Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta religión y ateísmo. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta religión y ateísmo. Mostrar todas las entradas

miércoles, 28 de septiembre de 2011

Atheism: A Very Short Introduction - Julian Baggini



Atheism: A Very Short Introduction By Julian Baggini
Publisher: O U P 2003 | 125 Pages | ISBN: 0192804243 | PDF | 2 MB

Atheism is often considered to be a negative, dark, and pessimistic belief which is characterised by a rejection of values and purpose and a fierce opposition to religion. Atheism: A Very Short Introduction sets out to dispel the myths that surround atheism and show how a life without religious belief can be positive, meaningful, and moral. It also confronts the failure of officially atheist states in the Twentieth Century. The book presents an intellectual case for atheism that rests as much upon positive arguments for its truth as on negative arguments against religion.

jueves, 8 de septiembre de 2011

Islamic History: A Very Short Introduction


LINK

Adam J. Silverstein - Islamic History: A Very Short Introduction
Publisher: Oxfоrd Univеrsity Prеss | 2010-02-01 | ISBN: 0199545723 | PDF | 144 pages | 2.71 MB

Opening with a lucid overview of the rise and spread of Islam, from the seventh to the twenty-first century, this Very Short Introduction introduces the story of Islamic history, charting the evolution of what was originally a small, localized community of believers into an international religion with over a billion adherents.

The book examines how Islam rose from the obscurity of seventh-century Arabia to the forefront of modern global concerns, and it highlights how we know what we claim to know about Islam's rise and development. Historian Adam J. Silverstein also discusses the peoples--Arabs, Persians, and Turks--who shaped Islamic history, and sheds light on three representative institutions--the mosque, jihad, and the caliphate--that highlight Islam's diversity over time.

Finally, the book analyzes the roles that Islamic history has played in both religious and political contexts, while stressing the unique status that history enjoys among Muslims, especially compared to its lowly place in Western societies where history is often seen as little more than something that is not to be repeated.

martes, 19 de abril de 2011

jueves, 31 de marzo de 2011

Darwin´s God: Religión como adaptación o epifenomeno?


PDF - eng

Darwin’s God
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG

God has always been a puzzle for Scott Atran. When he was 10 years old, he scrawled a plaintive message on the wall of his bedroom in Baltimore. “God exists,” he wrote in black and orange paint, “or if he doesn’t, we’re in trouble.” Atran has been struggling with questions about religion ever since — why he himself no longer believes in God and why so many other people, everywhere in the world, apparently do.

martes, 1 de marzo de 2011

PDFs sobre Paul Bloom y el Dualismo Intuitivo + comentario de Pascal Boyer


Religion is natural


Wired for creationism?


Does religion make you nice?


Comentario de Pascal Boyer

Paul Bloom's research does not just show that we are dualists, committed to an immaterial mind or soul that has no simple ties to the physical world, but also that we are, in a deep sense, incurable dualists. However scientifically literate we may become, our intuitions are still firmly rooted in commonsense dualism. This may be unfortunate if you think that people's commitment to what is patently untrue is always a Bad Thing. But in this case I think the alternative is equally unpleasant. Our sense of morality is grounded in the notion of uncaused volition—I want what I want because I want it, and that's that—and therefore in our idea of an immaterial soul. Naturally, you could build a morality based on scientific fact rather than dualist fiction, you could be a moral being and literally think of your thoughts as patterns of neural activation, but... that would be so difficult to maintain, so against the grain of our intuitions, that few if any people could sustain this kind of thought for any time at all.

Paul Bloom's arguments also point to the extraordinary mystery of our ordinary thoughts, to the fact that commonsense thinking is anything but banal. Consider this: because we are dualists, we think we have (or rather we are) an immaterial mind that floats about with no physical implementation. We think of our brains as something we use. Now we also think of our bodies as things that are governed by our thoughts: when I want to raise my hand, lo and behold, it does rise. How is that possible? How could our thoughts have an influence on meat and bone stuff? The interesting thing about that is not the question itself (it is entirely created by dualism and once you abandon dualism it vanishes) but the fact that no-one is bothered by the question. That is, there is a wide gap in our commonsense world-view, and unless we are born or made philosophers, we just don't care .

