In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing (...) to fight-and die for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or by showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses. (shrink)

The existential analysis -- The death of dasein -- The timeliness of dasein -- The derivation of time -- The time of being.

Supernatural beliefs are ubiquitous around the world, and mounting evidence indicates that these beliefs partly rely on intuitive, cross‐culturally recurrent cognitive processes. Specifically, past research has focused on humans' intuitive tendency to perceive minds as part of the cognitive foundations of belief in a personified God—an agentic, morally concerned supernatural entity. However, much less is known about belief in karma—another culturally widespread but ostensibly non‐agentic supernatural entity reflecting ethical causation across reincarnations. In two studies and four high‐powered samples, including mostly (...) Christian Canadians and mostly Hindu Indians (Study 1, N = 2,006) and mostly Christian Americans and Singaporean Buddhists (Study 2, N = 1,752), we provide the first systematic empirical investigation of the cognitive intuitions underlying various forms of belief in karma. We used path analyses to (a) replicate tests of the previously documented cognitive predictors of belief in God, (b) test whether this same network of variables predicts belief in karma, and (c) examine the relative contributions of cognitive and cultural variables to both sets of beliefs. We found that cognitive tendencies toward intuitive thinking, mentalizing, dualism, and teleological thinking predicted a variety of beliefs about karma—including morally laden, non‐agentic, and agentic conceptualizations—above and beyond the variability explained by cultural learning about karma across cultures. These results provide further evidence for an independent role for both culture and cognition in supporting diverse types of supernatural beliefs in distinct cultural contexts. (shrink)

The acclaimed social critic and author of the best-selling The Middle Mind presents a scathing assessment of modern detractors of science, citing the dangers of such figures as Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer while posing a defense of the tradition of Romanticism.

In this essay, I introduce religious naturalism as one contemporary religious response to anthropogenic climate change; in so doing, I offer a concept of hope associated with the beauty of ignorance, of not knowing ourselves in the usual manner. Reframing humans as natural processes in relationship with other forms of nature, religious naturalism encourages humans’ processes of transformative engagement with each other and with the more‐than‐human worlds that constitute our existence. Hope in this context is anticipating what possibilities may occur (...) when human organisms enact our evolutionary capacities as relational organisms who can love, engaging in multilayered processes of changing behaviors, values, and relationships that promote the betterment of myriad nature. (shrink)

BackgroundBesides balancing burdens and benefits of intensive care, ethical conflicts in the process of decision-making should also be recognised. This calls for an ethical analysis relevant to clinicians. The aim was to analyse ethically difficult situations in the process of deciding whether a patient is admitted to intensive care unit.MethodsAnalysis using the ‘Dilemma method’ and ‘wide reflective equilibrium’, on ethnographic data of 45 patient cases and 96 stakeholder interviews in six UK hospitals.Ethical analysisFour moral questions and associated value conflicts were (...) identified. Who should have the right to decide whether a patient needs to be reviewed? Conflicting perspectives on safety/security. Does the benefit to the patient of getting the decision right justify the cost to the patient of a delay in making the decision? Preventing longer-term suffering and understanding patient’s values conflicted with preventing short-term suffering and provision of security. To what extent should the intensivist gain others’ input? Professional independence versus a holistic approach to decision-making. Should the intensivist have an ongoing duty of care to patients not admitted to ICU? Short-term versus longer-term duty to protect patient safety. Safety and security were key values at stake in the ethical conflicts identified. The life-threatening nature of the situation meant that the principle of autonomy was overshadowed by the duty to protect patients from harm. The need to fairly balance obligations to the referred patient and to other patients was also recognised.ConclusionProactive decision-making including advance care planning and escalation of treatment decisions may support the inclusion of patient autonomy. However, our analysis invites binary choices, which may not sufficiently reflect reality. This calls for a complementary relational ethics analysis. (shrink)

