, and the extent to which they are based on first hand knowledge, or knowledge gained by any degree of study. Then discuss the aspect of Buddhism that most of us would focus on - its non-violent outlook, and how this distinguishes it from other organized religions. Then look through the article. Are they surprised by its links to violence - such as the large number of Buddhists in the British army? How has our understanding of Buddhism been shaped by colonization and the ‘framing’ of its identity? Thinking more broadly, is our understanding and awareness of world religions based on image or reality? Is this a problem - and if so, how can we overcome it?

KEY TERMS Reputation, Framing, Stereotype, Generalisations

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When teaching an undergraduate class on "Buddhism and Violence", I usually start by asking students to rank religious groups in the order of how many followers they have in the British army. Typically Christians are at the top of students' lists and Buddhists at the bottom.

This reflects an unconscious bias many of these students have regarding Buddhism - they assume that all Buddhists are peaceful and that a Buddhist isn't likely to embrace a career that may well involve violence at some point.

So they're always surprised to find out that there are more Buddhists in the British Army than Muslims and Sikhs put together - despite the relatively small number of Buddhists in Britain.

But why do so many people in the west associate Buddhism with peace?

According to historian Professor Jonathan Walters, the roots lie with colonialism and Christian missionaries. In encountering different beliefs among colonised peoples, missionaries adopted a strategy of framing other religions in such a way that Christianity could be presented as superior and attractive.

In their eyes Islam was too aggressive and focused on strict adherence to rules. Buddhism was too other-worldly, pacifist, and passive to the point of stagnation. Christianity was placed in the Goldilocks spot between the two.

The framing still has serious traction and leads to a certain cognitive dissonance when, for example, Buddhists make the headlines for the wrong reasons.

Avoiding "onslaught on living beings" and instead cultivating loving-kindness towards them is at the heart of Buddhist ethics; it's the first of five moral precepts, and the one that you have to take if you opt to take any of them at all. The Buddha discouraged violence and counselled kings to find alternative ways of resolving problems. Selling weapons is considered an inappropriate livelihood for a Buddhist.

Buddhist violence

But Buddhists have been involved in violent conflicts pretty much since the religion first emerged. Justifications for such actions have typically been based on defending the Dharma (the Buddhist teachings), occasionally demonising or dehumanising the enemy to make it less karmically wrong to kill them.

A particularly uncomfortable example of this is found in the fifth century Sri Lankan quasi-mythological Mahavamsa chronicle, in which monks reassure a king that out of the millions he'd just slaughtered only two were Buddhists and the others were more like animals than humans.

When it comes to "Buddhist violence", as with any perceived religious conflicts, religion is only one factor in a complex situation. Often ethnic identity is the real issue - it just happens that one of the ethnic groups in question has historical Buddhist affiliations, the others do not.

At one point the Sri Lankan conflict of 1983-2009 saw three different civil wars playing out at once, as much as anything along ethnic and political lines: Sinhalese vs Tamils, Sinhalese extremists vs the Sinhalese government, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam vs other Tamil militant groups.

While it was not as simple as Buddhists, Muslims, and Tamil Hindus fighting each other, the conflict nevertheless saw the rise of Jathika Chintanaya or "Nationalist Thought" which promoted an exclusively Buddhist vision for Sri Lanka which is influential today in organisations such as the Bodu Bala Sena ("Buddhist Power Force").

Tensions between Buddhist and Muslim ethnic groups in Rakhine State in Myanmar spilled over into riots in 2012 and eventually led to the displacement of more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to neighbouring Bangladesh. While it explicitly describes itself as non-violent and not responsible for these events, the Buddhist nationalist 969 Movement has nevertheless stoked anti-Muslim sentiments in Myanmar and framed Muslims as a threat to national identity. It's important to note, meanwhile, that these nationalist movements do not speak for all Buddhists - lay or monastic - in either Sri Lanka or Myanmar.

Buddhist monks actually bore arms and fought in the Korean defence against Japanese invasions of the late 16th century. While military service is not prohibited in Buddhist texts, a soldier's life is considered problematic because of the likelihood of dying in battle, psyched up for killing and fixated on violence. Ideally, a Buddhist wants to die with a calm mind which is more likely to be attracted to a positive rebirth. A violent mind could lead one to Buddhism's realms of hell.

It's not only war and external threats that provide examples of Buddhist violence. Corporal punishment was a feature of the pre-modern Tibetan legal system. In 1997 three Tibetan monks were murdered in Dharamsala - the police linked the suspects in the case to an ongoing controversy within Tibetan Buddhism. Thailand retains the death penalty, last using it in 2018.

Peaceful at its core

At the end of the class I always fear that students will fixate on the more sensationalist and violent material covered: that one extreme view will replace another. However, the pacifist stereotype of Buddhism is not without foundation.

Witness the Dalai Lama's continued opposition to violence when it comes to the issue of Tibetan independence, the peace activism of Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, or the efforts of Navayana ("Ambedkarite") Buddhists in relation to social justice in India, lifting millions of Dalits out of the structural violence of the "caste" system.

But then Buddhism is at least as internally diverse as Christianity or Islam - and, as such, we should be wary of making generalisations. After all, few Christians would like the perception of their religion to be based solely upon images of the Quakers or of the Westboro Baptist Church.

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Where did Buddhism get its reputation for peace?

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When teaching an undergraduate class on "Buddhism and Violence", I usually start by asking students to rank religious groups in the order of how many followers they have in the British army. Typically Christians are at the top of students' lists and Buddhists at the bottom.

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A Big Think video, in which Francis Collins argues that science and religion are asking very different questions. 

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A Big Think video, in which Francis Collins argues that science and religion are asking very different questions. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What does Collins say is the purpose of science and religion, and how do they fundamentally differ? Why, in his opinion, does this mean there is no need to see them as being contradictory? What is his explanation for the fact that many people believe the relationship between them is problematic? Overall, do we understand the world more or less by incorporating both a scientific and religious worldview?

KEY TERMS Rigorous answers to questions, Scientific method, Philosophical realm, Shrill pronouncements, Harmony perspective

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Science is about establishing rigorous answers to questions about how nature works. It's an important process that's quite reliable if carried out correctly by proposing hypotheses, testing those hypotheses in well-structured experiments, and drawing conclusions that other scientists can try to replicate to be sure they're right.

So, if we want to answer questions about how biology works, for instance, science is the way to get there. But some scientists are very troubled by the suggestion that other approaches can help us derive truth about nature.

Some scientists see faith as a threat to the scientific method, and, therefore, as something to be resisted. But faith in its proper perspective is asking a different set of questions - those that lie beyond science in the philosophical realm. Both approaches are needed to more fully understand life.

FRANCIS COLLINS: Science is about trying to get rigorous answers to questions about how nature works, and it's a very important process that's actually quite reliable if carried out correctly with generation of hypotheses, and testing of those by accumulation of data, and then drawing conclusions that are continually revisited to be sure they're right.

So, if you want to answer questions about how nature works, how biology works, for instance, science is the way to get there. Scientists believe in that, and they are very troubled by a suggestion that other kinds of approaches can be taken to derive truth about nature.

And some, I think, have seen faith as therefore a threat to the scientific method, and therefore, to be resisted. But faith in its proper perspective is really asking a different set of questions. And that's why I don't think there needs to be a conflict here.

The kinds of questions that faith can help one address are more in the philosophical realm. "Why are we all here?" "Why is there something instead of nothing?" "Is there a God?" Isn't it clear that those aren't scientific questions, and that science doesn't have much to say about them? But you either have to say, "Well, those are inappropriate questions and we can't discuss them." Or you have to say, "We need something besides science to pursue some of the things that humans are curious about."

For me, that makes perfect sense. But I think for many scientists, particularly for those who have seen the shrill pronouncements from extreme views that threatened what they're doing scientifically, and feel, therefore, that they can't really include those thoughts into their own worldview, faith can be seen as an enemy. And similarly, on the other side, some of my scientific colleagues who are of an atheist persuasion, are sometimes using science as a club over the head of believers; basically suggesting that anything that can't be reduced to a scientific question isn't important and it just represents a superstition- it should be gotten rid of.

Part of the problem is, I think the extremists have occupied the stage; those voices are the ones we hear. I think most people are actually kind of comfortable with the idea that science is a reliable way to learn about nature, but it's not the whole story. And there's a place also for religion, for faith, for theology, for philosophy, but that harmony perspective doesn't get as much attention.

Nobody's as interested in harmony as they are in conflict, I'm afraid. My study of genetics certainly tells me incontrovertibly, that Darwin was right about the nature of how living things have arrived on the scene by descent from a common ancestor under the influence of natural selection over very long periods of time. Darwin was amazingly insightful given how limited the molecular information he had was- essentially, it didn't exist. Now with the digital code of DNA, we have the best possible proof of Darwin's theory that he could have imagined.

So that certainly tells me something about the nature of living things, but it actually adds to my sense that this is a answer to a "how" question, and it leaves the "why" question still hanging in the air. Other aspects of our universe, I think also for me, as for Einstein, raised questions about the possibility of an intelligence behind all of this. Why is it for instance, that the constants that determine the behavior of matter and energy like the gravitational constant, for instance, have precisely the value that they have to in order for there to be any complexity at all in the universe?

That is fairly breathtaking in its lack of probability of ever having happened. And it does make you think that a 'mind' might have been involved in setting the stage. At the same time, that does not imply necessarily, that that mind is controlling the specific manipulations of things that are going on in the natural world. In fact, I would very much resist that idea. I think the laws of nature potentially could be the product of a mind. I think that's a defensible perspective, but once those laws are in place, then I think nature goes on, and science has the chance to be able to perceive how that works and what its consequences are.

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Science is about establishing rigorous answers to questions about how nature works. It's an important process that's quite reliable if carried out correctly by proposing hypotheses, testing those hypotheses in well-structured experiments, and drawing conclusions that other scientists can try to replicate to be sure they're right.

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Writing in Aeon, Thomas T. Hills looks at how shamanism is a universal feature of human society, and why it evolved in certain societies.

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Writing in Aeon, Thomas T. Hills looks at how shamanism is a universal feature of human society, and why it evolved in certain societies.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE The article is interesting on several levels. First, have a look at Hills’s possible arguments to explain shamanism – how does he put forward several hypotheses, and then explore them? Is creating a framework like this a good approach, or does it close off possible explanations? Second, find the passage which follows his assertion that “When minds can’t find things, they engage with the random.” What does this mean, and how does shamanism link to this? Do hypotheses help or hinder us from producing knowledge? How can ‘engaging with the random’ help us to generate knowledge?

KEY TERMS Shamanism, Exploratory divination, Mythology

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Shamanism is as varied as those who practise it. Its practitioners range from indigenous lineages who have passed down their craft over thousands of years to the modern 'plastic shamans', who represent no specific culture but have adapted shamanism to meet the demands of metropolitan markets. However, there is a common theme to shamanism wherever it is practised: the use of spiritual (or shamanic) trance to facilitate journeys to a non-ordinary reality. Here, in this non-ordinary reality, the shamans do their work. According to the historian of religion Mircea Eliade writing in 1951, shamanism is the 'technique of ecstasy', involving the purposeful invocation and use of dreams and visions to solve problems.

By this definition, shamanism is the landscape of the spirit-journey, populated by good and evil spirits and the souls of the deceased and yet-to-be-born. It is the place where mountains speak and Grandmother Skeleton points out which plants to eat when the dry season lasts too long. In this form, shamanism is everywhere in the old ways of humans. Every tribal culture - alive or dead - has some broker of spiritual capital. The Indonesian Mentawai have their sikerei. The Inuit have their angakok. The Columbian Desana have their paye. The Mongolian Buryat have their böö. The American Sioux have their heyoka.

The sheer magnitude of our shamanic ancestry means one of two things: either shamanism originated once prior to the human diaspora some 70,000 years ago and has been preserved since, or it has arisen independently countless times in premodern human cultures. If we consider that preagricultural human societies are each experiments in how to run a village, with each competing in the evolutionary market of survival and reproduction, then we must ask: what good is shamanism?

The answer is a lesson in both the psychology of problem solving and the construction of meaning. In order to get there, we first have to understand what the prominent explanations of shamanism are in contemporary anthropology. These explanations all rely upon a common set of psychological and evolutionary principles, and these principles in turn explain the adaptive value of shamanism.

One explanation holds that shamans are beta-versions of modern healers. They treat everything from tiger bites to depression. Their expertise in medicinal plants and associated healing practices extends from the physical to the psychological. This happens because many tribal cultures do not differentiate between the material and mental in the same way that modern science often does. It is also well-known that many of the plants used by traditional healers have active properties and are used accordingly. But this explanation doesn't say much about a key element in shamanic practice: the shamanic trance.

A second prominent explanation is that shamans exploit human gullibility by taking advantage of psychological biases, such as the human fear of 'dread risks'. These are risks that are essentially arbitrary, or outside of one's control, but can nonetheless wipe out entire families or villages. Modern examples include plane crashes, terrorist attacks, nuclear meltdowns, pandemics and the like: events with low probability, but very high consequences. The science shows that humans will pay a lot to minimise these risks, even if the associated consequences are more lethal over the long run. In this case, some anthropologists claim, the shamanic trance represents a kind of folk proof that shamans can protect people against dread risks. The shaman can interact with invisible forces and effectively neutralise them.

A third argument holds that shamans organise social groups around common beliefs. These, in turn, lead to better outcomes for the group as a whole. For example, using the threat of magical retribution, the shaman can keep everybody from killing the last gazelle. This mitigates a 'tragedy of the commons' scenario, in which shared resources are overused and depleted. Shamans can also unite the tribe around arbitrary decisions by making them sacred and putting everyone on the same page, thereby eliminating potential conflicts over where to hunt, what crops to plant, or whether to fight or flee a neighbouring tribe. This extends to organising groups around social-commitment ceremonies that enhance cooperation and create the soothing in-group vibrations common to traditions such as Thanksgiving and Hanukkah.

The shamanic ability to organise social groups around common beliefs is certainly an advantage. It might seem at first to be a somewhat weak evolutionary explanation, but in fact the opposite is true. Consider the following example. Up until the arrival of the Europeans, much of North America was home to peoples whose ancestors had crossed over the Bering Straits roughly 20,000 years before. But by the mid-1800s, Europeans were arriving in a steady drove, and the Native Americans were under serious threat. They needed to repel the invaders. But what was to be done?

The Buryat shamans blossomed like wildflowers as people sought new ways to control the uncertainty

In 1889, a Nevadan Paiute elder named Jack Wilson had a dream-vision of a sacred dance that would enlist the spirit armies of the dead. This dance would lead to the inevitable swallowing of White people by the Earth. It became known as the Ghost Dance.

The Ghost Dance was immensely attractive, and it united previously warring tribes from Oklahoma to California. With a common enemy and a belief in divine providence, the Native Americans organised themselves and their beliefs in a way that had never been seen before. They became a far more formidable force by working together rather than singly. This terrified the US government, and contributed to rising conflict, which eventually culminated in the Massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890.