Another fascinating consequence of Bloom's research is that it explains more clearly why we have religion the way we do. There is one (misguided) view of religion that is, unfortunately, widespread among intelligent people and especially scientists. I call it the "sleep of reason" interpretation. According to this view, people have religious beliefs because they fail to reason properly. If only they grounded their reasoning in sound logic or rational order, they would not have supernatural beliefs, including superstitions and religion. I think this view is misguided, for several reasons; because it assumes a dramatic difference between religious and commonsense ordinary thinking, where there isn't one; because it suggests that belief is a matter of deliberate weighing of evidence, which is generally not the case; because it implies that religious concepts could be eliminated by mere argument, which is implausible; most importantly, because it fails to explain why religion is the way it is. Religion is not a smorgasbord of irrefutable beliefs. It generally boils down to two kinds of notions, either of immaterial spirits or gods, or of artifacts with intentional powers. In both cases religion is grounded in the powerful dualism that is part of our commonsense world view, as described by Paul Bloom.

viernes, 4 de febrero de 2011

Louis Theroux: The Ultra Zionists

 

Louis Theroux spends time with a small and very committed subculture of ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers. He discovers a group of people who consider it their religious and political obligation to populate some of the most sensitive and disputed areas of the West Bank, especially those with a spiritual significance dating back to the Bible.

Throughout his journey, Louis gets close to the people most involved with driving the extreme end of the Jewish settler movement - finding them warm, friendly, humorous, and deeply troubling.

martes, 11 de enero de 2011

A History of God



I explain how I learned from A History of God by Karen Armstrong that the evidence indicates that the Jewish concept of monotheism evolved from the syncretism of various polytheistic sources like Canaanite and Babylonian polytheism.


By Evid3nc3

Books and Concepts:

A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
http://www.amazon.com/History-God-000...

Well-sourced Wikipedia articles describing the evolution of Jewish monotheism from polytheism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monothei...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh#E...

Enuma Elish:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BB...
Library of Ashurbanipal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_...
Canaanite Religion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaanit...
Did Jewish Slaves Build the Pyramids?:
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4191

Taanach Cult Stand:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh#D...
Israel Enters Recorded History in Egypt at 1200 BCE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_...

Jeremiah's Monolatrist Polytheism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of...

domingo, 12 de diciembre de 2010

miércoles, 8 de diciembre de 2010

Apostasía colectiva 2010

10 de diciembre de 2010

apostasiacolectiva.org

jueves, 18 de noviembre de 2010

martes, 2 de noviembre de 2010

Evolutionary perspectives on religion - Boyer, P; Bergstrom, B

PDF

Abstract: Recent work in biology, cognitive psychology, and archaeology has renewed evolutionary perspectives on the role of natural selection in the emergence and recurrent forms of religious thought and behavior, i.e., mental representations of supernatural agents, as well as artifacts, ritual practices, moral systems, ethnic markers, and specific experiences associated with these representations. One perspective, inspired from behavioral ecology, attempts to measure the fitness effects of religious practices. Another set of models, representative of evolutionary psychology, explain religious thought and behavior as the output of cognitive systems (e.g., animacy detection, social cognition, precautionary reasoning) that are not exclusive to the religious domain. In both perpectives, the question remains open, whether religious thought and behavior constitute an adaptation or a by-product of adaptive cognitive function.

Pascal Boyer
Brian Bergstrom

miércoles, 20 de octubre de 2010

Excomunión de Spinoza

Excomulgamos, maldecimos y separamos a Baruch de Espinoza
con el consentimiento de Dios bendito
y con el de toda esta comunidad,
delante de estos libros de la Ley,
que contienen trescientos trece preceptos;

la excomunión que Josué lanzó sobre Jericó,
la maldición que Elías profirió contra los niños
y todas las maldiciones escritas en el libro de la ley;
maldito sea de día y maldito sea de noche,
maldito al acostarse y maldito al levantarse,
maldito sea al entrar y al salir;

no quiera el Altísimo perdonarle,
hasta que su furor y su celo abracen a este hombre;
lance sobre él todas las maldiciones escritas en el libro de esta Ley,
borre su nombre de bajo los cielos
y sepárelo, para su desgracia de todas las tribus de Israel,
con todas las maldiciones del firmamento,
escritas en el Libro de la Ley...,

advirtiendo que nadie puede hablarle oralmente ni por escrito,
ni hacerle ningún favor ni estar con él bajo el mismo techo
ni a menos de cuatro codos de él,
ni leer papel hecho o escrito por él.