Comparing mortuary rituals across 57 representative cultures extracted from the Human Relations Area Files, this paper demonstrates that kin of the deceased engage in behaviours to prepare the deceased for disposal that entail close and often prolonged contact with the contaminating corpse. At first glance, such practices are costly and lack obvious payoffs. Building on prior functionalist approaches, we present an explanation of corpse treatment that takes account of the unique adaptive challenges entailed by the death of a loved one. (...) We propose that intimate contact with the corpse provides the bereaved with extensive veridical cues of death, thereby facilitating acceleration of a grieving process that serves to recategorize the deceased as no longer a relationship partner, opening the door to relationship replacement and a return to social functioning. The benefits of exposure to such cues are tempered by the costs of exposure to cues of disease risk, a balance that in part explains the relative rarity of highly invasive mortuary practices that exacerbate the latter factor. We conclude by discussing implications of our model for contemporary mortuary practices in the developed world. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to address the role of memory in past-life convictions. Although it is commonly accepted in the modern media - and popular western culture more generally - that people believe they have lived before because the memory contains detailed verifiable facts, little is known about how people actually reason about the veracity of their previous existence. To our knowledge, the current project is the most extensive research that probes the role of memory in past life (...) convictions. More specifically, we explore two questions. First, to what extent does memory lead to past-life belief, and is this conviction based on external validation or via the episodic sense of personal identity contained in the memory? Second, what is the conception of self on which one's current self is taken to be the same as the past-life self? -/- In what follows, we propose that memory plays an important role in convincing people that they have lived before. Fundamentally, this memory is episodic insofar as it represents the event as happened to the encoder. This memory contrasts with semantic memory - memory of facts...Further, we contend that it is the episodic sense of personal identity (rather than external validation) that typically contributes to the belief in a past life. Finally, we argue that the conception of self implicated in past-life belief is the non-trait conception. Of course, this fits naturally with the idea that the belief in a past life issues partly from the episodic sense of identity, since it is the non-trait conception of self that is implicated in the episodic sense of identity... -/- Our proposal in this chapter can be construed as a psychological extension of Reid's point in the context of past-life belief. People assume that they are the same person as someone in earlier times, despite large variations in the traits between those individuals, and they think this partly because of the testimony of their episodic memory. If our account is correct, then it makes the belief in a past life less bizarre, at least psychologically. For we are suggesting that the episodic sense of personal identity that led to your conviction that you existed at the time of your sixteenth birthday celebrations some decades ago, is also involved in other people's convictions that they existed 200 years ago. This proposal is also situated in recent cognitive approaches to the study of religion and religious experiences, which suggests that extraordinary convictions are often underpinned by the ordinary processes of social cognition (e.g. see Barrett 2000; Barrett 2007; Boyer 2001; Lawson and McCauley 1990; for reincarnation, see White Forthcoming-a,-b). (shrink)

The replicability and importance of the correlation between cognitive style and religious belief have been debated. Moreover, the literature has not examined distinct psychological accounts of this relationship. We tested the replicability of the correlation (N = 5284; students and broader samples of Canadians, Americans, and Indians); while testing three accounts of how cognitive style comes to be related to belief in God, karma, witchcraft, and to the belief that religion is necessary for morality. The first, the dual process model, (...) posits that analytical thinking is recruited in overriding intuitions related to supernatural beliefs. The second, the expressive rationality model, posits that analytical thinking is recruited in supporting already-held beliefs in an identity-protective manner. And the third, the counter-normativity rationality model, posits that analytical thinking is recruited to question beliefs supported by prevailing cultural norms. In Study 2, we tested the replicability of our results in a re-analysis of published data. The association between analytic thinking style and beliefs was replicated. We conclude that whereas the counter-normativity rationality model was contradicted by the data, both the dual process and expressive rationality models received varying degrees of empirical support, but neither model fully accounted for all the patterns in the data. (shrink)

Iraq: The Moral Reckoning is an intensive application of the six classic just war theory criteria to the 2003 Iraq war decision, weighing information available at the time from a wide range of sources and concluding that the war met just one of the six, whereas a just war should meet all. It supplements the criteria with widely used ethical principles and thoroughly refutes neoconservative arguments that the war met the criteria.