Though the Lakota were savagely killed by US soldiers, the Ghost Dance offers a powerful example of the potential strength of shamanism as a social organiser. But while this explanation for shamanism is heavily supported, it cannot be the entire explanation since there are many things that organise people: shared hunts, competitive sports, simple fireside songs. So what exactly is the evolutionary added-value of shamanic trance and how in the world does it work?

Here is a crucial clue: shamanism often arises among people exposed to uncertainty. A case in point is the recent rise of shamanism among the Buryat in Upper Mongolia. Following the collapse of socialism in 1989-91, the economic rug was pulled out from under the Buryat. This led to terrible poverty and starvation among a people whose cultural identity had largely been rubbed out over a series of generations. In this existential vacuum, the Buryat shamans blossomed like wildflowers as people sought new ways to control the uncertainty in which they had found themselves.

But shamanic powers are not seen as methods for defying the natural order, as one anthropologist found out when he tried to convince a shaman to engage in a rain ceremony, to which the shaman replied: 'Don't be a fool, whoever makes a rain-making ceremony in the dry season?' Shamanism is not a method of controlling reality in defiance of one's own experience. Shamanic peoples, just like the majority of Western Christians, prefer Western doctors when they can find them. Shamanism does not make one blind to the power of penicillin. Rather, it is only when visible technologies fail that people look for help from forces outside this world.

To understand what shamanism adds, let's take a step back and take a look at how minds, especially human minds, work. All organisms require resources to keep themselves alive and to reproduce. This has led to one of the most prominent theories on the evolution of the mind. Put simply, the mind is a search algorithm. Minds make their living by being able to find things. Food, mates, a good place to hide, effective methods of revenge, and the means to reach your goals, whatever they may be - all of these and more are targets of the mind's searching eye.

Whereas many animals use their brains to search in physical space, human minds (and those of some other animals) can search via simulation. That is, the brain can simulate potential future realities. This is possible because brains like ours encode a mental model of the world. By searching inside that mental model, we build narratives that tell us how to get from one place to another. Sometimes we do this backwards, by constructing counterfactual alternatives to explain how, if we had behaved differently, things might have gone. But just as often, we conjure up simulations to better understand how to influence outcomes in the future.

You might get only one chance to decide which house to buy, which partner to marry or what project to invest the next 10 years of your life in. Our brains allow us to solve these problems by projecting ourselves into alternative versions of these potential futures. This is called self-projection, which already starts to hint at the shamanic forces that might lie therein.

The hungry cats scratched and clawed at everything - until they eventually, randomly, figured out how to escape

Sometimes, however, we don't even know what we're looking for. The threat of collective starvation from a bad harvest. The death of a child. The decimation of one's entire village from a landslide. Such problems unravel the semantic connective tissue that holds reality together. They don't seem to play by the rules of our past experience. When that happens, humans need a 'search engine' that knows how to do what Google cannot: to generate search terms for a problem that they don't yet fully understand.

When minds can't find things, they engage with the random. A desert ant that can't find its nest starts hunting randomly. When in 1898 the psychologist Edward Thorndike put hungry cats in puzzle boxes made to be super tricky to get out of, the cats scratched and clawed at everything - until they eventually, randomly, figured out how to escape. And when the human mind gets stuck on a problem it can't solve, it starts adding noise to past solutions until it eventually hits on something that might work.

There is an old computer algorithm called simulated annealing that helps to explain why this works. It simulates the method by which metal, when heated and cooled on a certain schedule, can be made harder. By heating it, one relaxes the crystal structure of the metal, allowing the randomness of jiggling atoms to literally explore the space of metallic configurations. When it is cooled after this temporary heating, the metal can find a more solid arrangement.

Similar metaphors of high-temperature exploration are found throughout biological evolution. Some genes can alter their mutation rates in response to environmental heterogeneity in a process called evolvability. Bacteria can randomise their own genetic information by a stress-induced uptake of genomic material floating around in the soup they swim in. These evolutionary strategies insert randomness in direct response to uncertainty.

The mind's use of randomness is how we think new thoughts and come up with creative solutions to vexing problems. This is an inbuilt feature of minds such as ours, and one we don't often notice. If you sit quietly and let your mind wander, you can get a glimpse of this randomness at work, as your daydreams put together odd combinations in a kind of Rube Goldberg approach to problem solving.

But we also use randomness more purposefully. For example, when we use practices such as the I Ching or Tarot card readings, we are engaging in a form of exploratory divination.

Such practices have been used for thousands of years to help people understand their problems by confronting them with meaningful but random interpretations. Appropriately used, these methods can help to escape one's natural biases by being forced to consider alternative hypotheses. These can, upon consideration, lead to new insights, especially in situations where there are no competing solutions.

Shamanism is a form of exploratory divination. But this doesn't yet explain the full extent of its power. The final step towards understanding shamanism's adaptive contribution also makes it clear why shamanism is such an effective social organiser, why it might offer an extra-strength placebo effect in psychosomatic healing, and why it can capture the tribe's collective capacity for fear.

Shamans do this by accessing a particular part of the mind. Through purposeful and yet exploratory investigation, shamans make lucid the mental associations that lurk quietly underneath our understanding of reality. As what the US ethnobotanist Terence McKenna in the 1980s called 'astronauts of inner space', shamans help to make explicit a part of our mind that is thousands, if not millions, of years old.

No one did a more thorough job of explaining the characters that populate this inner space than the US literature scholar Joseph Campbell. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Campbell set out the basic narrative figures that are common to countless cultures. The hero, the wise elder, the mother/sister/love-interest, the trickster, and the dark shadow are all themes that appear throughout humanity's many stories and explanations of itself. The US filmmaker George Lucas used Campbell's work as an inspiration for Star Wars (1977), which sheds interesting light on the elements of our narrative addiction. These narrative figures and the challenges they face are embodied in characters such as Luke (the hero), Obi-Wan (the wise elder), Leia (the mother/sister/love-interest), Han (the trickster), and Darth Vader (the dark shadow). In a deep psychological sense, these figures are the molecules of meaning that fuel human narrative.

Shamanism uses in-built associations to construct meanings for which the mind has a natural affinity

For those fond of depth psychology, these characters are Carl Jung's archetypes, the Rosetta Stone by which our unconscious mind makes sense of reality. If you are an evolutionary psychologist, they are the survival and mating modules that compete for our attention ('Is it a threat?' 'Is it an opportunity for love?' 'Is he someone I can trust?' 'Is this the end?'). If you are a secular Buddhist who takes the practice of mindfulness as an opportunity to get a hawk's-eye-view on the mind, then these are the vines on which the monkey mind swings. In Why Buddhism Is True (2017), the US science writer Robert Wright combines these ideas to make clear the shoulder-sitting angels and devils of human motivation.

Through the ritualised invocation of these mental spirits, shamanism makes these characters explicit. In so doing, it offers us the opportunity to make sense of our reality in the mental light of forces that are hard-wired into our understanding. An evolutionary bias towards seeking out the safety of mother figures, avoiding enemies, respecting the wisdom of our elders, and for seeing ourselves as the heroes of own adventures is a powerful advantage over creatures that might fail to make such associations.

As a form of exploratory divination, shamanism uses these in-built associations to construct meanings for which the mind has a natural affinity. There is little that is as important as this constructed meaning. Research consistently finds that experiencing a coherent and meaningful life is one of the strongest predictors of our wellbeing. By meaningful, I mean having a story to tell, a higher reason as to why one thing happened and not another. This makes us feel good and helps us to act in ways that are consistent with our higher goals, instead of pursuing more short-term pleasures.

In his memoir Black Elk Speaks (1961), the spiritual leader and sacred clown ( heyoka) of the Oglala Sioux put it like this:

When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the West, it comes with terror like a thunderstorm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier... You have noticed truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping ... as lightning illuminates the dark, for it is the power of lightning that heyokas have.

To gain mastery over reality is to create a mythology worth living for. Your head is the space from which all meaning derives. It is the shaman's role to shine light on that meaning in order, like a wind-up doll, to make you go.

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Why did shamanism evolve in societies all around the globe? | Aeon Essays

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Shamanism is as varied as those who practise it. Its practitioners range from indigenous lineages who have passed down their craft over thousands of years to the modern 'plastic shamans', who represent no specific culture but have adapted shamanism to meet the demands of metropolitan markets.

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A Big Think article, exploring why Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein believed that science is a source of spirituality.   

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A Big Think article, exploring why Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein believed that science is a source of spirituality.   

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is Bobby Azarian’s definition of spirituality, and how similar is it to the students? Do students agree with Einstein when he said, “the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.”? How does developing a ‘cosmic perspective’ help bring different peoples together? Overall, give students the final line of the article - “You are not a cosmic accident. You are a cosmic imperative.” - what responsibilities does this suggest we have as knowers?

KEY TERMS Incompatible, Sense of connection, Supernatural, Genuine religiosity, Rational knowledge, Immanent entities, Meta-awareness, Interconnected whole, Cosmic perspective

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Why Carl Sagan believed that science is a source of spirituality

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Science will lead us to universal morality and cosmic religion. By becoming aware of our emergent purpose, we can live more meaningful lives.

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A Conversation article, analyzing how religious outlooks shape the way we feel about vaccines. 

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A Conversation article, analyzing how religious outlooks shape the way we feel about vaccines. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the relationship between religious outlooks, and scientific skepticism - and how should we make use of our understanding of this link?

KEY TERMS Hostility, Nuanced, Stereotypes, True, Conspiratorial belief

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Many scientists and public health officials were surprised that large swaths of the public were hesitant or outright hostile toward COVID-19 vaccines. "I never saw that coming," Francis Collins, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, commented in 2022. Even today, three years after the start of the pandemic, about 1 in 5 Americans have not received a single dose of any COVID-19 vaccine.

What could be the reason for such widespread vaccine hesitancy? When it comes to skepticism toward vaccines, religion is often cited as an important factor. As sociologists researching the role of religion in vaccine attitudes and behaviors, we have found that the religion-vaccine connection is significant, but much more nuanced than simple stereotypes assume.

Both religious life and vaccine views are complex. A person's religion cannot be boiled down to just one thing. It includes an identity, a place of worship and a variety of beliefs and practices. Each of these components can have its own distinct effect on vaccine attitudes and behaviors.

Attitudes toward vaccines are complicated, as well. Someone's feelings about vaccines in general might differ from their feelings about one specific type of vaccine, for instance.

To help make sense of this complexity, we surveyed a representative sample of 2,000 U.S. adults in May 2021 about their religious identities, beliefs, behaviors and their attitudes toward a number of scientific issues, including vaccines. This sample included individuals across many religious traditions, as well as people who do not affiliate with any religion. However, Christians represented the bulk of the sample, given their larger share of the American population, and so our research focuses heavily on on their views.

Bible beliefs

One part of religious life that social scientists are often interested in is people's views of the Bible. For example, does someone think of the Bible as the literal word of God; inspired by God, but not literally true; or as an ancient book of legends, history and moral codes that has no divine source?

We found that respondents who see the Bible as either the "inspired" or "the actual word of God" were less likely to see vaccines in general - not the COVID-19 vaccine in particular - as safe and effective, compared with those who see the Bible as just a book of history and morality created by humans. All else being equal, those who said that the Bible is the literal word of God, for instance, scored 18% higher on our measure of general vaccine skepticism than those who see the Bible as having no divine source or inspiration.

Although such literalist views might be found at higher rates in particular religious traditions, such as evangelical Protestantism, we found that an individual's religious tradition itself did not make much of a difference. An evangelical Protestant and a Catholic, for instance, would be predicted to have similar attitudes toward vaccines if they share the same view of the Bible.

In contrast, when we asked similar questions specifically about COVID-19 vaccines, we found that an individual's religious tradition is what matters the most. Protestants - both those who identify as evangelical and those who do not - express more skepticism toward the COVID-19 vaccines than respondents from other religious traditions and nonreligious respondents.

God and country

In additional studies, we have attempted to identify the reasons for these patterns. That is, why does one's view of the Bible or one's religious tradition matter when it comes to vaccine attitudes and behaviors?

One factor could be Christian nationalism, which has been increasingly visible in the public sphere since Donald Trump's rise to the presidency. Christian nationalism is described by sociologists of religion Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry as an ideology that advocates for the fusion of Christianity with American politics and public life.

For example, Americans who hold a Christian nationalist ideology tend to agree when surveys ask them whether the federal government "should declare the United States a Christian nation." In our own survey, we found that individuals' responses to that statement are strongly correlated with their willingness to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

We asked for respondents' level of agreement or disagreement with that statement on a 5-point scale. A 1-point increase in agreement meant someone was 17% less likely to have received or plan to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Although not exclusive to Protestants, adherence to Christian nationalist ideology is more prominent among this group - especially among its more conservative or evangelical traditions.

Another of our studies focused on how people view God. Our data showed that simply believing there is a God, or a higher power that supervises the world, does not make an individual less likely to have received the COVID-19 vaccine. On the other hand, believing that God can and will actively intervene in the world does make a difference. According to our analysis, with all else being equal, we would expect those with the lowest belief in an intervening higher power to be vaccinated, or intend to get vaccinated, 88% of the time. In contrast, we would expect those with the highest belief in an intervening higher power to be vaccinated, or intend to be, 73% of the time.

In addition, our data shows that belief in parareligious phenomena - including New Ageism, occultism, psychism and spiritualism - is also significantly associated with a reduced likelihood of receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. We used a 5-point parareligoius belief scale, with a 1-point increase in an individual's belief in parareligious phenomena being associated with a 40% decrease in the likelihood of having received a COVID-19 vaccine.

Once we accounted for higher rates of conspiratorial belief and distrust in science among respondents who believe in parareligious phenomena, however, this vaccine gap was reduced. This suggests that those underlying factors help explain why more people who believe in parareligious phenomena are skeptical toward vaccines.

All of these studies demonstrate that he link between religion and vaccine attitudes is neither simple nor uniform. Public health campaigns that target faith communities would do well to keep this in mind.

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Religion shapes vaccine views - but how exactly? Our analysis looks at ideas about God and beliefs about the Bible

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Specific beliefs may have more to do with people's vaccine views than their religious affiliation - but it depends on which vaccine you're talking about.

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A New Humanist article, analyzing how the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster helps us fathom the relationship between religion and the state.

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A New Humanist article, analyzing how the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster helps us fathom the relationship between religion and the state.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why was the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster established? In what ways have ‘Pastafarians’ tried to gain recognition around the world? How do opinions differ on whether the Church of the FSM is a religion - and how does this depend on whether the state is secular or more religiously-inclined? Do students agree with Paul CIteur that, “If all humanity were Pastafarians – people with a sense of humour and a relaxed attitude towards their religious convictions – that would be a tremendous improvement”? Overall, why is it so difficult to reach a consensus on what constitutes a religious belief system?

KEY TERMS Religious privileges, Pseudo-scientific rants, Parody, Protest, Legitimate, Religion vs. freedom to think

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A Variety review of a film about missionary John Chau, who died whilst trying to spread Christianity to the ‘unreached’ people of North Sentinel Island.

