| March 11, 2012 | Contact | Calendar | The Mix | Archives |
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In this election year as a religious culture war flames on, I'm thinking about how we can make peace with religion.
In the 2008 election year I was always wondering how Kansas got to be Kansas and Vermont got to be Vermont. (Genetics? Like-minded people moving there? Cows?)
This year's theme rises from reading books summarizing studies in neuroscience that suggest that the brain is hard-wired for religion. If it's hard-wired, it is evolutionarily useful and not going away. The studies also suggest that liberal/conservative leanings are somewhat brain-based. If it's not going away, then it needs to change.
I'm also reading Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton.
Here are some blogs/sites I read that tell me religion doesn't have to be mean and hateful and that it is evolving: Religion Dispatches, Slacktivist, Secular Right, and of course Andrew Sullivan's unique perspective. Speaking of whom, my cousin Mark Warren wrote a great profile of Sullivan and actually visited the blog cave. Another factor in picking a "make peace with religion" theme, was the offense taken by a book group member to my almost reflexive response when someone cites the bible: was that in the old testicle or the new. There is work to be done here in finding ways to make peace. |
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Playing Words With Friends without a dictionary or anything like that, I'm reminded of playing racquetball, a sport I played hard at for 20 years. I never thought a game that consisted almost solely of low hard kills was much fun. It was more interesting to move your opponent around, make them run, make them guess. There weren't many men who played like that. A rare one who did was a guy named Jim, an FBI agent. Those were good games. Similarly, to use a dictionary, especially a Scrabble dictionary in WWF, would be to play a game of power kills instead of a more joyful strategy.
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