"Life must be something more than dilettante speculation. And religion a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true, and life is action, growth, development—begun now and ending never."In September 2016, a first-year student at East Tennessee State University interrupted a Black Lives Matter protest on campus, parading in a gorilla mask. Clad in overalls and barefoot, the young man offered bananas to the protesting (...) students, heckling them.2 When set within a wider historical context, this student's actions evoke a legacy of intimidation in which perceived differences... (shrink)

There is great interest in understanding whether and how mood influences affective processing. Results in the literature have been mixed: some studies show mood-congruent processing but others do not. One limitation of previous work is that decision components for affective processing and responses biases are not dissociated. The present study explored the roles of affective processing and response biases using a drift-diffusion model of simple choice. In two experiments, participants decided if words were emotionally positive or negative while listening to (...) music that induced positive or negative mood. The behavioural results showed weak, inconsistent mood-congruency effects. In contrast, the DDM showed consistent effects that were selectively driven by an a-priori bias in response expectation, suggesting that music-induced mood influences expectations about the emotionality of upcoming stimuli, but not the emotionality of the stimuli themselves. Implications for future studies of emotional classification and mood are subsequently discussed. (shrink)

In stressing the beauty of ignorance, of not knowing in the usual manner, Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible evokes the death of a metaphysical uthorial presence and the dissolution of closed systems of meaning. In this article, I view her text as part of a crisis of modernity that challenges dominant theological pathways, on which certain problematic views of the human have been constructed. In my reading, Keller's Cloud enriches humanistic thinking in the West and I explore the themes (...) it shares with my own work in religious naturalism: there is no escape from the radical relationality and the irreducible materiality that structure human existence. I also emphasize that textual strategies are mere seductive, disembodied abstractions without acknowledging the force of materiality. Materiality matters; and I explore ways in which religious naturalism demonstrates how it does. In light of Keller's rich analysis, I focus on a “learned ignorance” that accompanies all of our limited interpretations emerging from the shifting, precarious positionalities as we rethink our relationality to each other and to all that it is. (shrink)

The authors apply the issue life cycle model to analyze the 1999 through 2001 dispute between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the accounting profession concerning auditor independence. The analysis also brings additional insights that extend understanding of the issue life cycle and issues development. This analysis highlights the roles of a trigger event, the shift of an issue from a technical concern to a public debate, and likely recurrence. The reappearance of the auditor independence issue in 2002 with accounting (...) scandals is consistent with the article’s findings and highlights the use of the issue life cycle model and issue evolution. (shrink)

Despite their growing popularity, little is known about the psychological effects of participating in past-life meditation groups in contemporary western contexts. We conducted a study to re-create some of the conditions observed in the field by facilitating a group of adults interested in exploring past life meditation. Before the session, participants completed a survey about their afterlife beliefs and associated experiences. Participants also completed questionnaires measuring meaningfulness in life and fear of death before and after the session. In the sample (...) (n = 125), just over half of the participants (52%) reported having a past life memory or vision during the session. Higher paranormal beliefs predicted reporting a past life memory or vision. We also found that having prior memories or visions of having lived before, but not the general belief in having a past life, predicted reporting having past life experiences during the session. Consistent with our predictions, participants who reported having a past life memory or vision also reported reduced existential death distress and increased meaningfulness in life following the session, compared to those who did not report these experiences. (shrink)

Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Sexuality examines the links between race, gender, and sexuality through the dual perspectives of relational psychoanalysis and the theory of intersectionality. Combining intersectional theory with relational psychoanalytic thought, the authors introduce a number of thought-provoking clinical vignettes to suggest how adopting an intersectional approach can help us navigate the space between pathology and difference in psychotherapy.

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

The inherent conflict in the taxation of married couples versus single individuals is examined. With competing social and economic outcomes, the taxation of married couples is tied to societal values and the political environment. The authors illustrate the issue by describing three methods of personal income taxation currently used across the globe. Factors such as stakeholder interests, workforce participation, and the political environment are important in determining acceptable trade-offs. Analyzing this issue in terms of the issue life cycle, the authors (...) conclude that in the United States the marriage tax penalty will be an enduring issue because of competing values and interests. (shrink)

This book presents a series of informal biographies about major figures in the history of psychology. A unique combination of expertise and human appeal, the volume places the contributions of each pioneer in a new and fascinating perspective. For instance, several of the authors use the novel approach of having the pioneers return to the present day to reflect back on their work as it relates to the here and now. Revisions of speeches given in a popular series of invited (...) addresses at psychological conventions, the chapters offer appealing glimpses into the lives of individuals who made a difference in the early years of psychology as a field of study. Each of the five volumes in this series contains different profiles thereby bringing more than 100 of the pioneers in psychology more vividly to life. (shrink)

The most comprehensive coverage of the core content Being Human, this course book will help learners grasp complex philosophical ideas and develop the crucial thinking skills. Developed directly with the IB, dedicated assessment support straight from the IB builds confidence.