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A Variety review of a film about missionary John Chau, who died whilst trying to spread Christianity to the ‘unreached’ people of North Sentinel Island.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Watch this trailer about the new documentary about John Chau, to gain a basic understanding of what happened to him in 2018. What two questions are asked about John Chau in the second paragraph of the article, and what does this reveal about the difficulties of telling his story objectively? How does missionary work differ from that done by anthropologists? What different factors motivated John Chau to try to make contact with the Sentinelese people? To wrap up: How should we balance our desire to communicate (what we believe is) useful knowledge with an awareness that that knowledge may not be desired or required?

KEY TERMS Biases and beliefs, Civilization, The Great Commission, Religious fanaticism, Imperialist agenda

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‘The Mission’ Review: While Netflix Drowns in True-Crime Docs, Nat Geo Embraces a World Without Answers

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In ‘The Mission,’ Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine delve into the mystery of John Allen Chau’s fatal mission to convert the isolated Sentinelese people.

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An Aeon article, looking at the validity of thought experiments (such as the Trolley Problem) in providing us with ethical insights.

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An Aeon article, looking at the validity of thought experiments (such as the Trolley Problem) in providing us with ethical insights.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This article gives a thorough introduction to what ethical thought experiments are, and how they are used to help us understand and construct value systems. What are their pros and the cons? Can they be equated to scientific thought experiments? Ultimately, as the article asks, “should we give up thought experiments as sources of ethical insight?”

KEY TERMS Thought experiments, Hypothetical scenarios, Implications, Implausible, Imagination, Internal and external validity, Intuition pumps

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Much recent work in analytic philosophy pins its hopes on learning from imaginary cases. Starting from seminal contributions by philosophers such as Robert Nozick and Derek Parfit, this work champions the use of thought experiments - short hypothetical scenarios designed to probe or persuade on a point of ethical principle. Such scenarios are nearly always presented context-free, and are often wildly different from the everyday contexts in which ethical sensibilities are formed and exercised. Most famous (or infamous) among these are 'trolley problems' - thought experiments about the permissibility of causing the death of a smaller number of people to save a larger number from a runaway trolley (or train). But there are thousands more, with some papers containing as many as 10 separate cases.

While thought experiments are as old as philosophy itself, the weight placed on them in recent philosophy is distinctive. Even when scenarios are highly unrealistic, judgments about them are thought to have wide-ranging implications for what should be done in the real world. The assumption is that, if you can show that a point of ethical principle holds in one artfully designed case, however bizarre, then this tells us something significant. Many non-philosophers baulk at this suggestion. Consider 'The Violinist', a much-discussed case from Judith Jarvis Thomson's 1971 defence of abortion:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back-to-back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you: 'Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you - we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.'

Readers are supposed to judge that the violinist, despite having as much right to life as anyone else, doesn't thereby have the right to use the body and organs of someone who hasn't consented to this - even if this is the only way for him to remain alive. This is supposed to imply that, even if it is admitted that the foetus has a right to life, it doesn't yet follow that it has a right to the means to survive where that involves the use of an unconsenting other's body.

From the perspective of philosophers, the point here is clear, even if Thomson's conclusion is controversial. In the few instances I tried to use this thought experiment in teaching ethics to clinicians, they mostly found it a bad and confusing example. Their problem is that they know too much. For them, the example is physiologically and institutionally implausible, and problematically vague in relevant details of what happened and how. (Why does the Society of Music Lovers have access to confidential medical records? Is the operation supposed to have taken place in hospital, or do they have their own private operating facility?) Moreover, clinicians find this thought experiment bizarre in its complete lack of attention to other plausible real-world alternatives, such as dialysis or transplant. As a result, excellent clinicians might fail to even see the analogy with pregnancy, let alone find it helpful in their ethical reasoning about abortion.

Faced with people who don't 'get' a thought experiment, the temptation for philosophers is to say that these people aren't sufficiently good at isolating what is ethically relevant. Obviously, such a response risks being self-serving, and tends to gloss over an important question: how should we determine what are the ethically relevant features of a situation? Why, for example, should a philosopher sitting in an armchair be in a better position to determine the ethically relevant features of 'The Violinist' than someone who's worked with thousands of patients?

Although philosophers don't often talk about this, it would appear that they assume that the interpretation of thought experiments should be subject to a convention of authoritative authorial ethical framing. In other words, the experiments are about what the author intends them to be and nothing else, much like Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty, who used words to mean whatever he wanted them to mean. To further spell out the implied convention, the author of the thought experiment has, by definition, specified all the ethically relevant elements of the case.

Thought-experiment designers often attempt to finesse the problem through an omniscient authorial voice that, at a glance, takes in and relates events in their essentials. The voice is able to say clearly and concisely what each of the thought experiment's actors is able to do, their psychological states and intentions. The authorial voice will often stipulate that choices must be made from a short predefined menu, with no ability to alter the terms of the problem. For example, the reader might be presented with only two choices, as in the classic trolley problem: pull a lever, or don't pull it.

All this makes reasoning about thought experiments strikingly unlike good ethical reasoning about real-life cases. In real life, the skill and creativity in ethical thinking about complex cases are in finding the right way of framing the problem. Imaginative ethical thinkers look beyond the small menu of obvious options to uncover novel approaches that better allow competing values to be reconciled. The more contextual knowledge and experience a thinker has, the more they have to draw on in coming to a wise decision.

Ethical thought experiments work best when those who read them are willing to go along with the arbitrary stipulations of the author. The greater one's contextual expertise, the more likely one is to suffer the problem of 'too much knowledge' when faced with thought experiments stipulating facts and circumstances that make little sense given one's domain-specific experience. So, while philosophers tend to assume that they make ethical choices clearer and more rigorous by moving them on to abstract and context-free territory, such gains are likely to be experienced as losses in clarity by those with relevant situational expertise.

It's easy for such differences of perspective to turn into standoffs. Impasse looms where each side employs different standards of good reasoning, and criticises the other for failing to meet standards it wasn't trying to meet. To make progress, it pays to understand why those with whom you disagree think that their views are cogent. What would the world need to be like for thought experiments to be a good way of making progress in ethics? I'll canvass two suggestions: first that the thought experiment is a kind of scientific experiment, and second that it is an appeal to imagination. As we will see, on either reading, thought experiments are highly fallible, and we should be circumspect about taking them to provide insights into real-world ethical problems.

Some philosophers think that ethical thought experiments either are, or have a strong affinity with, scientific experiments. On such a view, thought experiments, like other experiments, when well-designed can allow knowledge to be built via rigorous and unbiased testing of hypotheses. Just as in the randomised controlled trials in which new pharmaceuticals are tested, the circumstances and the types of control in thought experiments could be such as to make the situation very unlike everyday situations, but that is a virtue rather than a vice, insofar as it allows ethical hypotheses to be tested cleanly and rigorously.

If thought experiments are - literally - experiments, this helps to explain how they might provide insights into the way the world is. But it would also mean that thought experiments would inherit the two methodological challenges that attend to experiments more generally, known as internal and external validity. Internal validity relates to the extent to which an experiment succeeds in providing an unbiased test of the variable or hypothesis in question. External validity relates to the extent to which the results in the controlled environment translate to other contexts, and in particular to our own. External validity is a major challenge, as the very features that make an environment controlled and suitable to obtain internal validity often make it problematically different from the uncontrolled environments in which interventions need to be applied.

There are significant challenges with both the internal and the external validity of thought experiments. It is useful to compare the kind of care with which medical researchers or psychologists design experiments - including validation of questionnaires, double-blinding of trials, placebo control, power calculations to determine the cohort size required and so on - with the typically rather more casual approach taken by philosophers. Until recently, there has been little systematic attempt within normative ethics to test variations of different phrasing of thought experiments, or to think about framing effects, or sample sizes; or the extent to which the results from the thought experiment are supposed to be universal or could be affected by variables such as gender, class or culture. A central ambiguity has been whether the implied readers of ethical thought experiments should be just anyone, or other philosophers; and, as a corollary, whether judgments elicited are supposed to be expert judgments, or the judgments of ordinary human beings. As the vast majority of ethical thought experiments in fact remain confined to academic journals, and are tested only informally on other philosophers, de facto they are tested only on those with expertise in the construction of ethical theories, rather than more generally representative samples or those with expertise in the contexts that the thought experiments purport to describe.

The problems of external validity are even greater. The crucial question is: even assuming that a thought experiment has internal validity, what follows from the validity of judgments in the world of the thought experiment for other cases? If you agree that it would be permissible to pull the lever in the original trolley problem, causing five people to be saved and one to die, there are a variety of inferences that could follow. At the most confined, we could take it that the result has implications only for cases involving runaway trains with particular switching arrangements. At the other end of the spectrum, we could take the result to have far-reaching implications about the permissibility of causing harm to some in the course of preventing harm to greater numbers of others. Judges within the common law tradition face a structurally similar question when making a judgment. They need to supply reasoning to support their decision, parts of which can be filleted out as the ratio decidendi (reason for the decision) by future judges. The ratio gives the judge's best approximation to the breadth of the precedent the case sets.

The broader the precedents that thought experiments can set, the more powerful they will be for ethical thinking. In turn, the breadth of the precedents that a thought experiment sets depends on the degree to which the controls in place in the thought experiment, which allow the particular hypothesis to be tested cleanly, imply or are compatible with the wider cogency of the resultant ethical principle. This is not straightforward, and is itself a frequent topic for contestation.

It's not hard to think of a pair of cases where killing and letting die are not morally equivalent

Some philosophers think that well-controlled thought experiments allow wide-ranging implications to be drawn. In 1975, the philosopher James Rachels constructed a pair of parallel cases involving a relative intending to kill his young cousin to gain an inheritance, in order to show that there is no intrinsic difference between killing and letting die.

In Rachels's first case, Smith kills his cousin by drowning him in the bath, and makes it look like an accident. Meanwhile, Jones intends to drown his cousin and make it look like an accident; he sneaks into the bathroom to do precisely this, but by coincidence the boy slips, hits his head, falls face-down into the water and drowns of his own accord. Rachels argues that killing the cousin and letting him die are morally equivalent; thus, if in these two otherwise identical cases there is no ethical difference between killing and letting die, then there is no intrinsic difference between the two. This is supposed to carry over to the world of real ethical choices and those that potentially influence policy. But does it?

It is now widely argued that such inferences - from a simplified thought experiment to a real-life situation - are unsafe. Context will sometimes or often make a difference, and there is no algorithmic way of working out what this difference will be in advance. It's not hard, for example, to think of a precisely matched pair of cases where killing and letting die are not morally equivalent. Had the context been one in which a hitman was preparing to take a hidden shot at a target, and the target then died of a sudden cardiac arrest as the hitman remained out of sight, it's far from clear that killing and letting die would be equally bad.

The deeper question about external validity is whether thought experiments give insights into a single fixed picture that can gradually be reconstructed, or whether even well-designed thought experiments inform something more fragmentary, changeable and plural. Societies differ greatly in features such as wealth, inequality, population size, ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity, technological advancement, economic structure, ease of communication and travel, and the ability to collect taxes and maintain order without violence. Moreover, societies are continually shifting in terms of these structural variables, and sometimes rapidly, for example through processes of industrialisation or transition away from communism. The COVID-19 outbreak has vividly displayed the ways in which social norms and structures are more malleable than we assume.

It is implausible to think that the actual optimal policy prescriptions would be the same, regardless of the societal context. It is less clear whether, despite this multidimensional variety, it is better to hold fast to the conviction that there are global and unchanging ethical principles to be discovered, or if it would be better to start from the assumption that ethical principles arise from attempts to solve problems in living together, and should be assumed to be at least somewhat local and changeable as these conditions change. One reason to doubt that correct ethical principles are unchanging is that many seemingly vital ethical questions are decidedly recent, and would have been barely intelligible to those living 100 ago - questions such as individual responsibility to prevent climate change, gender self-identification, the nature of authenticity under surveillance capitalism, and the governance of AI-based automated decision-making.

Many philosophers nonetheless wish to say that the correct ethical principles are unchanging. However, even if this were true, I suspect the principles wouldn't be specific enough to provide useful advice, and the real work of ethical thinking would be in interpreting or specifying these principles. Compare a case where you go to someone for advice, and it transpires that you got exactly the same advice as everyone else, regardless of the specifics of your position.

An alternate view of thought experiments would downplay their relationship to scientific experiments, and acknowledge that they are, as Daniel Dennett put it, 'intuition pumps': tools for persuasion via imaginative consideration of possibilities. Thinking of thought experiments as persuasive fictions wouldn't obviate the problem of external validity, but might allow us to reframe it.

Aristotle provides one way of thinking through how fiction can provide ethical insights, arguing that tragic drama is more 'philosophical and more serious than history', as it speaks of universals, while history speaks only of particulars. History will tell us what actually happened, but this is often unsatisfying and random. Lives as we live them, and events as they unfold, often don't make sense - but it is precisely this kind of sense-making and feeling of necessity that makes stories resonate universally; and this comes from rational construction. Dramatists and novelists tend to condense and leave out elements that are irrelevant to the kind of stories they want to tell. As the author Iris Murdoch argued in 1970, when fiction works well:

We are presented with a truthful image of the human condition in a form which can be steadily contemplated; and indeed this is the only context in which many of us are capable of contemplating it at all.

The idea that fictions can provide ethical insights seems correct; but it doesn't follow that they do so reliably or in a way that allows ethical insights to be easily transported from one context to another. One important question is what the relationship is between a well-told story and one that is true, or ethically insightful. The screenwriter William Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983) discusses how one might approach writing a movie in which the main character had to get in the same room as the most famous woman in the world. Probably you'd write it as a classic heist film, with the first half devoted to the mastermind devising the plan and assembling the team - no doubt involving a confidence trickster, an electronics expert to defeat security systems and a getaway driver. The second half would see the plan unfold and things go wrong, and then any necessary adjustments.

How things are presented in fiction is often simplified and distorted

Goldman then compares this notion with how in fact Michael Fagan entered the Queen's bedroom in 1982. The man hopped over the palace railings and, via a series of accidents and attendants failing to notice alarms, walked through the royal stamp collection, shinned up a drainpipe, and took off his sandals and socks to climb through an open window. Once inside the palace, Fagan wandered around unchallenged for 15 minutes in bare feet, before finding himself in the Queen's bedroom. To this day, it's unclear why he wanted to do this. As Goldman put it: 'true as it may be, if you handed it in as a screenplay, you would find yourself thrown out without ceremony as a very uninventive writer of fantasy'.

Whether in police work, emergency medicine or war, how things are presented in fiction is often simplified and distorted, to a point where it might be just too annoying to watch if the drama focuses on your area of expertise. For example, resuscitation (CPR) is much more likely to succeed in TV dramas than in real life. As the public health scholar Jaclyn Portanova and her colleagues found in 2015, nearly 70 per cent of CPR attempts in TV dramas succeeded, with 50 per cent of patients surviving to be discharged. In reality, the rate of successful discharge after CPR in US hospitals is 25 per cent. So using fiction as a means for ethical reflection - whether in thought experiments or in novels - will tend to raise the same questions of experience, abstraction and 'too much knowledge' that we considered earlier in discussing Thomson's violinist.

