Atheistic Gaiaists

Half Sigma, a long-time critic of what he terms the Gaia Cult, contends that the enfeeblement of Christianity in the West has created a religious vacuum that said Gaia worship has increasingly come to fill:Christianity has been disproved by science, thus some new religion is forming to fill in the void. The human brain is very unhappy unless there is something supernatural to worship. An atheist himself, HS apparently presumes those of a similar...

Save your sermons for someone who's afraid to love

At a post on Secular Right in the context of the recent apocalyptic predictions by radio broadcaster Harold Camping, Razib muses on the consequences of nerdish supernatural belief on larger society. He mentions how even as a kid he could scarcely identify a spiritual bone in his body:I have never really believed in the supernatural. As a small child I knew I was supposed to believe in the supernatural, but I honestly had a hard time taking any...

World peace and hair bands

Bruce G. Charlton, a votary of the late Father Seraphim Rose (who I imagined looked something like this, but who actually looks like this), notes his commentary dating back to the early eighties that appears prescient today:Never has there been more talk of “peace and security” than today. One of the chief organs of the U.N. is the Security Council, and organizations for...

Women have a little less sex and a couple more partners than they did 20 years ago

A year ago, I looked at the number of sexual partners American men have had over the last couple of decades to see whether or not a trend towards greater sexual promiscuity and general activity, as the Game narrative contends is the case, would be empirically detectable. The data, however, reveal that it has been steady state over that period of time.This came in the wake...

Cremation, politics, and religiosity

A month ago, Agnostic looked at the burying of the burial as conventional postmortem send off in the Great Britain and the US. Cremations were rare on this side of the Atlantic through the sixties, and only began increasing after 1970 (when about 4% of the deceased were incinerated). The popularity of cremation grew steadily from that point on, though, and today for every...

More social justice, please

There probably isn't a phrase that gets under my skin more than "social justice" does. It's wielder gives me an immediate impression of being pretentious, supercilious, accusatory, and self-promoting. And the future promises more of it than even the present does. It's frequency has been doubling every decade for the last three, and it's apex is in the future, not in the past:The...

IQ Wars: McCain voters win

The 2010 GSS data have been released. As Inductivist noted, this is a fun time for quant bloggers. There will be a lot of sifting through special modules for the 2010 battery of questions, but of broader interest are converted IQ averages of voters in the 2008 election. With the post-racial man who putatively put together an autobiographical masterpiece on one side and milfy trailer trash on the other, the last Presidential election should've added...

Scientific literacy by church attendance

In the comments of the last GSS science module post, the question of scientific literacy by attendance at religious services was brought up, the suggestion apparently being that while it's not surprising that believers are less knowledgeable than non-believers are, actual adherence to a religion's requirements and the social implications of belonging to a church select for people more knowledgeable than the average self-described theist, a default...

Women lie more about sexual activity now than they did in the past?

Roissy recently referred to a study conducted nearly a decade ago finding that the male-female discrepancies in self-reported numbers of sexual partners are not equally the fault of each sex, but instead primarily the result of female understatement:A lot of bloggers like to use GSS (General Social Survey) data to track changes in society’s sexual behavior. Many of these bloggers have found in this data evidence that American women are becoming...