Bogosity

Another ‘Odds and Ends’ post but I think I might have to cut back on these as they are not very satisfying. Perhaps I can make a kind of sidebar widget thing for putting interesting links like a del.icio.us feed.

Cognitive dissonance – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

a driving force that compels the mind to acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to reduce the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions.

Apparently this a theory that many atheists use to write off religious experience. The mind has to reconcile the need to be happy with the reality of life and so invents religious experience in order to reconcile the cognitive dissonance. I came across it in a blog post somewhere or other today.

I caught up on some interesting podcasts today too.

The Ark – 7 January 2007 – Galileo’s Crime

In 1633 Galileo Galilei was found guilty of ‘vehement suspicion of heresy’. The trial has since been regarded as the greatest scandal in Christendom.

The Ark also did a piece the previous week about the gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth with a Bible scholar basically debunking everything we believe about it – the virgin birth, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem etc…

Get bogosity email

I’ve added some RSS feed links on the right hand sidebar as well as a way to subscribe to the blog as emails in case any crazy person would want to do that.

Religious Animals

Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal that has the true religion—several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. – Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835 – 1910)