In some ways, this criticism is as old as philosophical reflection on art. In his Republic, Plato complained that poets knew nothing about the things they wrote about, whether war or shoemaking, but presented images that others equally as ignorant would find convincing. The criticism could apply not just to TV dramas, but to thought experiments too.

Overall, ethical thought experiments are, at best, fallible ways of constructing simplified models that map rather imperfectly onto the world as we experience it, and can distort as much as they illuminate. So should we give up on them as sources of ethical insight?

Responsible thinking requires calibrating our levels of credence to the reliability of our intellectual tools. Clearly, ethical thought experiments are not particularly reliable tools. But that's not to say that we have other, more reliable tools. Pre-theoretical ethical 'common sense' is subject to distortions brought by prejudice, power and many other factors, and the reason why we turn to philosophical ethics in the first place is that it's unclear how to resolve competing ethical duties that arise at a pretheoretical level. Ethical thinking is hard, and even our best tools for doing it are not very good. Humility should be the watchword.

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What is the problem with ethical trolley problems? - James Wilson | Aeon Essays

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Much recent work in analytic philosophy pins its hopes on learning from imaginary cases. Starting from seminal contributions by philosophers such as Robert Nozick and Derek Parfit, this work champions the use of thought experiments - short hypothetical scenarios designed to probe or persuade on a point of ethical principle.

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A CBS video and a BBC photo essay, covering the parade of the Catrinas in Mexico, in preparation for this year’s Day of the Dead celebration. 

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A CBS video and a BBC photo essay, covering the parade of the Catrinas in Mexico, in preparation for this year’s Day of the Dead celebration. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the parade of the Catrinas? How does this approach to death differ from many other cultures around the world? Why do you think there has been such a worldwide increase in interest in the Latin American ‘day of the dead’ celebrations, as seen in its portrayal in movies and other popular art forms? This story is a great starting point for students to research the way different cultures visualize and celebrate/mourn death. To wrap up: To what extent are religious belief systems a mechanism to cope with the ephemeral nature of life?

KEY TERMS  Alive, Celebration, Cycle of life and death, Sombre

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A Big Think article, asking the question, "Does it matter if there was a historical Jesus?" 

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A Big Think article, asking the question, "Does it matter if there was a historical Jesus?" 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This article raises some interesting questions about the nature of religion, and the figures which are worshipped by adherents. Is religious belief based purely on symbolism? How much does historical reality matter when we construct our religious outlooks? In addition, what does the article suggest about the evolution of religion: is religious knowledge based on the creation of new ideas, or the synthesis of pre-existing ones?

KEY TERMS Truth, Archetype, Contradictions, Mythology, Cult, Synthesist

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Although Jesus Christ is inextricably linked to Christianity, historically he was a major factor but not the totality of the faith. For the bulk of the last 2,000 years, Christians were more concerned with other facets of their religion. As religion professor Stephen Prothero writes, the obsessive focus on the Christ figure is a relatively recent innovation.

Within America, Christ has many meanings for different people. Prothero notes that American Christians have portrayed him as "black and white, male and female, straight and gay, a socialist and a capitalist, a pacifist and a warrior, a Klu Klux Klansman and a civil rights agitator." Of course, each denomination claims to worship the correct Jesus, which is more assumption than grounded truth.

Christ's malleability is historically constant. We can see that in action today. For supporters of Bernie Sanders, he's the wild-eyed prophet raging against moneymen in the temple; evangelicals pleased with the choice of Amy Coney Barrett are rejoicing over the potential overturning of Roe v Wade, a cultural wedge issue they claim Jesus demands. With this kind of imagined flexibility, does the actual historical Christ even matter?

The historical Jesus has always been elusive. The four gospels-the only widely circulated biographies of his existence-were penned somewhere between 65 and 100 years after his death. Gospel writers never even divulge his appearance. As religious scholar Lawrence Cunningham writes, New Testament authors "do not say what Jesus looked like." From Christianity's very origins, Christ is portrayed more as archetype than man.

Scripture and prophecy don't always match up: the Hebrew Bible claimed the coming prophet would be born in Bethlehem, a prediction "Jesus of Nazareth" doesn't fulfill. Sure, Luke says his parents were visiting for a census, while Matthew claims they were always in Bethlehem until fleeing to Egypt under duress (and then ended up in Nazareth). The earliest gospel, Mark, keeps it simple: Jesus of Nazareth is from Nazareth.

Remember, we aren't even discussing Q or the Gospel of Mary.

These aren't the only contradictions, though what can you expect when four writers tackle one subject on hearsay over the course of decades?

There's also the question of narrative lineage. As Brian Muraresku writes in "The Immortality Key," the Church has gone to great lengths to make it appear as if Christianity emerged whole-cloth amid a world of pagan worship. In fact, the ruling Romans considered early Christians to be atheists due to their belief in only one God. Christians certainly held distinct beliefs, but they were also heavily influenced by their environment.

Most biblical stories have precedent. As Muraresku notes, you don't get to Jesus without Dionysus; Dionysus without El; El without Osiris; Osiris without a rich oral history that predates written language. In each case, the mythological archetype mattered most. With Christianity, an emphasis was placed on a man, which in some ways is also traceable to the Greeks.

As Edith Hamilton writes in her epic survey on mythology, the Greek emphasis on human deities (in sculpture, painting, and story) broke from prior traditions, which dreamed up animal totems and animal-human hybrids. Christians merely took human worship to the next level, even though the roots of this practice are distinctly Greek.

As with all religions, Christianity was a cult for quite some time. Early Christian writers fused Jewish and Greek ideas during the Patristic Era to create their doctrines. Various Christologies were introduced to suit the temperament of each faithful tribe. After the Nicene Creed (325 CE) dubbed Jesus the "only-begotten Son of God," a host of competing Christian offshoots shook their head in agreement. The man finally usurped the myth, and the cult took form as a global religion.

Though Jesus is presented as revolutionary, his philosophical bent squares well with the apocalyptic prophets of Judaism, especially as presented in Second Isaiah. Jesus remixed a long-held Jewish belief in a heavenly kingdom on earth. Amos and First Isaiah feature plenty of discussion about speaking up for the poor and weak. The exploitation of the lower class had been a sin for at least seven centuries by the time Jesus took to the soapbox. If anything, Jesus was a synthesist, not a creationist, as was the writers that honored him.

Credit: pronoia / Adobe Stock

This doesn't denigrate Jesus's role in any capacity. Instead, it grounds his humanity. Every religion is a synthesis of previous religions. As Muraresku shows, the Greek influence on Christian symbolism is too often overlooked. Understanding historical circumstances help us recognize the forces such prophets were fighting and provides context for their messages. Better to evolve a tradition than pretend it emerged from a vacuum.

As religious scholar Karen Armstrong points out, Christians seem particularly interested in the origins of their religion, certainly much more so than Buddhists, making Muraresku's research even more revealing: Why wouldn't you want to know about the pharmacological connection between Dionysus and Jesus in the early Church? If we're talking about the supposed world savior, would an honest biography really dampen our enthusiasm for the Eucharist? How much do his flesh and blood matter when the goal is to live his values in our time?

Christ has long been weighed down by false assumptions. German philosopher Hermann Samuel Reimarus was the first modern thinker to question myths around the historical Jesus. For example, he writes that Jesus never claimed to atone for the sins of mankind. That feature was added by St. Paul, arguably the real founder of Christianity. Reimarus writes that Jesus isn't God, but a teacher of a "remarkable, simple, exalted and practical religion."

If we want to investigate Jesus's most pertinent messages-treat the poor and underserved with respect; question authority; refrain from hatred; love your neighbor as yourself-then the actual person is irrelevant. Many have espoused the same principles before and after Jesus. The man is second to the message, which, if you read his instructions closely, is how he'd likely want it.

If you think turning water into wine and walking on water is amazing, imagine the magic of universal basic income and healthcare for all. That's a practical and living religion we can all take part in.

-

Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

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Does it matter if there was a historical Jesus?

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Although Jesus Christ is inextricably linked to Christianity, historically he was a major factor but not the totality of the faith. For the bulk of the last 2,000 years, Christians were more concerned with other facets of their religion. As religion professor Stephen Prothero writes, the obsessive focus on the Christ figure is a relatively recent innovation.

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A Big Think video, in which Sasha Sagan talks about the 23.4° tilt of the earth - and how that impacts on beliefs and ceremonies around the world.

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A Big Think video, in which Sasha Sagan talks about the 23.4° tilt of the earth - and how that impacts on beliefs and ceremonies around the world.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What problem does Sagan identify that humans have related to time? How does this link to the 23.4° tilt of the earth? What need does she say secular thinkers share with those who hold theistic views? Overall, what does this indicate about the scope to combine both a scientific and a spiritual worldview?

KEY TERMS Disparate cultures, Wonder, Traditions and ceremonies, Secular, Celebrate

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Many of humanity's cultural traditions are based upon the movement of our planet around the Sun. The summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes take on special significance.

The reason these special days exist is because our planet tilts at an angle of roughly 23° on its axis. Without this tilt, there would be no seasons.

The religious and philosophical themes of rebirth and resurrection, therefore, are partially the result of our planet's axial tilt.

SASHA SAGAN: There's no refuge from change in the cosmos, but we're not really good at processing time passing. It's very mysterious. It's very confusing. Throughout time, we earthlings have all sort of come to the same points in the year, and the same points in life to mark. Disparate cultures, who had no way of communicating, found the same moments to create ceremonies and traditions around. Birth, coming of age, death- and also the solstices and equinoxes. So many of our rituals and traditions are about processing change and coming to terms with who we are on this little, particular planet.

My dad, Carl Sagan, was an astronomer and together with my mom, Ann Druyan, they really communicated wonder and awe about the natural world as revealed through science. And they found ways to carry on traditions to connect to our place in the Universe without compromising what they really believed about the world and what we're all doing here. So many of our celebrations around the world are tied to four points in the year, which are a function of how we move around our star, and the axial tilt that the planet has. So, our planet rotates on its axis, but we do it at a little angle- it's about 23 degrees and change. And because of that, we have seasons. Without it, we would still have weather, but we would not have seasons. And the length of days wouldn't change.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, our summer solstice is around June 20th, and at that same time, it's the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. Six months later, we switch. The points in between those extremes are the autumn and spring equinoxes. Holidays like, for example, Easter, Passover, Nowruz, are all tied to the spring equinox. So many holidays around this time of year are connected. Rebirth, resurrection, and this theme of overcoming darkness. There's this underlying story that says, "Wow, that was close. That looked really bad. We almost didn't make it, but now it looks like it's gonna be okay." And we see that in so many different places around this time of year, so many different traditions, because that's spring itself. There's so much symbolism in traditions and ceremonies.

They're almost like these performance art pieces. And I don't mean that in a negative way- it's beautiful! It's this way we can communicate these larger ideas that everyone understands. I'm a secular, but I do love community, and I love getting together to carry on traditions. Those of us who are secular or agnostic or atheist or some combination of those things, we still need ways to mark time. In the wintertime, when it's really cold and dark, we have all these traditions in so many cultures to make ourselves feel joy and create light for ourselves; just around this idea that when the sun sets early, we need more light.

There's something about that that's very profound. So, talking about the winter solstice, because of the axial tilt, the days are gonna start getting longer little by little. It'll be summer before we know it, and no matter whether we believe in it or not, no matter what anyone does, it's definitely happening and the light is returning. It's coming back for sure. And that's something to celebrate.

NARRATOR: Get smarter, faster with videos from the world's biggest thinkers. And to learn even more from the world's biggest thinkers, get Big Think+ for your business.

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How Earth's 23.4° tilt makes life beautiful

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Rituals come as much from religion as they do from the way Earth spins around the Sun.

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A Guardian article, looking at a recent report which concluded that religious intolerance is more prevalent and damaging than intolerance related to ethnicity or nationality. 

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A Guardian article, looking at a recent report which concluded that religious intolerance is more prevalent and damaging than intolerance related to ethnicity or nationality. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Students can analyse this story on two levels: first of all, what does this report reveal about the way in which our negative perceptions lead us to judge other people’s religious affiliations? How does this mislead us when it comes to understanding religion in general? Second, how do you measure things like religious intolerance - and compare it to the level of intolerance related to ethnicity or nationality? Can such comparisons be made in an accurate way? How important are studies such as this in helping us to understand religion and other aspects of society?

KEY TERMS Negative perceptions, Prejudice

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Religious intolerance is ‘bigger cause of prejudice than race’, says report

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Attitudes to faith said to drive negative perceptions more than nationality or ethnicity

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An AP article, considering the news that the Catholic Church says it cannot permit the blessing of a same-sex unions because they are inherently sinful. 

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An AP article, considering the news that the Catholic Church says it cannot permit the blessing of a same-sex unions because they are inherently sinful. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE The declaration made by the Pope on 15th March is a big one, and means that unions between same-sex people remain morally illegitimate in the eyes of the Catholic Church. This poses a lot of questions linked to religion and the construction of our values. First, should our values ‘move with the times’, or remain absolute? Second, given the fact that the Church’s position is arguably contradictory (it’s hard to see how you can treat people with “dignity and respect” and at the same time refer to one of the central aspects of their lives as being “intrinsically disordered”), how important is it to subscribe to an ethical system that is logically consistent? Finally, what are the pros and cons associated with belonging to an ethical system based on faith rather than demonstrable evidence?

KEY TERMS Sin, God’s plan, Divine

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ROME (AP) - The Vatican declared Monday that the Catholic Church won't bless same-sex unions since God "cannot bless sin."

The Vatican's orthodoxy office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a formal response to a question about whether Catholic clergy have the authority to bless gay unions. The answer, contained in a two-page explanation published in seven languages and approved by Pope Francis, was "negative."

The note distinguished between the church's welcoming and blessing of gay people, which it upheld, but not their unions. It argued that such unions are not part of God's plan and that any sacramental recognition of them could be confused with marriage.

The note immediately pleased conservatives, disheartened advocates for LGBT Catholics and threw a wrench in the debate within the German church, which has been at the forefront of opening discussion on hot-button issues such the church's teaching on homosexuality.

Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, which advocates for greater acceptance of gays in the church, predicted the Vatican position would be ignored, including by some Catholic clergy.

"Catholic people recognize the holiness of the love between committed same-sex couples and recognize this love as divinely inspired and divinely supported and thus meets the standard to be blessed," he said in a statement.

The Vatican holds that gay people must be treated with dignity and respect, but that gay sex is "intrinsically disordered." Catholic teaching says that marriage is a lifelong union between a man and woman, is part of God's plan and is intended for the sake of creating new life.

Since gay unions aren't intended to be part of that plan, they can't be blessed by the church, the document said.