The most comprehensive coverage of the core content Being Human, this course book will help learners grasp complex philosophical ideas and develop the crucial thinking skills. Developed directly with the IB, dedicated assessment support straight from the IB builds confidence.

Two views of theistic faith are presented in this book. Some contributors see faith as a set of beliefs about God and seek substantiation for those beliefs. Others perceive faith less as a set of beliefs than as a special way of living in relationship to God. The connection between these two views is an intriguing theme winding through the collection and explicitly addressed by Michael A. Brown in the closing essay. The epistemology of religion is now one of the (...) most exciting and controversial areas in philosophy of religion. These eleven essays by recognized leaders in the field and outstanding new voices exhibit the diversity of approaches and the subtle unity of concerns that characterize the best work in this discipline. The repeated comparison of religious beliefs and their justification with scientific theories and their testing is especially useful. (shrink)

This book argues that the moral quality of an act comes from the agent's inner states. By arguing for the indispensable relevance of intention in the moral evaluation of acts, the book moves against a mainstream, 'objective' approach in normative ethics. It is commonly held that the intentions, knowledge, and volition of agents are irrelevant to the moral permissibility of their acts. This book stresses that the capacities of agency, rather than simply the label 'agent', must be engaged during an (...) act if its moral evaluation is to be coherent. The author begins with an ontological argument that an act is a motion or a causing of change in something else. He argues that the source of an act's moral meaning is in the agent: specifically, what the agent, if aware of relevant facts around her, aims to accomplish. He then moves to a series of critical chapters that consider arguments for mainstream approaches to act evaluation, including Thomson's dismissal of the agent knowledge and volition requirements, Scanlon's arguments for a derivative relevance of intentions to permissibility, Frowe's "causal roles" of agents in the moral evaluation of acts, and Bennett's explicit defense of the objective approach. The book concludes by offering the author's preferred replacement for the objective approach, an Aristotelian-Thomist view of acts. Acts, Intentions, and Moral Evaluation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in ethics, just war theory, the ethics of self-defense, and philosophy of action. (shrink)

Individuals with high anxiety show bias for threatening information, but it is unclear whether this bias affects memory. Recognition memory studies have shown biases for recognising and rejecting threatening items in anxiety, prompting the need to identify moderating factors of this effect. This study focuses on the role of semantic similarity: the use of many semantically related threatening words could increase familiarity for those items and obscure anxiety-related differences in memory. To test this, two recognition memory experiments varied the proportion (...) of threatening words in lists to manipulate the semantic-similarity effects. When similarity effects were reduced, participants with high trait anxiety were biased to respond “new” to threatening words, whereas when similarity effects were strong there was no effect of anxiety on memory bias. Analysis of the data with the drift diffusion model showed that the bias was due to differences in processing of the threatening stimuli rather than a simple response bias. These data suggest that the semantic similarity of the threatening words significantly affects the presence or absence of anxiety-related threat bias in recognition memory. The results indicate that trait anxiety is associated with a bias to decide that threatening stimuli were not previously studied, but only when semantic-similarity effects are controlled. Implications for theories of anxiety and future studies in this domain are discussed. (shrink)

The Aristotelian-Thomist claim is that external actions can be morally evaluated when they are voluntary (which includes being based on reasonably accurate knowledge of what an agent is doing), absent which, in effect, we evaluate outcomes, not acts. Also, in the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition the internal act of the will is paramount. These claims contrast with some current theorizing, e.g., by Judith Jarvis Thomson, that morally evaluates actions separately from agents, downplaying the internal act. Taking cases from current authors that revolve (...) around ignorance of key facts, I critique their theorizing on the basis of the nature of agency, the nature of abstraction, the moral language we use in describing acts, the need for reasonably complete descriptions of acts, and the tendency of act evaluations to “leak” into agent evaluations in objective theories. I then describe how Thomas Aquinas’s account of moral evaluation avoids these problems and provides a superior, multi-dimensional framework for moral evaluation. (shrink)