Acta de excomunión de Spinoza.
Comunidad Hebrea de Amsterdam
Amsterdam, 27 de julio de 1656

miércoles, 13 de octubre de 2010

Libro: "The moral landscape" de Sam Harris


BAJAR (fileserve/PDF/1.03mb/ENG)

The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values (2010) is a book by Sam Harris. In it, he joins the ranks of those supporting a Science of Morality, and argues that too many thinkers have long confused the relationship between morality, facts, and science. Harris suggests that morally "good" things pertain to increases in the "flourishing of conscious creatures" (and explains that claims pertaining to anything else are, at very least, extremely uninteresting). He adds that Moral questions have right and wrong answers that are grounded in empirical facts; to Harris, Moral nihilism and Moral relativism are out, Moral naturalism is in. As the author puts it "just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality." Although he does not claim to provide all the answers, Harris hopes to provide a new context for debates about morality.

 

martes, 12 de octubre de 2010

Ciencia cognitiva de la religión


The Cognitive Science of Religion is the study of religious thought and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive sciences. The field employs methods and theories from cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive anthropology, artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, neurobiology, zoology, and ethology, among others. The scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religion by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.

E. Thomas Lawson is the founder of the Cognitive Science of Religion. A systematic treatment of religious representations can be found in the books he authored (with Robert McCauley): Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. A festschrift in his honor, Religion as a Human Capacity was published in 2004. Pascal Boyer in his Naturalness of Religious Ideas and Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought made the contribution of explicitly demonstrating the value of an evolutionary psychology framework within cognitive psychology of religion. The focus in the field has now shifted from theorizing to experimental and empirical studies. Examples of current well publicized multi-million dollar projects are the Oxford University based Explaining Religion project and the Cognition Religion and Theology Project.
Other contributors to this field include Robert McCauley (who first came up with the notion of a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device - HADD), Stewart Guthrie, Pascal Boyer and Harvey Whitehouse. Dan Sperber foreshadowed the Cognitive Science of Religion in his 1975 book Rethinking Symbolism. The first use of the term "cognitive science of religion" appears to be in a 2000 article in the journal Numen entitled "Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion" by E. Thomas Lawson (2000).

Researchers in the field include:
  • Scott Atran, Directeur de Recherche, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris
  • Justin L. Barrett, senior researcher at the University of Oxford
  • Jesse Bering, Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen's University - Belfast
  • Pascal Boyer, Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis
  • Emma Cohen, postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute
  • István Czachesz, fellow at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki
  • Michal Fux, PhD fellow at the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen's University - Belfast
  • Armin W. Geertz, Professor of religion at the University of Aarhus
  • Stewart Elliott Guthrie, Anthropology Emeritus at Fordham University
  • Jeppe Sinding Jensen, Associate Professor of religion at the University of Aarhus
  • Nicola Knight, researcher and lecturer at the University of Oxford
  • E. Thomas Lawson, Honorary Professor and Research Scientist at the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen's University - Belfast
  • Cristine Legare, Assistant Professor at the University of Texas - Austin
  • Pierre Liénard, Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada - Las Vegas
  • Brian Malley, lecturer at the University of Michigan
  • Luther H. Martin, University Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont
  • Robert N. McCauley, William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor at Emory University
  • William W. McCorkle Jr., Visiting Assistant Professor at Webster University
  • Joel Mort, Research Scientist in the Behavior Modeling Branch, Air Force Research Laboratory and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen's University - Belfast
  • Ara Norenzayan, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Ilkka Pyysiäinen, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki
  • D. Jason Slone, assistant professor at Tiffin University
  • Jesper Sorensen, Associate Professor of religion at the University of Southern Denmark
  • Dan Sperber, Directeur de Recherche, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris
  • Todd Tremlin, assistant professor of religion at Central Michigan University
  • Harvey Whitehouse, professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford
  • Dimitris Xygalatas, postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University

martes, 5 de octubre de 2010

Audiolibro "The Portable Atheist" de Christopher Hitchens


The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer is a 2007 book by Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens writes introductions for the selected writings of philosophers, scientists, and other thinkers.