"The presence in such relationships of positive elements, which are in themselves to be valued and appreciated, cannot justify these relationships and render them legitimate objects of an ecclesial blessing, since the positive elements exist within the context of a union not ordered to the Creator's plan," the response said.

God "does not and cannot bless sin: He blesses sinful man, so that he may recognize that he is part of his plan of love and allow himself to be changed by him," it said.

Francis has endorsed providing gay couples with legal protections in same-sex unions, but that was in reference to the civil sphere, not within the church. Those comments were made during a 2019 interview with a Mexican broadcaster, Televisa, but were censored by the Vatican until they appeared in a documentary last year.

While the documentary fudged the context, Francis was referring to the position he took when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires. At the time, Argentine lawmakers were considering approving gay marriage, which the Catholic Church opposes. Then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio instead supported providing legal protections for gays in stable unions through a so-called "law of civil cohabitation."

Francis told Televisa: "Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God."

Speaking of families with gay children, he said: "You can't kick someone out of a family, nor make their life miserable for this. What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally covered."

In the new document and an accompanying unsigned article, the Vatican said questions had been raised about whether the church should bless same-sex unions in a sacramental way in recent years, and after Francis had insisted on the need to better welcome gays in the church.

It was an apparent reference to the German church, where some bishops have been pushing the envelope on issues such as priestly celibacy, contraception and the church's outreach to gay Catholics after coming under pressure by powerful lay Catholic groups demanding change.

In a statement, the head of the German bishops' conference, Bishop Georg Bätzing, said the new document would be incorporated into the German discussion, but he suggested that the case was by no means closed.

"There are no easy answers to questions like these," he said, adding that the German church wasn't only looking at the church's current moral teaching, but also the development of doctrine and the actual reality of Catholics today.

Bill Donohue, president of the conservative Catholic League, praised the decision as a decisive, non-negotiable "end of story" declaration by the Vatican.

"The Vatican left nothing on the table. The door has been slammed shut on the gay agenda," Donohue wrote on the League's website, calling the document "the most decisive rejection of those efforts ever written."

In the article, the Vatican stressed the "fundamental and decisive distinction" between gay individuals and gay unions, noting that "the negative judgment on the blessing of unions of persons of the same sex does not imply a judgment on persons."

But it explained the rationale for forbidding a blessing of such unions, noting that any union that involves sexual activity outside of marriage cannot be blessed because it is not in a state of grace, or "ordered to both receive and express the good that is pronounced and given by the blessing."

And it added that blessing a same-sex union could give the impression of a sort of sacramental equivalence to marriage. "This would be erroneous and misleading," the article said.

Esteban Paulon, president of the Argentine Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transsexuals, said the document was proof that for all of Francis' words and gestures expressing outreach to gays, the institutional church wouldn't change.

"Saying that homosexual practice - openly living sexuality - is a sin takes us back 200 years and promotes hate speech that unfortunately in Latin America and Europe is on the rise," Paulon said. "That transforms into injuries and even deaths, or policies which promote discrimination."

A similar note of exasperation was echoed in the Philippines, Asia's largest Roman Catholic nation, where gay rights leader Danton Remoto said it simply wasn't worth it to fight an old institution. "I keep on telling LGBTQIs to just have their civil unions done," Remoto said. "We do not need any stress anymore from this church."

Other critical commentators noted the Catholic Book of Blessings contains blessings that can be bestowed on everything from new homes and factories to animals, sporting events, seeds before planting and farm tools.

Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean survivor of sexual abuse who is gay and close to Francis, said the document was out of step with Francis' pastoral approach and was tone deaf to the needs and rights of LGBT Catholics.

"If the Church and the CDF do not advance with the world ... constantly rejecting and speaking negatively and not putting priorities where they should be, Catholics will continue to flee," he warned.

In 2003, the same Vatican office issued a similar decree saying that the church's respect for gay people "cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behavior or to legal recognition of homosexual unions."

Doing so, the Vatican reasoned then, would not only condone "deviant behavior," but create an equivalence to marriage, which the church holds is an indissoluble union between man and woman.

Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the U.S.-based NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice and an advocate for greater LGBTQ inclusion in the church, said she was relieved the Vatican statement wasn't worse.

She said she interpreted the statement as saying, "You can bless the individuals (in a same-sex union), you just can't bless the contract."

"So it's possible you could have a ritual where the individuals get blessed to be their committed selves."

___

AP writers David Crary in New York, Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin, Almudena Calatrava in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, contributed to this report.

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Vatican bars gay union blessing, says God 'can't bless sin'

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ROME (AP) - The Vatican declared Monday that the Catholic Church won't bless same-sex unions since God "cannot bless sin." The Vatican's orthodoxy office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a formal response to a question about whether Catholic clergy have the authority to bless gay unions.

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A BBC article about how a rare tea is picked in India.

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A BBC article about how a rare tea is picked in India.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What are the limits to knowledge produced via a positivist approach?

KEY TERMS Spiritual, Ceremonial

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Set 2,200m high on the steep slopes of the Indian Himalayas and surrounded by the ice-capped peaks of Khangchendzonga, the world's third-highest mountain, the hills surrounding Darjeeling are - quite literally - breath-taking. Wild elephants and tigers roam the valley ridges and Buddhist monasteries cling to the slopes, but it's Darjeeling's vast blanket of emerald-green tea plantations that has led its cash crop to be called the 'Champagne of teas' and propelled it to international fame.

Each of Darjeeling's 87 tea estates is renowned for producing delicate, muscatel-flavoured brews. But if you venture 33km south from the town's bustling Victorian-era resorts to one of the world's oldest tea factories, you'll find a rare variety that's arguably leaf and bud above the rest. Known as Silver Tips Imperial, it's only plucked by expert pickers from the Makaibari estate on clear, full-moon nights when the planets align to produce optimal harvest conditions. This mystical Oolong isn't only cosmic, it's costly: in 2014, it sold for the equivalent of $1,850 per kg, making it the most expensive tea ever produced in India.

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India's rare tea picked under a full moon

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Set 2,200m high on the steep slopes of the Indian Himalayas and surrounded by the ice-capped peaks of Khangchendzonga, the world's third-highest mountain, the hills surrounding Darjeeling are - quite literally - breath-taking.

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A Big Think article, exploring whether there can be an ethical basis for right and wrong without a divine authority. 

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A Big Think article, exploring whether there can be an ethical basis for right and wrong without a divine authority. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Can we establish objectively the moral basis of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’?

KEY TERMS Divine command theory, the Euthyphro dilemma

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If there is no God, can anything be objectively good?

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Apart from divine authority, is there an ethical basis for right and wrong?

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A Big Think article, looking at the Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural map, which arranges nations according to their values and religious outlooks.

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A Big Think article, looking at the Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural map, which arranges nations according to their values and religious outlooks.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How we represent the world is a central aspect of TOK, and an interesting topic to explore with your students. This map shows another way of doing it, but what insights do students feel it offers us? Do they like the way the data is generated and plotted on the map (which is actually a ‘scatterplot diagram’)? What are their opinions on the criticisms offered in the final paragraph that it is “simplistic, and culturally essentialist”?

KEY TERMS Values, Cultural proximity

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Credit: Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images

Question: On what map is Lithuania a neighbor of China, Poland lies next to Brazil, and Morocco and Yemen touch?

Answer: The Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural Map. To be precise, the 2017 map. Because on the 2020 version, each of those pairs has drifted apart significantly.

These are not, strictly speaking, maps but rather scatterplot diagrams. Each dot represents a country, the position of which is based on how it ranks on two different values (discussed below). The dots are corralled together into geo-cultural groups:

Catholic Europe, which comprises countries as diverse and far apart as Hungary and Andorra

Protestant Europe, taking in both Iceland and Germany

The Orthodox world, from Belarus all the way to Armenia

The three Baltic states

The English-speaking world, including both the U.S. and Northern Ireland

The huge African-Islamic world, ranging from Azerbaijan to South Africa

Latin America, which goes from Mexico to Argentina

South Asia, which comprises both India and Cyprus

The Confucian world, encompassing China and Japan.

The placement of the dots indicates cultural proximity or distance. Some countries from different groups can be more similar than other countries in the same group.

See the examples indicated above: cultural neighbors China and Lithuania belong to the Confucian and Baltic groups, respectively. Poland is part of Catholic Europe; its 2017 neighbor Brazil is in Latin America. Morocco and Yemen are closer culturally to Armenia, in the Orthodox group, than they are to Qatar, despite all belonging to the African-Islamic group.

Credit: World Values Survey, public domain.

Creating a culture map

So, what exactly are the criteria used for plotting these dots in the first place?

These maps are part of the World Values Survey, first conducted by political scientist Ronald Inglehart in the late 1990s. With his colleague Christian Welzel, he produced an update in 2005. The WVS has been revised several times since, most recently in 2020.

The WVS asserts that there are two fundamental dimensions to cross-cultural variation across the world. These are used as the axes to plot the various countries on the diagram.

The X-axis measures survival versus self-expression values.

Survival values focus on economic and physical security. There is not much room for trust and tolerance of "others." Self-expression values prioritize well-being, quality of life, and self-expression. There is more room for tolerating ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities.

The Y-axis measures traditional versus secular-rational values.

Traditional values include deference to religion and parental authority as well as traditional social and family values. Societies that score high on traditions typically also are highly nationalistic. In more secular-rational societies, science and bureaucracy replace faith as the basis for authority. Secular-rational values include high tolerance of things like divorce, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide.

As indicated by the significant changes on the 2020 map, the cultural values of nations are not static:

Countries that move up on the map are shifting from traditional to more secular-rational values.

Countries that move to the right on the map are shifting from survival values to self-expression values.

And, of course, vice versa in both cases.

According to the authors of the map, changes in cultural outlook can be the result of socioeconomic changes - increasing levels of wealth, for example. But the religious and cultural heritage of each country also plays a part.

Credit: World Values Survey, public domain.

Some notable features of the 2020 map:

The Baltic group has been dissolved; Lithuania is now part of Catholic Europe, Estonia a lone Protestant island in a Catholic sea. More worryingly, Latvia seems to have dissolved completely.

In general, survival values are strongest in African-Islamic countries, self-expression values in Protestant Europe.

Traditional values are strongest in African-Islamic countries and Latin America, while secular values dominate in Confucian countries and Protestant Europe.

The United States is an atypical member of the English-speaking group, scoring much lower on both scales (that is to say, lower and more to the left). In other words, the U.S. is more into traditional and survival values than the group's other members.

Shifting attitudes don't just separate; they also unite. Belgium and the U.S. are now culture buddies, as are New Zealand and Iceland. Kazakhstan is virtually indistinguishable from Bosnia.

The Inglehart-Welzel map is not without its critics. It has been decried as Eurocentric, simplistic, and culturally essentialist (that is, the assumption that certain cultural characteristics are essential and fixed, and that some are superior to others). Which is, of course, a very self-expressive thing to say.
For more on these maps, on the WVS surveys, and on the methodology used, visit the World Values Survey. Strange Maps #1098 Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
Follow Strange Maps on Twitter and Facebook.

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Why the U.S. and Belgium are culture buddies

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Credit: Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images Question: On what map is Lithuania a neighbor of China, Poland lies next to Brazil, and Morocco and Yemen touch? Answer: The Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural Map. To be precise, the 2017 map. Because on the 2020 version, each of those pairs has drifted apart significantly.

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An ArtNews report into the dismissal of a professor at Hamline University, after displaying two medieval paintings of the prophet Muhammed.

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An ArtNews report into the dismissal of a professor at Hamline University, after displaying two medieval paintings of the prophet Muhammed.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What did the unnamed professor do in his art history class, and what point was he trying to prove? Why did someone complain, and how did the college respond to this? Why have some people argued that the action taken afterwards by the college was a “violation” of the principles of academic freedom? What are your opinions on the incident (you can use this article from the Conversation to add to your knowledge)? Overall, where should the line be placed (or should there be a line) between cultural sensitivity and censorship?

KEY TERMS Monothetic, Disrespectful, Offensive, Censorship, Freedom of expression

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Professor’s Termination for Showing Paintings of Prophet Muhammad Spurs Debate Around Academic Freedom

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A professor dismissed for showing images of the Prophet Muhammad deemed offensive by students have spurred an academic debate.

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This Aeon article considers the concepts of ‘immanence’, and how it influenced the way Martin Luther King viewed the world, and informed the way the Civil Rights Struggle was approached.

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This Aeon article considers the concepts of ‘immanence’, and how it influenced the way Martin Luther King viewed the world, and informed the way the Civil Rights Struggle was approached.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Students often struggle with religion, either regarding this theme as solely about the existence of God, or confusing it with ethics. This story about MLK shows how a religious concept – immanence – can shape the way people understand the world, and how it influences the knowledge they construct. Get them to look up what immanence means first of all, how it influenced King, and finally a consideration of the (profound) implications of holding this belief. They could also reflect on central concepts (religious or otherwise) that inform their outlooks and worldviews. How do religious concepts influence the way we understand the world? To what extent are our worldviews determined by the way we subscribe to religious ideas?

KEY TERMS Divine immanence, Satyagraha

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Martin Luther King addresses marchers in Washington on 28 August 1963. Courtesy Wikimedia

Martin Luther King Jr knew he was risking his life. The US civil rights leader, who would be assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for equality, realised that his safety, and that of his family and co-activists, were constantly in danger. In 1958, he had been stabbed and nearly killed during a book-signing event in Harlem. In 1956, during his involvement in the Montgomery bus boycott, the front porch of his home had been bombed. Yet King did not relent. After receiving a menacing phone call one night in January of 1956, King turned to God for the strength to carry on.

'I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid,' King prayed at his kitchen table. 'At that moment,' he wrote in Stride Toward Freedom (1958), 'I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced God before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: "Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever." Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.'

King's faith in God helped him weather the storms of his calling. But his abiding beliefs in progress and the ideals of his nation also demanded faith in a certain kind of creator: an immanent God, working directly in the world through human beings, relying on them to carry out His will on Earth. Indeed, King's belief in God's immanence helped to strengthen his optimism about nonviolence and democracy, his ability to withstand disappointment, death threats, political setbacks and the seemingly irreversible condition of human sinfulness. God, he believed, was in the world, and His will would prevail, even when the evidence of moral victories seemed slim. The faithful need only stay the righteous course.

King's theology took shape during divinity school at Crozer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he studied. Students and faculty at Crozer debated whether God remained wholly transcendent, removed from the world and humans' daily lives, or if He was immanent, and thus present alongside mankind in the struggle for moral order. King refused to behold God in this either/or manner, concluding that He existed beyond time, space, nature and humanity, and yet moved as a spirit or force within history and the evolutionary process. 'God is immanent in the world,' King wrote at Crozer. '[He] is not a deity who stands outside of the world and does nothing, but he is a deity immanent in the process of history.' King would go on to write his dissertation on this subject. He criticised the view popularised by, among others, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who insisted that God was wholly transcendent and unknowable.

