Category: General

On By DavidWebsterIn General2 Comments

Blog readers may enjoy this..

robinince's avatarRobinince's Blog

this weekend I attended the Greenbelt festival and various thoughts came uninvited into my head about the presumed battle between the faithful and the faithless. here are some of them. This is a reflection of this conversation in the UK, i realise that readers outside the UK might have a very different experience of the religion versus atheism discussion/feud/fist fight (note – as usual please remember this is not journalism so no editorial process has taken place – expect poor spelling, ugly punctuation or peculiar phrasing, my brain has an erratic toolbar) 

 

Does it matter to me if someone is religious?

No

Does it matter to me if someone justifies their cruelty or oppression to others because of their religion?

Yes

Does it matter to me if someone is a creationist?

No

Does it matter to me if a creationist insists it should be taught with science at school?

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American Buddhist Perspective – Review

On By DavidWebsterIn Book, GeneralLeave a comment

Hi..

Just a quick post to note the book review at the American Buddhist Perspective blog:

Webster teaches Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics not far from me and as a fellow traveler on the road of Buddhist studies (Webster’s fist book is on Buddhism and Desire) and philosophy, I have been looking forward to reading this book for some time. At just over 70 pages, it’s written as a pamphlet almost, perhaps a manifesto: light on footnotes, jargon, and the kind of verbiage that can turn a lot of people off from intelligent writing. I highly recommend it.

That said, it may come as no surprise that the book seems to have been misunderstood by some readers. Perhaps this is due to its polemical opening words:

When someone tells me that they are not really religious, but that they are a very spiritual person, I want to punch their face. Hard.

Not exactly the best way to make friends. But Webster does explain. The problem is confusion: his own. Religion for him is deeply spiritual, and spirituality is inseparable from religion.

Thus the book reads less like an attack on ‘spiritual’ life (which Webster notes is multifaceted and not always pernicious – e.g. in Pierre Hadot’s “Philosophy as a Way of Life“) and more as an exploration of and ultimately an attack on a very pernicious marketplace of spirituality in the contemporary world. The problematic notion of spirituality is narrowed, in developing detail, to the kind of superficial, non-committed, materialistic nonsense which so often surrounds people proffering the above violent-desire-producing phrase.

In fact, despite his committed atheism, Webster praises.. CONTINUE READING

The full review is at :  http://www.patheos.com/blogs/americanbuddhist/2012/08/a-careful-walk-through-the-spirituality-minefield.html

The Momus Report review..

On By DavidWebsterIn General1 Comment

Over at http://themomusreport.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/dispirited-how-contemporary.html there is another review… It begins:

 

Throughout this book author David Webster makes disparaging remarks to the current interest in Mind, Body, Spirit with the acronym MBS. It is the last two letters that are probably the most significant. This book is nothing less than an attack on the confusion of pseudo-science and the arrogance of faith-based certainties. In this regard Webster thankfully joins.. CONTINUE READING…

“Why We Should be Cultivating Ritual, Not Piety” by Per Smith..

On By DavidWebsterIn General1 Comment

I have broke (briefly) the re-blog thing: so manual – worth a read nonetheless!

Over at the new Patheos blog, Science on Religion, Connor Wood poses the no longer rhetorical question: “Does religion make us moral?” He presents this question in order to highlight the implications raised by the recent publication of Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who as Connor notes is an atheist:

It might seem surprising, then, that Bloom has recently published a paper in the Annual Review of Psychology detailing, in part, all the good that religion can do. Religion, Bloom points out, does actually seem to make people more altruistic and generous. Religious people give more to charities than non-religious people, including secular charities. And IRS tax receipts show that states where people are more religious have much higher rates of charitable giving than less religious states. Meanwhile, lab experiments show that participating in religious rituals primes people to be more generous and caring toward one another.

READ MORE

The link is http://irritually.org/2012/06/15/why-we-should-be-cultivating-ritual-not-piety/ – and the rest is worth a look…

On By DavidWebsterIn GeneralLeave a comment

Ok, ok: not about spiritual matters-but felt like re-blogging it..

lives; running's avatarlives; running

One theme of this summer’s Olympic sports coverage will be the weak challenge by British athletes in the men’s and women’s middle distances – in the women’s 800 metres for example, UK athletics have been able to fill just one of the three potential spaces . There is no expectation of a serious medal challenge at any distance between the 400 metre and Mo Farah at 5k

It hasn’t always been like that. There was of course the Ovett-Coe-Cram moment, but in the thirty years before that, UK middle distance running was generally competitive; and (as I’ve posted before) elite UK marathon times have been getting consistently slower, year by year, for a while. Where did the previous tradition of middle-distance running come from?

Once answer, I suspect, is the figure of Alf Tupper, who was a staple of many working-class childhoods, from his first appearance in the Rover in 1949. Aged 18…

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Rabbi Jason Rosenberg from Tampa reviews Dispirited..

On By DavidWebsterIn Book, GeneralLeave a comment

At http://cbatampa.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/but-not-religious.html, Rabbi Jason Rosenberg from Tampa reviews Dispirited.

Below is a flavour of the piece…

There’s always a lot of talk about the idea of being “spiritual but not religious.” It certainly is a fairly common refrain, and it’s no surprise that proponents (and leaders) of organized religion are often against it. I’ll admit to having pretty mixed feelings on the matter*. On the one hand, I’m really not all that eager to attack people who are, more or less, minding their own business. It’s one of the ways in which religious people like myself often allow themselves to engage in mean-spirited pettiness. Not very religious, or spiritual, frankly.

* If you read this blog at all regularly, this should come as no shock to you!

And, maybe more significantly, it’s often not fair. At the very least, it’s using the same broad brush that many of us religious types hate being used on us. I mean, when someone says, “religion is all superstitious nonsense,” I usually protest about the word “all.” It’s manifestly true that some religion is superstitious nonsense. Maybe much of it.  READ THE FULL REVIEW…

Another interesting review – it doesn’t wholly agree, but engages with what seem serious questions..