Mp3 / 258mb / ENG

http://rapidshare.com/files/130229776/Portable_Atheist.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/130232541/Portable_Atheist.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/130232958/Portable_Atheist.part3.rar

Contenido

Lucretius: De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) - Books I, III, V, translation by W. Hannaford Brown
Omar Khayyám: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Paraphrase from Several Literal Translations by Richard Le Gallienne
Thomas Hobbes: Of Religion, from Leviathan
Benedict De Spinoza: Theologico-Political Treatise
David Hume: The Natural History of Religion, Of Miracles
James Boswell: An Account of My Last Interview with David Hume, Esq.
Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Refutation of Deism
John Stuart Mill: Moral Influences in My Early Youth, From Autobiography
Karl Marx: Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
George Eliot: Evangelical Teaching
Charles Darwin: Autobiography
Leslie Stephen: An Agnostic's Apology
Anatole France: Miracle
Mark Twain: Thoughts of God, From Fables of Man; Bible Teaching and Religious Practice, From Europe and Elsewhere and A Pen Warmed Up in Hell
Joseph Conrad: Authors's Note to The Shadow Line
Thomas Hardy: God's Funeral
Emma Goldman: The Philosophy of Atheism
H. P. Lovecraft: A Letter on Religion
H. L. Mencken: Memorial Service
Sigmund Freud: From The Future of an Illusion, translated and edited by James Strachey
Albert Einstein: Selected Writings on Religion
Bertrand Russell: An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish
Salman Rushdie: "Imagine There's no Heaven": A Letter to the Six Billionth World Citizen

wiki

miércoles, 22 de septiembre de 2010

Libro "Dialogues concerning natural religion" de David Hume (1776)

 Online (eng)

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical work written by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Through dialogue, three fictional characters named Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes debate the nature of God's existence. While all three agree that a god exists, they differ sharply in opinion on God's nature or attributes and how, or if, humankind can come to knowledge of a deity.

In the Dialogues, Hume's characters debate a number of arguments for the existence of God, and arguments whose proponents believe through which we may come to know the nature of God. Such topics debated include the argument from design -- for which Hume uses a house -- and whether there is more suffering or good in the world (argument from evil).

Hume started writing the Dialogues in 1750 but did not complete them until 1776, shortly before his death. They are based partly on Cicero's De Natura Deorum. The Dialogues were published posthumously in 1779, originally with neither the author's nor the publisher's name.

lunes, 20 de septiembre de 2010

Steven Weinberg (Atheism Tapes, sub esp)

American physicist and nobel prize winner Steven Weinberg talks about the effectiveness of the Design Argument, both in the past and today. He also discusses the reasons that people become religious, including the varying influences of physical and biological arguments against religion. Jonathan Miller connects this to a higher likelihood of biologists being non-believers than physicists, which Weinberg finds surprising.



Weinberg goes on to distinguish between harm done in the name of religion from that done by religion and states that both of these are very real and very dangerous. He goes on to discuss the difference between religious belief in America and Europe, and about how he doesn't like the "character" of the monotheistic God.



He ends by saying that science is very definitely corrosive to religious belief, and that he considers this a good thing. 



The Atheism Tapes

sábado, 31 de julio de 2010

Libro "Romper el hechizo" de Daniel Dennett


Bajar libro (ESP)

Romper el hechizo intenta arrojar un poco de luz a preguntas peliagudas. ¿Por qué y cómo se originó la religión desde el punto de vista de la psicología evolutiva? ¿Por qué significa tanto para la gente? ¿Por qué somos capaces de matar o morir por ella? ¿Aporta más beneficios que obstáculos? ¿Debe de ser erradicada, como se hace con las sectas destructivas o las ideologías neonazis, o debe de ser respetada simplemente porque muchos individuos la respaldan?
“Las grandes ideas de la religión -sostiene Daniel Dennett en esta obra- han mantenido a los seres humanos cautivados durante miles de años. Si queremos entender la naturaleza de la religión hoy como un fenómeno natural, debemos atender no sólo a lo que ella es actualmente, sino a lo que solía ser.” Al analizar la religión como un fenómeno natural, resultado de los imperativos de la evolución, el autor provee una nueva perspectiva desde la cual considerar qué es hoy la religión y por qué significa tanto para tantas personas. “Entonces -señala Dennett- lograremos ver mejor hacia dónde podría estar dirigiéndose la religión en un futuro cercano, nuestro futuro en este planeta. No puedo pensar en investigar ningún tema más importante que éste.”


Daniel C. Dennett (Boston, 1942) es un filósofo de Harvard bien distinto de la mayoría de filósofos, aquéllos que esconden sus opiniones arbitrarias (respaldadas, además, por momias del pensamiento) tras un pomposo lenguaje. Dennett, por el contrario, se explica con claridad y cercanía, y además se ha preocupado de estudiar a fondo múltiples materias científicas para dar cuerpo a sus tesis, como las ciencias cognitivas, la inteligencia artificial o la memética, incluso ofreciendo a la comunidad científica significativos aportes en cuanto a la significación actual del darwinismo. En definitiva, la filosofía que practica Dennett es una filosofía ligada a la investigación empírica, la que en el próximo siglo revolucionará el conocimiento incluso en ámbitos que hace poco parecían exclusivos de las disciplinas humanistas.