For King, the stakes of this theological debate were great. If God existed as an impersonal and transcendent entity, Christians could argue against the need to take action on issues of justice, equality and civil rights. After all, why fight for a cause if humans had no effect on God's plan? King had grasped the implications of the doctrine of a wholly transcendent God and he preached a different message: Americans would never experience true democracy, blacks would never know true freedom, and Christians could not claim to follow Jesus unless they put religious principles into practice on a daily basis. Such was the process, King believed, of building the Kingdom of God on Earth. It was also the process of cultivating democracy and other ideals. If everyone, as a child of God, deserved to be heard and respected, then democracy became another way for King to talk about God's purpose, immanently revealed in people's lives.

The concept of divine immanence became less theoretical once King learned about the activism of Mahatma Gandhi. Though Gandhi was not a Christian, his method of satyagraha, meaning 'truth-force' or, as King put it, 'soul force', fascinated King. Gandhi challenged the British empire by forcing them to confront their Indian subjects as fellow humans, deserving fair treatment. He did so without firing a shot. From Gandhi's example, King saw how humans practising God's love, particularly through nonviolence and disciplined self-comportment, could unleash the power of God's love in the world. He acknowledged Gandhi's method as 'the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change' during the Montgomery bus boycott. In Selma, Alabama and in Memphis, Tennessee, and throughout the US South, King continued to utilise Gandhian strategies of direct action throughout his campaign against American racism. For King, in short, divine immanence was a call to action. 'All humanity is involved in a single process,' he contended, working in concert with God's Holy Spirit, the ultimate 'community creating reality that moves through history.' God and mankind, in other words, moved together. From the perspective of theological doctrine, King had reconciled immanence and transcendence.

King was all too aware that forces of opposition to God's will filled the world too. He saw the fruits of his efforts in incremental reforms, but small results could be discouraging. Here is where King's faith in an immanent God stepped in. The night before his assassination, while addressing a group of sanitation workers on strike in Memphis, King spoke of God. Though he warned of 'difficult days ahead', he claimed that God had allowed him 'to go up to the mountain' and see the 'Promised Land'. 'I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land ... Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!'

King's courage rested upon that conviction. God's truth would march on as an intrinsic force in the world through his allies. It would help the faithful build the brotherhood of man. A transcendent God could not do it alone, a certainty for King that made him willing to do the work. But King could not do it alone either. He called upon both black and white activists, the entire nation and the worldwide community to join him in the cause, which he knew would continue beyond his lifetime. On the eve of his death, he told the crowd he was not worried. In the end, he believed, immanence would overcome everything.

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Why divine immanence mattered for the Civil Rights struggle | Aeon Ideas

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Martin Luther King addresses marchers in Washington on 28 August 1963. Courtesy Wikimedia Martin Luther King Jr knew he was risking his life. The US civil rights leader, who would be assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for equality, realised that his safety, and that of his family and co-activists, were constantly in danger.

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In this short Big Think video, Dr. Michio Kaku discusses the distinctive purposes of science and religion, and how there are two Gods – one ‘personal’, and one related to the order and harmony of the universe.

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In this short Big Think video, Dr. Michio Kaku discusses the distinctive purposes of science and religion, and how there are two Gods – one ‘personal’, and one related to the order and harmony of the universe.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Do students agree with the basic premise of the video – that “the purpose of science is to determine how the heavens go. The purpose of religion is to determine how to go to heaven”? And do they find Kaku’s identification of two Gods (what are these) helpful? Does this indicate that we cannot approach the world purely with a scientific worldview, as other thinkers may advocate?

KEY TERMS Personal gods vs. the god of Spinoza

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MICHIO KAKU: Well, when you talk about religion, I like to quote from Galileo. Galileo said, the purpose of science is to determine how the heavens go. The purpose of religion is to determine how to go to heaven. So in other words, science is about natural law. It's about the laws of nature. While religion is about ethics, about how to go to heaven, how to be a good person, how to earn the favor of God. So you see, as long as you keep these two separate, there's no problem at all. The problem occurs when people from the natural sciences begin to pontificate upon ethics and when religious people begin to pontificate about natural law. That's where we get into trouble. Now, the boundary of the two, the question arises. Can you prove the existence of God? Well, first of all, let's be clear about this.

There are two kinds of God. Einstein was very clear about this, two kinds of God. The first God is a personal god, the God that you pray to, the God that gives you your bicycle for Christmas, the God that smites the Philistines and destroys your enemies. That's the personal God. Einstein did not believe that the God of the universe created us just so you can get that wagon for a Christmas present. You see, Einstein believed in another god, the god of Spinoza, the god of liveness, the god of order, harmony. The universe could have been random. It could have been chaotic. It could have been messy. But the universe is actually quite elegant, quite simple, and in fact, is gorgeous. You can put the laws of physics as we know them on a simple sheet of paper amazing. It didn't have to be that way.

Therefore, you ask the question, is the existence of God provable? Well, what is science? Science is based on things that are testable, reproducible, and falsifiable. But you see, the existence of God is not testable. It's not reproducible. We cannot reproduce God at will. You cannot put an angel inside a box and demand that miracles take place. It doesn't work that way. That's why religion is based on faith rather than things that are objectively testable, falsifiable, and reproducible. Now, that doesn't mean that God doesn't exist. I don't know. I don't know if God exists or not. All I'm saying is that science is limited by looking at what is testable, reproducible, and falsifiable. There are areas where you push the boundaries of that, like the Big Bang.

You cannot reproduce the Big Bang. You cannot test the Big Bang. It's like a detective story. You can only look at the clues, the clues left over from the Big Bang. So to calculate the instant of creation is, in some sense, outside science, because it's not reproducible. You cannot reproduce the Big Bang. But you can then trace the history of what happened afterwards, like a murder mystery. And that's where a lot of science is done. And that's why I say that the existence of God is not within the normal boundaries of science.

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There are 2 types of god. Only one is within the boundary of science.

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MICHIO KAKU: Well, when you talk about religion, I like to quote from Galileo. Galileo said, the purpose of science is to determine how the heavens go. The purpose of religion is to determine how to go to heaven. So in other words, science is about natural law.

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The philosopher Daniel DeNicola argues in Aeon that we don’t have the freedom to believe in what we choose; our beliefs must be supported by valid evidence.

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The philosopher Daniel DeNicola argues in Aeon that we don’t have the freedom to believe in what we choose; our beliefs must be supported by valid evidence.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This article could form the heart of a great debate – is DeNicola right, or is he wrong? Should we be allowed to believe in anything, even things that we can’t prove or justify? Does it depend on the area of knowledge? Is it wrong “to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”? Do people have a responsibility to believe in certain things (and not in others)? What is the difference between belief and knowledge?

KEY TERMS Belief, Truth, Personal values, Tolerance

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True believers in fakery. Photo by Ben Brooks/Flickr

Do we have the right to believe whatever we want to believe? This supposed right is often claimed as the last resort of the wilfully ignorant, the person who is cornered by evidence and mounting opinion: 'I believe climate change is a hoax whatever anyone else says, and I have a right to believe it!' But is there such a right?

We do recognise the right to know certain things. I have a right to know the conditions of my employment, the physician's diagnosis of my ailments, the grades I achieved at school, the name of my accuser and the nature of the charges, and so on. But belief is not knowledge.

Beliefs are factive: to believe is to take to be true. It would be absurd, as the analytic philosopher G E Moore observed in the 1940s, to say: 'It is raining, but I don't believe that it is raining.' Beliefs aspire to truth - but they do not entail it. Beliefs can be false, unwarranted by evidence or reasoned consideration. They can also be morally repugnant. Among likely candidates: beliefs that are sexist, racist or homophobic; the belief that proper upbringing of a child requires 'breaking the will' and severe corporal punishment; the belief that the elderly should routinely be euthanised; the belief that 'ethnic cleansing' is a political solution, and so on. If we find these morally wrong, we condemn not only the potential acts that spring from such beliefs, but the content of the belief itself, the act of believing it, and thus the believer.

Such judgments can imply that believing is a voluntary act. But beliefs are often more like states of mind or attitudes than decisive actions. Some beliefs, such as personal values, are not deliberately chosen; they are 'inherited' from parents and 'acquired' from peers, acquired inadvertently, inculcated by institutions and authorities, or assumed from hearsay. For this reason, I think, it is not always the coming-to-hold-this-belief that is problematic; it is rather the sustaining of such beliefs, the refusal to disbelieve or discard them that can be voluntary and ethically wrong.

If the content of a belief is judged morally wrong, it is also thought to be false. The belief that one race is less than fully human is not only a morally repugnant, racist tenet; it is also thought to be a false claim - though not by the believer. The falsity of a belief is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a belief to be morally wrong; neither is the ugliness of the content sufficient for a belief to be morally wrong. Alas, there are indeed morally repugnant truths, but it is not the believing that makes them so. Their moral ugliness is embedded in the world, not in one's belief about the world.

'Who are you to tell me what to believe?' replies the zealot. It is a misguided challenge: it implies that certifying one's beliefs is a matter of someone's authority. It ignores the role of reality. Believing has what philosophers call a 'mind-to-world direction of fit'. Our beliefs are intended to reflect the real world - and it is on this point that beliefs can go haywire. There are irresponsible beliefs; more precisely, there are beliefs that are acquired and retained in an irresponsible way. One might disregard evidence; accept gossip, rumour, or testimony from dubious sources; ignore incoherence with one's other beliefs; embrace wishful thinking; or display a predilection for conspiracy theories.

I do not mean to revert to the stern evidentialism of the 19th-century mathematical philosopher William K Clifford, who claimed: 'It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.' Clifford was trying to prevent irresponsible 'overbelief', in which wishful thinking, blind faith or sentiment (rather than evidence) stimulate or justify belief. This is too restrictive. In any complex society, one has to rely on the testimony of reliable sources, expert judgment and the best available evidence. Moreover, as the psychologist William James responded in 1896, some of our most important beliefs about the world and the human prospect must be formed without the possibility of sufficient evidence. In such circumstances (which are sometimes defined narrowly, sometimes more broadly in James's writings), one's 'will to believe' entitles us to choose to believe the alternative that projects a better life.

In exploring the varieties of religious experience, James would remind us that the 'right to believe' can establish a climate of religious tolerance. Those religions that define themselves by required beliefs (creeds) have engaged in repression, torture and countless wars against non-believers that can cease only with recognition of a mutual 'right to believe'. Yet, even in this context, extremely intolerant beliefs cannot be tolerated. Rights have limits and carry responsibilities.

Unfortunately, many people today seem to take great licence with the right to believe, flouting their responsibility. The wilful ignorance and false knowledge that are commonly defended by the assertion 'I have a right to my belief' do not meet James's requirements. Consider those who believe that the lunar landings or the Sandy Hook school shooting were unreal, government-created dramas; that Barack Obama is Muslim; that the Earth is flat; or that climate change is a hoax. In such cases, the right to believe is proclaimed as a negative right; that is, its intent is to foreclose dialogue, to deflect all challenges; to enjoin others from interfering with one's belief-commitment. The mind is closed, not open for learning. They might be 'true believers', but they are not believers in the truth.

Believing, like willing, seems fundamental to autonomy, the ultimate ground of one's freedom. But, as Clifford also remarked: 'No one man's belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone.' Beliefs shape attitudes and motives, guide choices and actions. Believing and knowing are formed within an epistemic community, which also bears their effects. There is an ethic of believing, of acquiring, sustaining, and relinquishing beliefs - and that ethic both generates and limits our right to believe. If some beliefs are false, or morally repugnant, or irresponsible, some beliefs are also dangerous. And to those, we have no right.
Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don't Know (2017) by Daniel DeNicola is published via The MIT Press.

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You don't have a right to believe whatever you want to | Aeon Ideas

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True believers in fakery. Photo by Ben Brooks/Flickr Do we have the right to believe whatever we want to believe? This supposed right is often claimed as the last resort of the wilfully ignorant, the person who is cornered by evidence and mounting opinion: 'I believe climate change is a hoax whatever anyone else says, and I have a right to believe it!'

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A Guardian article, thinking about how people in Britain no longer identify as Christian - but are also reluctant to label themselves as atheists. 

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A Guardian article, thinking about how people in Britain no longer identify as Christian - but are also reluctant to label themselves as atheists. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Do human beings have a ‘spiritual need’?

KEY TERMS Nones, Post-Christian

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few years ago, one of Britain's leading sociologists published a fascinating paper on the rise of "no religion" as a self-designation in social surveys. More and more "nones", reported Prof Linda Woodhead, had declared themselves "in a slow, unplanned and almost unnoticed revolution". A new cultural majority was emerging with no connection to organised religion.

The most recent census may prove to be a tipping point of sorts in that national journey. The results will not be published for months, but it is being predicted that, for the first time, the number of Britons describing themselves as Christian may dip below 50%. In 2001, when the question "What is your religion?" was first included, the figure was 72%; by 2011 it had fallen to 59%. Meanwhile the proportion of "no religions", or "nones", rose from 15 to 25%. These statistics, stark as they are, may significantly underestimate the phenomenon. When the 2018 British Social Attitudes survey asked the less loaded question: "Do you regard yourself as belonging to a religious group?", only 38% identified as Christian. A whopping 52% said they were "nones".

For demographic as well as other reasons, the proportion of the British population identifying with minority religions, such as Islam, is likely to continue to rise. But as Christianity's Holy Week begins, these are sobering considerations for Easter worshippers. And the statistical direction of travel won't change. Just as Christian belief was once passed down through the generations, the baby boomers' great rejection of organised religion has gained unstoppable momentum among their millennial children and Generation Z. Post-Christian Britain is now a fait accompli.

What that means for Britain's spiritual sense of itself is harder to judge. The secular campaigners at Humanists UK rightly argue there are significant implications for religious education and public funding in areas such as pastoral care. In Wales, a landmark Senedd bill passed this month makes space for a new "religion, values and ethics" course, which will include humanism. But in a broader sense, all bets are off.

During her research, Prof Woodhead devised what she called a "Dawkins indicator", named in honour of Britain's most famous atheist, Richard Dawkins. Measuring factors such as hostility to faith schools, she found that though "no religionists" were more socially liberal, only a small minority were militantly secular and less than half considered themselves atheists. The largest bloc was made up of "maybes, doubters, and don't knows", plus a group who did believe in God, a higher power or in "something there". The younger the cohort, the smaller the proportion of atheists.

Which makes the future rather interesting, from a transcendental point of view. Could Britain become post-secular as well as post-Christian? At least a few cultural markers tantalisingly point in that direction. Take, for example, audience engagement with the second series of Fleabag. Intense interest in the illicit love affair between Phoebe Waller-Bridge's millennial hedonist and a Catholic priest suggested a fascination with how ethical imperatives play out in an individualist age. A taste for the religious sublime has contributed to a startling 21st-century surge in popularity of early Christian composers such as William Byrd and Palestrina. Pre-Covid, pilgrimages were even back in vogue, to an extent that would have astonished Geoffrey Chaucer. The rise of artificial intelligence poses metaphysical questions about the nature of the human soul, as touched on in Kazuo Ishiguro's latest novel, Klara and the Sun.

