Paul Browning, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Columbia University, examines one of the ancient parchment scrolls whose content is being taken literally by a surprising number of people.

“I was at my wits’ end over what to do about my failing marriage,” Reuss said. “Marjorie and I thought about counseling, therapy, even divorce. In the end, though, I got the help I needed from a book of stories inscribed by an itinerant Middle Eastern shepherd many millennia ago.”

One of their best.

Atlanta- Pat Robertson, the conservative Christian televangelist and host of the 700 Club said that the 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Chile yesterday  was the result of the nations pact with the Chupacabra, or goat-sucker, a devilish beast blamed for livestock deaths across Latin America.

“Something happened a long time ago in Chile, and people might not want to talk about it,” Robertson said. “They were under the heel of the democratically elected SOCIALIST regime of Salvador Allende …and they got together and swore a pact to the chupacabra. They said, ’We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the the man we elected president, and install a military dictatorship that will make thousands of ‘troublemakers disappear.’” ”True story,” he continued. “And the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

It saddens me that people send this man money.

In a well-meaning attempt to be tolerant of other cultures and religions we often blithely subvert our values and morality, says Sam Harris, the outspoken critic of blind religious faith. We do this because we think that questions about good and evil or right and wrong cannot be answered definitively. But they can, he told a rapt audience at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference Thursday — and they should.

Harris is no stranger to the argument that, to put it more mildly than he might, religion does more harm than good. His 2005 New York Times bestseller The End of Faith attempted to draw a straight line from faith to human atrocities. His subsequent Letter to a Christian Nation took on the fierce pushback he received from writing his first book.

So it should come as no surprise that Harris ran with this theme at TED, expanding his argument beyond the faithful to the secular-leaning. Scientists and academics, who are wedded to facts and empiricism, he said, do something different when they talk about morality. “We value differences of opinion in a way that we don’t in other areas,” Harris said.

We know that there are fundamentally right and wrong answers to certain questions and issues, but do not trust our instincts, he said. These cast-aside tenets should respected and should be the basis of a universal morality, regardless of variations in cultures and belief.

I actually previously discovered that Larry’s speculation is false. In the General Social Survey, it is primarily Wordsum score and not years of schooling which correlates with less religiosity. It should also be noted that the correlation of higher IQ with less religiosity was observed in the 1920s, before liberals took over the colleges. And even before the invention of IQ tests, it can be observed though the study of history that the elites tended to be more secular than the masses.

In the United States where belief in God is the norm, self-identifying as an atheist means you are likely to have thought about the issue, which indicates higher intelligence. But beyond this, it seems obvious to me that smarter people find the Bible hard to believe, so even when smarter people claim to believe in God, their religious beliefs tend to be more like universal Unitarianism than traditional Christianity with its reliance on supernatural events for which there is no historical or scientific evidence.

Obvious, but necessary to reinforce.

The February issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review has published a meta-analysis of 55 independent studies conducted in the United States which considers surveys of over 20,000 mostly Christian participants. Religious congregations generally express more prejudiced views towards other races. Furthermore, the more devout the community, the greater the racism. 

We also read this additional fascinating conclusion from the authors’ summary:

“The authors failed to find that racial tolerance arises from humanitarian values, consistent with the idea that religious humanitarianism is largely expressed to in-group members. Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant.”

A study to come out later will detail the increased moisture content in water.