Recovering from Religion
All the major world religions, both Eastern and Western, share more in common than most people realize - and often share the same skeletons in their closets.
Recovering from Religion
Aired 02/02/2022 Explore what it means to be "spiritual" or live meaningfully without the outmoded accessories of religious trappings. Rachel Roberts will offer definitions of terms that illustrate how ancient human inclinations, such as spirituality, are still relevant but need to be recontextualized in the 21st century. She will also provide examples and ideas for non-religious meaning-making traditions and rituals that can enhance everyday living and the overarching life journey. Being connected to something greater than ourselves, whether it's community, love, nature, or any other value, is the epicenter of secular spirituality.
Recovering from Religion
How have the dominant species of religions evolved over human history? And why? Archeology suggests that some religious practices go back tens of thousands of years or more. However these ancient religious practices among hunter-gatherers bear little resemblance to organized religion today. Dr. Mark Reimers is a computational neuroscientist at Michigan State University where he researches how animal brains work and how human genes affect brain function. His broader aim is to ground our understanding of feeling and thought in the facts of biology. Dr. Reimers was raised Christian but found a path to humanism in his twenties. Since then he has been a humanist leader and speaker for over a decade in Virginia and now in Michigan.
Religious Tolerance
Unlike essentially all other religious web sites, we don't promote the beliefs and practices of a single religion, or of one denomination, faith group, or sect within a single religion. Instead we try to explain the beliefs, practices, moral teachings and histories of a wide range of faith groups within many religions. We promote religious tolerance, freedom, understanding, coexistence, respect, and cooperation. We also promote equal rights and treatment of persons of all races, nationalities, genders, gender identifications, and sexual orientations.
Bart D. Ehrman
Bart D. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He began his teaching career at Rutgers University, and joined the faculty in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC in 1988, where he has served as both the Director of Graduate Studies and the Chair of the Department. Professor Ehrman completed his M.Div. and Ph.D. degrees at Princeton Seminary, where his 1985 doctoral dissertation was awarded magna cum laude. An expert on the New Testament and the history of Early Christianity, has written or edited thirty books, numerous scholarly articles, and dozens of book reviews. In addition to works of scholarship, Professor Ehrman has written several textbooks for undergraduate students and trade books for general audiences. Six of his books have been on the New York Times Bestseller list: Misquoting Jesus; God's Problem; Jesus Interrupted; Forged; and How Jesus Became God. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.
Austin Cline
The difference between being an atheist and an agnostic is clear but misunderstood. Explore how the two are both different and related.
University of British Columbia
Drawing on new scientific advances, this religion course examines foundational questions about the nature of religious belief and practice. The course is based on the idea that religion is a naturalistic phenomenon -- meaning it can be studied and better understood using the tools of science. Religious belief and practice emerge naturally from the structure of human psychology, and have an important impact on the structure of societies, the way groups relate to each other, and the ability of human beings to cooperate effectively. Topics to be covered will include traditional and contemporary theories of religion, with a special emphasis on cultural evolutionary models.
Britannica
Humans have long pondered not only how we came to be but also why we came to be. The earliest Greek philosophers focused their attention upon the origin and nature of the physical world; later philosophers have theorized about the nature of knowledge, truth, good and evil, love, friendship, and much more. Philosophy involves a methodical assessment of any and all aspects of human existence and experience. The realms of philosophy and religion have sometimes intersected in conducting such inquiries as these. As with philosophy, the study of religion underscores how humankind has long speculated about its origins. The possibility of a higher being (or beings) to which livings things owe their existence has long captived human thought. Many religions also offer their own views on the nature of good and evil, and they may prescribe guidelines and judgment on different kinds of human behavior.
Darrel Ray
Dr. Darrel Ray, psychologist and lifelong student of religion, discusses religious infection from the inside out. How does guilt play into religious infection? Why is sexual control so important to so many religions? What causes the anxiety and neuroticism around death and dying? How does religion inject itself into so many areas of life, culture, and politics? The author explores this and much more in his book The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture. This second-generation book takes the reader several steps beyond previous offerings and into the realm of the personal and emotional mechanisms that affect anyone who lives in a culture steeped in religion. Examples are used that anyone can relate to and the author gives real-world guidance in how to deal with and respond to people who are religious in our families, and among our friends and coworkers.
Bart D. Ehrman
book
Ara Norenzayan
How did human societies scale up from tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today--even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with Big Gods--the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths--spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization answer each other.
Yuval Noah Harari
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical – and sometimes devastating – breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities.
Ara Norenzayan
Sincere faith in watchful Big Gods unleashed unprecedented cooperation within ever-expanding groups, yet at the same time it introduced a new source of potential conflict between competing groups. And in some parts of the world, societies with atheist majorities--some of the most cooperative and prosperous in the world--have climbed religion's ladder, and then kicked it away. Big Gods answers fundamental questions about the origins and spread of world religions and helps us understand the rise of cooperative societies without belief in gods.
Robert N. Bellah
How did our early ancestors transcend the quotidian demands of everyday existence to embrace an alternative reality that called into question the very meaning of their daily struggle? Robert Bellah, one of the leading sociologists of our time, identifies a range of cultural capacities, such as communal dancing, storytelling, and theorizing, whose emergence made this religious development possible. Deploying the latest findings in biology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, he traces the expansion of these cultural capacities from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (roughly, the first millennium BCE), when individuals and groups in the Old World challenged the norms and beliefs of class societies ruled by kings and aristocracies. These religious prophets and renouncers never succeeded in founding their alternative utopias, but they left a heritage of criticism that would not be quenched.
YouTube Channel
An educational channel dedicated to the academic, nonsectarian study of religion. We promote improving the public's religious literacy by exploring humanity's beliefs and rituals through an anthropological, sociological, and archaeological lens.