Por Sergio Parra

dc

miércoles, 14 de julio de 2010

Debate por el matrimonio gay

Principales argumentos a favor y en contra del matrimonio gay.
Click en imagen para agrandar 

Matrimonio y católicos

Estoy completamente a favor del permitir el matrimonio entre católicos.

Me parece una injusticia y un error tratar de impedírselo.

El catolicismo no es una enfermedad. Los católicos, pese a que a muchos no les gusten o les parezcan extraños, son personas normales y deben poseer los mismos derechos que los demás, como si fueran, por ejemplo, informáticos u homosexuales.

Soy consciente de que muchos comportamientos y rasgos de carácter de las personas católicas, como su actitud casi enfermiza hacia el sexo, o la defensa a ultranza de sus ministros pederastas o de sus arzobispos perseguidos por delitos económicos, pueden parecernos extraños a los demás. Sé que incluso, a veces, podrían esgrimirse argumentos de salubridad pública, como su peligroso y deliberado rechazo a los preservativos. Sé también que muchas de sus costumbres, como la exhibición pública de imágenes de torturados, o las insinuaciones de zoofilia entre una mujer y un palomo, puedan incomodar a algunos. E incluso el que no hayan condenado su pasado bañado en la sangre de víctimas a las que llamaban, según la época, infieles, herejes, rojos o liberales; o espolvoreado con las cenizas
de científicos, curanderas (brujas) o simples enfermos mentales.

Pero todo eso no es razón suficiente para impedirles el ejercicio del matrimonio.

Algunos podrían argumentar que un matrimonio entre católicos no es un matrimonio real, porque para ellos es un ritual y un precepto religioso ante su dios, en lugar de una unión entre dos personas. También, dado que los hijos fuera del matrimonio están gravemente condenados por la iglesia, algunos podrían considerar que permitir que los católicos se casen incrementará el número de matrimonios por el qué dirán? o por la simple búsqueda de sexo (prohibido por su religión fuera del matrimonio), incrementando con ello la violencia en el hogar y las familias desestructuradas. Pero hay que recordar que esto no es algo que ocurra sólo en las familias católicas y que, dado que no podemos meternos en la cabeza de los demás, no debemos juzgar sus motivaciones. Tampoco debemos juzgarlos si creen que la mujer es inferior al hombre, e indigna, por ejemplo, de ejercer el magisterio dentro de su secta o iglesia. Y aunque eso violente un principio básico de cualquier constitución civilizada, no por ello debemos ser con ellos tan estrictos como ellos intentan ser con los demás.

Por otro lado, el decir que eso no es matrimonio y que debería ser llamado de otra forma, no es más que una forma un tanto ruin de desviar el debate a cuestiones semánticas que no vienen al caso: aunque sea entre católicos, un matrimonio es un matrimonio, y una familia es una familia.

Y con esta alusión a la familia paso a otro tema candente del que mi opinión, espero, no resulte demasiado radical: También estoy a favor de permitir que los católicos adopten hijos.

Algunos se escandalizarán ante una afirmación de este tipo. Es probable que alguno responda con exclamaciones del tipo de ?¿Católicos adoptando hijos? ¡Esos niños podrían hacerse católicos!?.

Veo ese tipo de críticas y respondo: Si bien es cierto que a los hijos de católicos, y al contrario que, por ejemplo, ocurre en la informática o la homosexualidad, los inscriben en su secta sin que hayan alcanzado la mayoría de edad, sin consultarles, y sin poder borrarse después, violentando la Ley de Protección de Datos, con el fin de obtener beneficios fiscales de difícil justificación, ya he argumentado antes que los católicos son personas como los demás.

Pese a las opiniones de algunos y a los indicios, no hay pruebas evidentes de que unos padres católicos estén peor preparados para educar a un hijo, ni de que el ambiente religiosamente sesgado de un hogar católico sea una influencia negativa para el niño. Además, los tribunales de adopción juzgan cada caso individualmente, y es precisamente su labor determinar la idoneidad de los padres.

En definitiva, y pese a las opiniones de algunos sectores, creo que debería permitírseles también a los católicos tanto el matrimonio como la adopción.

Exactamente igual que a los informáticos y a los homosexuales.

Por Psycobite


dc / lmp

lunes, 12 de julio de 2010

Slayer va a la iglesia



dc
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