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Neurotheology: The Crucible of Religion

A crucible is a vessel used for refining a substance, usually with the addition of extreme heat, which is exactly what I see happening to religion these days. Science, particularly neurotheology, has been turning up the heat under a crucible in which all religious experiences and beliefs are being scrutinized. When the Church was calling [...]

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Vilenkin’s Cosmic Vision: A Review Essay of Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes- William Lane Craig

The task of scientific popularization is a difficult one. Too many authors think that it is to be accomplished by frequent resort to explanatorily vacuous and obfuscating metaphors which leave the reader puzzling over what exactly a particular theory asserts. One of the great merits of Alexander Vilenkin’s book is that he shuns this route [...]

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Dialogue with Richard Dawkins, Rowan Williams and Anthony Kenny

Sir Anthony Kenny chaired a dialogue at Oxford University between Archbishop Rowan Williams and Professor Richard Dawkins on the subject of “The nature of human beings and the question of their ultimate origin”. The event was held on Thursday 23rd February 2012 in the Sheldonian Theatre, and was hosted by Sophia Europa (Theology Faculty) Oxford. [...]

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The “Need to Belong” – Part of What Makes Us Human

  Why are people so strongly motivated to have relationships? According to a landmark paper by psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary it’s because of a fundamental “need to belong.”1 The “belongingness hypothesis” states that people have a basic psychological need to feel closely connected to others, and that caring, affectionate bonds from close relationships [...]

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Is Your Anger a Cleansing Squall or a Destructive Hurricane?

Anger is the emotional energy within each of us that rises up when something needs to change. If you act on the need to create change, your anger can be channeled effectively. If it’s not redirected to something effective, your frustration will build, sometimes to hurricane force. Anger that is allowed to get out of [...]

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HeadModel

Nothing but a pack of neurons?

    The sort of Cartesian dualism that sees us as disembodied souls piloting a brain that exists only to sense the external (and internal) world and to execute action has long been difficult to reconcile with knowledge from neurology of the extent to which many aspects of cognition depend on the brain, in that [...]

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thanks

Why ‘Thank You’ Is More Than Just Good Manners

According to positive psychologists, the words ‘thank you‘ are no longer just good manners, they are also beneficial to the self. To take the best known examples, studies have suggested that being grateful can improve well-being, physical health, can strengthen social relationships, produce positive emotional states and help us cope with stressful times in our [...]

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Changing Your Brain By Changing Your Mind

  When it comes to managing stress, the Eastern traditions may be especially effective. The Western health model is based on diagnosing the underlying cause of a problem and then finding an active medical or behavioral intervention to remove it. People with chronic illness are often urged to “stay strong,” or to have “a fighting [...]

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Meditating at Work: A New Approach to Managing Overload

  Today’s employees and managers are deluged with an unprecedented amount of information and distraction. If it’s not emails, texts, and instant messaging, then it’s phone calls, coworkers, and constantly changing demands and deadlines. Basex research found that 50 percent of a knowledge worker’s day is spent “managing information” and that an excess of information [...]

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dep

Why do some people never get depressed?

Confronted with some of life’s upsetting experiences – marriage breakdown, unemployment, bereavement, failure of any kind – many people become depressed. But others don’t. Why is this? A person who goes through experiences like that and does not get depressed has a measure of what in the psychiatric trade is known as “resilience”. According to [...]

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No Matter What the Problem, There Are Only Four Things You Can Do

When faced with a difficult problem, you might find yourself paralyzed over deciding what to do. Emotionally sensitive people often have difficulty making decisions, tend to ruminate about issues and can become increasing upset as a result of thinking about the issue over and over. Searching and searching for the right solution, perhaps one that [...]

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music

The Neuroscience Of Music

Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. When listening to our [...]

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