Perhaps the atheist Philip Larkin got to the nub of it 70 years ago, when communal Christian worship still flourished. In his poem Church Going, Larkin wrote that such places have an aura because they satisfy in us "A hunger ... to be more serious". Congregations may have since thinned out, but spiritual hunger is part of the human condition. It will find other outlets and means of expression in the years to come.

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The Guardian view on 'post-Christian' Britain: a spiritual enigma | Editorial

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few years ago, one of Britain's leading sociologists published a fascinating paper on the rise of "no religion" as a self-designation in social surveys. More and more "nones", reported Prof Linda Woodhead, had declared themselves "in a slow, unplanned and almost unnoticed revolution". A new cultural majority was emerging with no connection to organised religion.

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Julian Baggini in The Guardian muses on the dissonance between faith and the rational mind when it comes to the Easter story, cautioning non-believers not to be lazily dismissive of concepts and explanations we consider implausible.

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Julian Baggini in The Guardian muses on the dissonance between faith and the rational mind when it comes to the Easter story, cautioning non-believers not to be lazily dismissive of concepts and explanations we consider implausible.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is an interesting article largely because it is written by a non-theist, but one who is eager to understand religion, rather than write it off, and build bridges between those who believe and those who don’t. The key sentence to focus on is where Baggini says, “The Easter story thus ends up rather like quantum theory: if you find it easy to believe, you haven’t understood it. Illogicality is a design feature, not a design flaw.” What does he mean? Does this help us to understand (and accept) those who have decided that “faith is superior to belief based on evidence”? Can we make sense of a faith-based approach to the world? What is the relationship between faith and reason?

KEY TERMS Faith, Credulity gap, Cognitive dissonance

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Atheists who bring logic to the Easter story are missing the point | Julian Baggini

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Having faith is a complex business. To assume that religious people are either crazy or stupid is lazy, says philosopher Julian Baggini

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A Conversation article that considers whether Creationism qualifies as a conspiracy theory. 

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A Conversation article that considers whether Creationism qualifies as a conspiracy theory. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Get students to offer their opinions on what constitutes a conspiracy theory, perhaps drawing on the key terms mentioned above. Then ask them to read the article - does Creationism qualify as a conspiracy theory? How does Creationism compare to more mainstream religious beliefs? Is the key characteristic of conspiracy theories an agenda?

KEY TERMS Biblical infallibility, Rules of evidence, Unprovable assumptions, Fact-based criticism, agenda

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Many people around the world looked on aghast as they witnessed the harm done by conspiracy theories such as QAnon and the myth of the stolen US election that led to the attack on the US Capitol Building on January 6. Yet while these ideas will no doubt fade in time, there is arguably a much more enduring conspiracy theory that also pervades America in the form of young Earth creationism. And it's one that we cannot ignore because it is dangerously opposed to science.

In the US today, up to 40% of adults agree with the young Earth creationist claim that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve within the past 10,000 years. They also believe that living creatures are the result of "special creation" rather than evolution and shared ancestry. And that Noah's flood was worldwide and responsible for the sediments in the geologic column (layers of rock built up over millions of years), such as those exposed in the Grand Canyon.

Such beliefs derive from the doctrine of biblical infallibility, long accepted as integral to the faith of numerous evangelical and Baptist churches throughout the world, including the Free Church of Scotland. But I would argue that the present-day creationist movement is a fully fledged conspiracy theory. It meets all the criteria, offering a complete parallel universe with its own organisations and rules of evidence, and claims that the scientific establishment promoting evolution is an arrogant and morally corrupt elite.

This so-called elite supposedly conspires to monopolise academic employment and research grants. Its alleged objective is to deny divine authority, and the ultimate beneficiary and prime mover is Satan.

Creationism re-emerged in this form in reaction to the mid-20th century emphasis on science education. Its key text is the long-time best seller, The Genesis Flood, by John C Whitcomb and Henry M Morris. This provided the inspiration for Morris's own Institute for Creation Research, and for its offshoots, Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International.

Ken Ham, the founder and chief executive of Answers in Genesis, is also responsible for the highly lucrative Ark Encounter theme park and Creation Museum in Kentucky. As a visit to any of these websites will show, their creationism is completely hostile to science, while paradoxically claiming to be scientific.

Demonising and discrediting

These are common conspiracy theory tactics at play. Creationists go to great lengths to demonise the proponents of evolution, and to undermine the overwhelming evidence in its favour.

There are numerous organisations, among them Biologos, the American Scientific Affiliation, the Faraday Institute, and the Clergy Letter Project, which describes themselves as "an endeavour designed to demonstrate that religion and science can be compatible", that is, promoting evolution science within the context of religious belief. Even so, creationists insist on linking together the separate topics of evolution, materialist philosophy, and the promotion of atheism.

According to Answers in Genesis, evolution science is a work of Satan, while former US Congressman Paul Broun has described it as " a lie straight from the pit of hell". When he said that, by the way, he was a member of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Like other conspiracy theorists, creationists immunise themselves from fact-based criticism. They label the study of the past as based on unprovable assumptions, thus disqualifying in advance the plain evidence of geology.

They then attack other evidence by focusing on specific frauds, such as Piltdown man - a hoax skeleton purportedly of a missing link between humans and other apes that was debunked more than 60 years ago - or the dinosaur-bird amalgam "Archaeoraptor", discredited by sharp-eyed scientists before ever making it into the peer-reviewed literature (although not before making it into National Geographic).

One favourite target is Ernst Haeckel, whose pictures of embryos, published in 1874, are now considered to be seriously inaccurate. However, they do correctly draw attention to what most matters here: the features shared during development by different organisms - including humans - such as gill arches, a long tail, and eyes on the side rather than the front of the head, confirming they have a common ancestry.

Haeckel's name appears on the Answers in Genesis website 92 times. He is also the subject of a lengthy chapter in Jonathan Wells' Icons of Evolution; Science or Myth?. This book, which even has its own high school study guide, was what first convinced me, back in 2013, that creationism was a conspiracy theory.
More from The Conversation's Expert guide to conspiracy theories here.
It is a splendid example of creationist tactics, using long-rectified shortcomings (such as those in early studies on Darwinian evolution in peppered moths, in response to changing colours following reduced pollution) to imply that the entire science is fraudulent. Wells has a real PhD in biology, a PhD acquired with the specific goal of " destroying Darwinism " - meaning evolution science - from the inside.

Wells is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a conservative thinktank which promotes creationism under the banner of " Intelligent Design", and is also linked to other conspiracy theories, such as claims that the consensus on climate change is bogus, and that last November's US presidential election was stolen. An article by a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute on the subject has now being removed from its website, but can be found here.

What next?

Conspiracy theories are always driven by some underlying concern or agenda. The theory that Obama's birth certificate was a forgery, or that the 2020 US election was stolen, are about political legitimacy and will fade as the politicians promoting them fade from memory. The idea that COVID-19 does not exist is proving a little harder to dislodge, but scientists, such as those behind Respectful Insolence, are organising to fight back on science denial and misinformation.

I fear that the creationist conspiracy theory will not be so short-lived. It is driven by a deep-seated power struggle within religious communities, between modernists and literalists; between those who regard scripture as coming to us through human authors, however inspired, and those who regard it as a perfect supernatural revelation. And that is a struggle that will be with us for a long time to come.

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Why creationism bears all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory

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An inevitable part of the internet age, some conspiracy theories appear and then fade, but in the US particularly, creationism seems firmly embedded in religion, education and pseudoscience.

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A Conversation article, in which a New Testament scholar outlines what ‘biblical inerrancy’ is. 

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A Conversation article, in which a New Testament scholar outlines what ‘biblical inerrancy’ is. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Is religious knowledge based on certainties?

KEY TERMS Inerrancy, Final authority, interpreted

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In his farewell address at the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention, outgoing president J.D. Greear acknowledged the internal disputes but assured attendees that the Baptist faith continues to affirm "those doctrines most contested in our culture," such as "the authority, and the inerrancy, and the sufficiency of scripture."

Recently, other prominent Christians have touted a belief in inerrancy, including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former Vice President Mike Pence. Even if support for the doctrine has declined in recent years, nearly one in four Americans believes the Bible is God's literal word.

But what is "inerrancy," and why is it important to so many Christians?

I first encountered the doctrine of biblical inerrancy as an undergraduate at Biola University. The evangelical school's faith statement affirms that "the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are without error or misstatement in their moral and spiritual teaching and record of historical facts."

Now, as a New Testament scholar teaching courses at a university in the Bible Belt, I frequently interact with students familiar with - if not committed to - the doctrine of inerrancy.

Why the doctrine of inerrancy matters

The Bible itself does not claim to be inerrant. Perhaps the closest the Bible comes to claiming to be without error is in a New Testament letter known as 2 Timothy 3:16. In this letter, the apostle Paul states that "all scripture is inspired and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness." In other words, the Bible is God's authoritative instruction for the church.

Biblical scholars are quick to point out that "all scripture" here does not likely refer to both the Old and New Testaments, and that the apostle Paul likely did not even write 2 Timothy. This verse, however, remains central to those who see the Bible as without error.

The doctrine of inerrancy is more post-biblical, even modern. And it has been particularly influential among U.S. evangelicals, who often appeal to the doctrine of inerrancy in arguments against gender equality, social justice, critical race theory and other causes thought to violate the God's infallible word.

The doctrine of inerrancy took shape during the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States. A statement crafted in 1978 by hundreds of evangelical leaders remains its fullest articulation. Known as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, the statement was a response to emerging "liberal" or nonliteral interpretations of the Bible. According to the statement, the Bible speaks with "infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches."

In short, the Bible is the final authority.

As Southern Baptists and other American evangelicals attempt to articulate biblical positions on issues such as social justice, abortion, gender and sexuality, one thing remains certain: Even a Bible thought to be without errors still has to be interpreted.
The Conversation U.S. publishes short, accessible explanations of newsworthy subjects by academics in their areas of expertise.

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What is biblical inerrancy? A New Testament scholar explains

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The doctrine of inerrancy likely took shape during the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States, in response to the rise of liberalism within Christianity.

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A Conversation article, looking at what constitutes a ‘miracle’ for the Catholic Church. 

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A Conversation article, looking at what constitutes a ‘miracle’ for the Catholic Church. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE It’s sometimes hard to identify concepts and ideas that are specific to religion, so this article, focusing on miracles, is useful for us in understanding this optional theme. Get students to understand how the Catholic church defines a miracle, and its role in canonization. Then think about some of the questions that miracles throw up: how does the Catholic church deal with the tension that exists between protecting the integrity of belief, and the need to avoid “mistakes or scandals”? What role do miracles play in a person’s religious faith? Are miracles undermined by scientific understanding? Are there different ways of interpreting miracles (such as Rudolph Bultmann asserts)? Can miracles exist within other areas of knowledge?

KEY TERMS Holiness, Divine power, Supernatural, Symbolic meaning vs. literal truth, Faith

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What’s a ‘miracle’? Here’s how the Catholic Church decides

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To qualify as a Catholic ‘saint,’ someone must have two miracles credited to them. But how does the church define a miracle in the first place?

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An Independent article which reports on the reaction to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s assertion that representations of Jesus shouldn’t always be white. 

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An Independent article which reports on the reaction to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s assertion that representations of Jesus shouldn’t always be white. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE A very short article that looks both at what Justin Welby said about the way we portray the ethnic identity of Jesus, and the reaction (from white Westerners) of his assertion. This prompts us to ask how our cultural perspectives influence the way we produce religious knowledge. Why were people offended by what he said? Do gods make us in their image, or do we make them in ours?

KEY TERMS Cultures, Ahistorical, Erasure of history

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White people are furious because the archbishop of Canterbury suggested that Jesus, a Middle Eastern man, shouldn't be portrayed as white.
Archbishop Justin Welby said on the BBC's Radio 4 Today programme that he would be reviewing statues in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury cathedral in light of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Asked whether the "way the western church portrays Jesus needs to be thought about again", he said that when you enter churches around the world:

You see a black Jesus, a Chinese Jesus, a Middle Eastern Jesus, which is of course the most accurate, you see a Fijan Jesus.

Jesus is portrayed in as many ways as there are cultures, languages and understandings.

And I don't think that throwing out everything we've got in the past is the way to do it, but I do think saying 'that's not the Jesus who exists, that's not who we worship' is a reminder of the universality of the God who became fully human.

Welby also said that he would review monuments in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury cathedral.

Some will have to come down, some names will have to change.

We are going to be looking very carefully and putting them in context and seeing if they all should be there.

He stressed, however, that he would not be tearing statues down, and nor does he have the authority to.

Some people reacted with fury to his comments, calling Welby a "disgrace".

But others pointed out that portraying Jesus as white is ahistorical.

It's important to note that Welby appears to want to review the monuments in Church of England buildings, in order to potentially offer a context where the church feels it is needed.

He "very carefully didn't say" that statues should be torn down.

The myth that Jesus was a white man is itself erasure of history, as the historical figure of Jesus was a Jewish Middle Eastern man no matter how he has since been portrayed.

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White people are furious that the archbishop of Canterbury said statues of Jesus shouldn't be white

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White people are furious because the archbishop of Canterbury suggested that Jesus, a Middle Eastern man, shouldn't be portrayed as white. Archbishop Justin Welby said on the BBC's Radio 4 Today programme that he would be reviewing statues in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury cathedral in light of th...

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A Le Monde article, looking at how Ukraine has decided to change the date it celebrates Christmas, in a break with the Orthodox Church.

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A Le Monde article, looking at how Ukraine has decided to change the date it celebrates Christmas, in a break with the Orthodox Church.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How important is religious heritage in defining a nation’s identity?

KEY TERMS Heritage, Identity

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Ukrainians attend a Christmas mass at an Orthodox Church in Bobrytsia, on the outskirts of Kyiv, on December 25, 2022. FELIPE DANA / AP

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, July 28, signed a law moving the official Christmas Day holiday to December 25. The explanatory note attached to the law said its goal is to "abandon the Russian heritage," including that of "imposing the celebration of Christmas" on January 7, and cited Ukrainians' "relentless, successful struggle for their identity" and "the desire of all Ukrainians to live their lives with their traditions, holidays," fueled by Russia's 17-month-old aggression against the country. The law also moves the Day of Ukrainian Statehood to July 15 from July 28, and the Day of Defenders of Ukraine to October 1 from October 14.

The Russian Orthodox Church, which claims sovereignty over Orthodoxy in Ukraine, and some other Eastern Orthodox churches continue to use the ancient Julian calendar. Christmas falls 13 days later on that calendar, or January 7, than it does on the Gregorian calendar used by most church and secular groups. The Catholic Church first adopted the modern, more astronomically precise Gregorian calendar in the 16th century. Protestants and some Orthodox churches have since aligned their calendars for the purpose of calculating Christmas and Easter.

