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Living -
The Dialogue
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Stephen Cheleda
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Tuesday, 19 May 2009 09:00 |
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Yorkshire, UK. Religion, in the form of various pagan rituals, existed in Europe and elsewhere during prehistoric times, but the story of creation, which seems to be the bane of scientists, has been embedded in Western culture since Christianity was firmly established in Europe. Creationism was given intellectual weight by Ptolemy’s observation of the position of the Earth relative to the Sun and the other planets. Ptolemy, the greatest astronomer of the time who wrote extensively, described a system of planetary motion where the Earth was at the centre of the universe, and the Sun the moon and the stars move round in perfect circles, while the then known planets move around in smaller circles called epicycles.
Ptolemy’s geocentric view of the world fitted the literal interpretation of the Bible perfectly. Over the following centuries every state and church institution derived its raison d’être from divine authority.
Gradually, observers such as Copernicus and Kepler, increasingly found inaccuracies in Ptolemy’s description of cycles and epicycles: they found that the Earth was not at the centre of the universe, but it moved round the Sun. But how can this observation be reconciled with the profoundly held view that we were at the centre of all creation?
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 19 May 2009 08:31 |
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Living -
The Dialogue
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TS-Si News Service
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Saturday, 07 March 2009 16:00 |
Toronto, ON, CAN. New research that shows distinct  brain differences between believers and non-believers. Belief in God can help block anxiety and minimize stress, while non-believers benefit from the existence of stress in learning situations.
The findings appear in Psychological Science.
In two studies at the University of Toronto, led by Assistant Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht, participants performed a Stroop task – a well-known test of cognitive control – while hooked up to electrodes that measured their brain activity.
Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that helps modify behavior by signaling when attention and control are needed, usually as a result of some anxiety-producing event like making a mistake.
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Last Updated on Saturday, 24 December 2011 00:55 |
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Living -
The Dialogue
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Lisa Jain Thompson and Father Lucian J. Kemble O. F. M.
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Wednesday, 04 March 2009 22:00 |
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Fairfax, VA, USA.Father Lucian J. Kemble [N1], a Franciscan Friar, was a friend and my sometimes confessor. [N2] A world class amateur astronomer, he was the discoverer of Kemble’s Cascade, an asterism [N3] located in the constellation Camelopardalis. Luc described it as "a beautiful cascade of faint stars tumbling from the northwest down to the open cluster NGC 1502 that he had discovered while sweeping the sky with a pair of 7x35 binoculars in Canada.
Father Luc was an excellent writer whether he was explaining science, discussing the world he saw around us, or just corresponding with a friend, signing many of his emails as Lamplighter.
I treasured the emails Luc and I exchanged on subjects ranging from astronomy and science to theology and philosophy and poetry and canon law.
Father Luc often talked about the subtlety of nature, the beauty of small things that in the rush of today’s society we often overlook. He worried that many beginning amateur astronomers would turn away from the actual night sky when the Milky Way our eyes see naturally turns out not to be as colorful as the photoshopped images that are published in magazines and online.
Father Luc does not need me to paraphrase him. Please read on.
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Last Updated on Saturday, 07 March 2009 22:57 |
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Living -
The Dialogue
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Lisa Thompson & Sharon Gaughan
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Sunday, 22 February 2009 16:00 |
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Fairfax, VA, USA. We direct your attention to a new blog from Suzanne Cooke called Women Born Transsexual (WBT). We applaud the launch of Ms. Cooke’s stimulating new effort and encourage our readers to visit her WBT blog and judge for yourself. [N1]
Ms. Cooke was one of the last patients treated by Harry Benjamin, M.D., who made her initial diagnoses and guided her treatment (1969 and 1971). Benjamin wrote Ms. Cooke's recommendation letter and she had Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS) in 1972. Ms. Cooke is currently writing a book titled Outside the Gates of Eden. There is an excerpt on this site. [N2]
One of us (Sharon) participated with Suzie years back on an online forum where she announced her preference for the term Women Born Transsexual, since in her view it recognized classic transsexualism as an innate condition rather than a gender identity disorder. The usage placed WBTs in a medical context with a medical condition susceptible to treatment. Once treated, the “patient” ceased to be a transsexual.
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 30 March 2010 14:28 |
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Living -
The Dialogue
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Mark S. Lawson
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Thursday, 19 February 2009 16:00 |
 Melbourne, Victoria, AUS. Three great scholars are generally associated with the second half of the 19th century — Darwin, Freud and Marx. There were many more, of course, but those three are all household names and devised theories that have had far reaching effects. Of those three Charles Darwin is the only one whose reputation has survived intact. With his 200th birthday being celebrated recently, it is worth considering why his fame has grown since his death and the theories of the other two have been discarded.
In the process we can gain some inkling of the extraordinary nonsense that can distort public and scientific debate.
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Last Updated on Sunday, 17 May 2009 20:14 |
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Living -
The Dialogue
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Neal Peirce
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Thursday, 19 February 2009 04:00 |
 Washington, DC, USA. Red ink-smeared budgets are pushing an array of states — Virginia, Kentucky, California, Alabama, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina among them — to consider early release of hundreds, possibly thousands of convicted criminals. Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter even wants to close down two prisons.
As Josh Goodman writes in Governing Magazine, “Budget crises have a way of making the politically impossible suddenly possible.”
Even more significant, though, may be a wave of reassessment, from localities to state governments to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, about the effectiveness of America’s vast criminal justice enterprise.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 18 February 2009 12:12 |
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