Ukraine's religious landscape has fractured for years. There are two branches of Orthodox Christianity in the country, one aligned with the Russian church, even as it enjoys broad autonomy, the other completely independent of it. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine, the branch that is separate from the Russian church, announced earlier this year that it was switching to the Revised Julian calendar, which marks Christmas on December 25. Its leadership last year allowed believers to celebrate the holiday on Dec. 25.

Russia's state news agency RIA Novosti reported on Saturday that the rival Orthodox Church, which is aligned with the Russian Orthodox Church, vowed to continue observing Christmas on January 7.

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Ukraine changes official Christmas Day holiday, denouncing Russian-imposed traditions

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The rebellious movement started last year, when some Ukrainians decided to observe Christmas on December 25 instead of January 7, the day when the Russian Orthodox Church observes it.

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A Conversation article, which looks at a film about indigenous stories about the night sky, and how they help us to comprehend the universe. 

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A Conversation article, which looks at a film about indigenous stories about the night sky, and how they help us to comprehend the universe. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is an amazing story, bringing together stories from the world’s oldest extant culture, and the latest scientific technology and thinking. Ask students to think about the following: how does modern knowledge align with traditional practices and habits? How do stories about the night sky from very different societies and times match up? What does Steven Tingay mean when he says, “differences in race, religion, culture, politics, and society melt away with that perspective”?

KEY TERMS Indigenous stories, Common origins, Intertwined cultural and scientific perspectives

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Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered what it all means? You are not alone. Billions of people before you have done the same. Looking at the stars to make sense of the universe, and our lives on Earth, extends back many tens of thousands of years, across all cultures.

A new 360 degree immersive film, Star Dreaming, set to screen around Australia and internationally, draws on our common wonder about the universe, exploring ancient culture and astrophysics, side by side.

In Australia, the world's longest continuous culture can also claim to provide some of the first astronomers. Indigenous Australians attach rich meaning to the night sky, and its connection to the land and our environment.

Also in Australia, much more recently, astrophysics has become one of the nation's most successful and prominent sciences. In Western Australia, one of the world's largest astronomy projects is being hosted, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

On the land of the Wajarri Yamaji people, in mid-west WA, the SKA will be the largest radio telescope ever built, detecting radio waves from galaxies forming soon after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. This massive project will be completed towards the end of this decade.

Read more: Aspiration vs delivery: the long road to the Square Kilometre Array

Over the last 13 years, I have been privileged to work with colleagues from Yamaji Art in Geraldton, exploring Indigenous stories about the sky alongside the stories of the Greeks and Romans, and the astrophysical stories about the universe. We have learned from each other and taken our experience to the world through art exhibitions.

Three years ago, we started work on Star Dreaming. It has been filmed using a 360 degree camera and is designed to be shown inside a dome, like a planetarium. Star Dreaming is an immersive experience, combining live action and CGI animation, and a unique cross-cultural exploration.

The film is a narrative, following two children from Geraldton as they discover the astrophysical story of the universe and Yamaji stories of the sky and land. Max Winton and Amangu girl Lucia Richardson make their acting debuts, as do I as "the scientist".

Filming was interesting and demanding. Over four days, we filmed prototype SKA antennas (from a drone), the landscape (including in scorching hot creek beds), and indoor sequences. The director, Perun Bonser (an Ngarluma man), Julia Redwood (producer), and cast and crew had their work cut out.

The film starts with the Big Bang, the origin of all matter and energy, space and time. We look at the life cycle of stars, and how stars produced the atoms that make up the Earth - and us. Without stars, we would not exist. We explain the speed of light, the temperatures and colours of stars, and the basics of how the SKA works.

This is interwoven with Indigenous stories, like the astonishing Emu in the Sky, which appears after dusk in March/April toward the east, appearing to sit on its nest on the horizon. This is the same time of year when real emus lay their eggs and tend to them.

When the Emu in the Sky appears, Indigenous people know it is time to hunt for the eggs. As Yamaji artist Margaret Whitehurst says in the film, "good tucker!" Margaret and fellow Yamaji artist and poet Charmaine Green lead the kids on an egg hunt, and cook up the results.

Yamaji artists Barbara and Kevin Merritt show the kids the Seven Sisters, the Indigenous story of a hunter pursuing seven sisters across the country and into the night sky - repeated every night.

Turns out, this is almost identical to an ancient story of the Greeks and Romans for this group of stars, also identified as seven sisters (the Pleiades) being chased by a hunter (Orion).

How is that cultures on opposite sides of the Earth, separated by thousands of years, arrive at the same story for the same group of stars? These are mysteries that hint at common origins.

As a scientist, I've learned so much from being with the artists and sharing our stories together. I have a much richer perspective on the universe and Indigenous culture, well beyond the night sky, as a result of our time together.

Read more: Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is a must-visit exhibition for all Australians

Another Yamaji artist, Wendy Jackamarra, paints the Jewel Box, a colourful cluster of stars right next to the Southern Cross that can only be seen with a telescopes; it comes to life on the screen, as does Margaret's painting of the Emu in the Sky, and Barbara's painting of the Seven Sisters. The paintings reveal themselves through CGI, telling their stories as the different elements come together.

I've been asked, "what do you want people to take away from the film?" Of course, I want people to come away with a better understanding of Indigenous culture, and to have learned something about the science. But, to me, the film captures intertwined cultural and scientific perspectives that are common to all peoples.

The atoms in our bodies are produced in stars and scattered into space when those stars die, providing the building blocks for planets and life. For many millennia, humans have sat under the night sky and watched all this unfold, our different cultural stories underpinned by our common sense of wonder.

Differences in race, religion, culture, politics, and society melt away with that perspective. We all experience a shared sky, a common origin.
Star Dreaming is screening at the WA Maritime Museum in Fremantle, WA. Keep an eye out for it in major cities and planetaria across Australia before the end of 2021. In 2022 it will be screened around the world. All aspects of the film and the project, including its name, were derived from consultations and formal sign-off between the Indigenous participants, Prospero Productions, and the scientists.

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How making a film exploring Indigenous stories of the night sky enriched my perspective as a scientist

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A new 3D film follows two children as they discover the astrophysical story of the universe and Yamaji stories of the sky and land. Making it was an extraordinary cross-cultural experience.

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A National Geographic article, exploring how Christmas has developed over time in different cultural contexts.

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A National Geographic article, exploring how Christmas has developed over time in different cultural contexts.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a great overview of the development of Christmas, with plenty of links taking you to further information about different aspects of the holiday season. For us, it prompts the question: in order to fully understand something, do we need to know about its history and development? Apply this to Christmas: how does it help us to understand this celebration by grasping its cultural, artistic, religious, culinary, and technological background?

KEY TERMS Secularized, Cultures, Innovation, Traditions

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How Christmas has evolved over centuries

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People around the world celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on December 25. Here’s why—and the history of its iconic symbols from Christmas trees to Santa Claus.

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A New Humanist article, considering the shockingly high rate of violence against perceived witches, and the thinking behind this phenomenon. 

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A New Humanist article, considering the shockingly high rate of violence against perceived witches, and the thinking behind this phenomenon. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This disturbing story interests us because of both the thought-process leading to the conclusion that witchcraft has occurred, and the way in which it places a strain on the need for tolerance and acceptance of radically different worldviews. First, what evidence do people require to believe that witchcraft has taken place - and what might motivate arriving at this conclusion (link this to ‘power’)? Second, why is a simple education in Western science insufficient to combat this phenomenon? Finally, what part does embracing ‘worldview pluralism’ play in solving this problem?

KEY TERMS Evidence, Ignorance, Powerless, Supernatural worldview, Worldview pluralism

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Over the past decade, there have been over 20,000 victims of accusations of witchcraft and related harmful practices worldwide.

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A BBC article, looking at the resurgence of a Mexican sport which was banned by the Spanish conquistadores.

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A BBC article, looking at the resurgence of a Mexican sport which was banned by the Spanish conquistadores.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE To what extent does an understanding of our traditions help us to understand ourselves?

KEY TERMS Ritual and religious connotations

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Ulama was played in Mesoamerica more than five centuries ago before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the area in 1519.

Players wearing special belts and loincloths pass a rubber ball with their hips. The solid ball can weigh up to 4kg (9lb).

While there are believed to have been many different versions of the game, most are thought to have involved rival teams facing each other, each confined to its half of the court and passing the ball from team to team without dropping it.

In some versions the game was played inside a stone courtyard with vertical hoops, which play a similar role to those in basketball.

While there has been a revival of ulama in some indigenous areas of Mexico, the capital did not have an ulama court until very recently when a cultural centre built one at an old rubbish dump in the Azcapotzalco neighbourhood.

Emmanuel Kakalotl is a coach at the new court. "The game had been forgotten," he told Agence France Press news agency.

"It was toppled 500 years ago, but now we're raising it up again," he explains.

At the new court, women are also taking up the ancient practice.

Twenty-five-year old Beatriz Campos is one of them. "We're women warriors at heart, because it isn't easy. Not just anyone can play this sport. It takes a lot of practice, and your body takes a beating," she says.

Before the match she performs a ceremony burning fragrant tree resin.

Ulama is believed to have had ritual and religious connotations and members of the group playing in Mexico City today don elaborate outfits to perform ceremonies before taking to the court.

They represent different mythological deities such as Mictlantecuhtli, the god of the dead.

The game has been embraced by those playing it at the new court in Mexico City, some of whom say that rather than them "rescuing" ulama, the game has rescued them by giving them a new focus.

All photos subject to copyright.

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In pictures: The ancient game making a comeback

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Ulama was played in Mesoamerica more than five centuries ago before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the area in 1519. Players wearing special belts and loincloths pass a rubber ball with their hips. The solid ball can weigh up to 4kg (9lb).

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A Smithsonian article, looking at the power of place names for indigenous (and other) cultures. 

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A Smithsonian article, looking at the power of place names for indigenous (and other) cultures. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How important are place names for indigenous people in North America? How were names used by colonialists to appropriate power? How important is it to name a place with the involvement of those who live there? Students can watch the short film, Shash Jaa’, made by the writer, here, and read about the politics behind the renaming of Bears Ears National Monument here. Overall, how does our understanding of a place change when we view its name as being its “identification of the spirit and energy” found there?

KEY TERMS Cultural and social realms, Indigenous epistemology, K’é, Power, Border lines, Sacred, Appropriating

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This article was originally published on February 21, 2018, in Folklife Magazine.

Rising from the center of the southeastern Utah landscape and visible from every direction are twin buttes so distinctive that in each of the native languages of the region their name is the same: Hoon'Naqvut, Shash Jaa', Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, Ansh An Lashokdiwe, or "Bears Ears."
-Excerpt from Bears Ears National Monument Presidential Proclamation (2016)

What's in a name?

It's an important part of our identity, our existence, connecting us to the cultural and social realms we come from. So when President Barack Obama declared Bears Ears a national monument in 2016, he respectfully acknowledged that this sacred place in the state of Utah was shared and honored in different traditions, citing the original names in Hopi, Zuni, Ute, and Diné languages.

Naming who you are and where you come from is essential to Indigenous communities. It connects you to a family, a lineage, maybe even a clan or community. It makes your relationships and friendships part of a larger social and cultural system of kinship, or what we call in Navajo K'é, which means that we are never alone.

Our relationships with our families and to people in our communities, region, and environment are intertwined with the lands that we come from. Even now, our names and identification, in some way, are bound to the lands. Indigenous epistemology positions us in a universe larger and more complex than any of us can completely understand by ourselves, but it is a process of accumulating traditional knowledge from Native communities over generations, all over the world.

How did four tribes separately arrive at the name "Bears Ears"? It's possible one group influenced their Indigenous neighbors, but early Zuni and Hopi inhabitants, as Pueblo peoples who were first in this place, had their name for it in their own language. Ute and Navajos came into the territories a little later and gave it their own names. There are periods of habitation, migration, and transition through the region. In different times, in different languages, the result is the same: Bears Ears is not just a place but an identification of the spirit and energy of the personhood of the animal and relative we know as the bear.

The bear is a sacred animal in many Indigenous cultures. It is affiliated with medicine because, as an omnivore, and much like a human being, it understands the medicinal ways of both plants and animals. It is our close relative whom we respect.

I named my short documentary film Shash Jaa': Bears Ears, using the Diné term from own Navajo perspective. It poses a challenge to those who want everything to be easily digestible in a Western framework-and in English. They momentarily stumble, and eventually succeed, in saying the name of the film. Personally, it is very satisfying to hear people who have never spoken Diné make the effort to learn a word or two. These are rare moments for Indigenous scholars, filmmakers, and artists that we relish.

I believe that naming the film with my primary Indigenous language gives it the weight it deserves. If any other Indigenous filmmaker from the region makes a film about the Bears Ears movement to pursue a national monument designation, I hope they will use its name in their own language too. It would mean more and be culturally significant to acknowledge that place in a proper and respectful way.

Imagine if the area was given a generic English settler-colonial name, like Hole-in-the-Rock. The power of naming would be subsumed by the larger American Manifest Destiny narrative of "discovering" and colonizing the West. Our Indigenous naming practices long predate this Western attempt to cut the landscape up into neat demarcated boxes, a "God's-eye-view" method of mapping. It has raised jurisdiction issues of this sacred space between Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico in this "Four Corners" region, where such imagined border lines originally had no bearing on the sharing or naming of the place.

When colonialists first arrived on the continent, they established places with names like New London, New Hampshire, and New York, tying themselves back to the "motherland." Others, in an effort to depart from European conventions, adopted Indigenous place names. "Manhattan" was taken from Manahatta, or the "Hilly Island" of Lenape territory. "Seattle" was named after Chief Sealth of Duwamish territory. Even "Utah" is believed to originate from the Ute, meaning "people of the mountains." The country named places after Indigenous peoples, drawing power from them, as it simultaneously attempted to erase their presence and render them invisible.

Naming a sacred place without the involvement and input of the people who originally deemed it sacred does not honor them or give them adequate recognition. It is appropriating that name for the dominant group's own ends. When the current administration renamed the Bears Ears region Shash Jaa National Monument, they didn't consult with us about the decision. This name is reserved for use by the Diné (meaning "The People" of the Navajo Nation). It is a divisive tactic, one that all the five tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition recognizes will not work.

In the petition for the designation, the tribes called it Bears Ears National Monument in solidarity and unity, not privileging any one tribe or their names, but sharing and respecting each other's language, heritage, history, and traditions.

Angelo Baca is a cultural activist, scholar, filmmaker and currently a doctoral student in anthropology at New York University. He is the cultural resources coordinator at Utah Diné Bikéyah, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the defense and protection of culturally significant ancestral lands. The National Parks Conservation Association designated him as one of "10 Under 40" dynamic cultural activists who make up the association's Next Generation Advisory Council. He has published a widely read in the New York Times.

Shash Jaa': Bears Ears is Angelo Baca's award-winning film about the five tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition that worked together to protect 1.9 million acres of Utah wilderness through a national monument designation.

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The Power of "Bears Ears" and Indigenous Place Names

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What's in a name? It's an important part of our identity, our existence, connecting us to our cultural and social realms.