Stephan: What this report like most other reports fails to distinguish -- perhaps because the people who write these stories, and do this research, are spiritual unawakened, is the difference between religious and spiritual. Religion is entirely man made. People decide what is religious. People create the dogmas. The experience of gnosis is something quite different from that. Sometimes gnosis is experienced within a religious context, but often it is not.
Religion, because it is inherently irrational, rarely does well when exposed to the cold light of rational thought, which is why only a very small proportion of scientists are religious, although many are spiritual. This truth is why all fundamentalism, of whatever denomination, is anti-intellectual, and pro willful ignorance.
A new University of British Columbia study finds that analytic thinking can decrease religious belief, even in devout believers.
The study, which is published in the April 27 issue of Science, finds that thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers and skeptics alike, shedding important new light on the psychology of religious belief.
‘Our goal was to explore the fundamental question of why people believe in a God to different degrees,
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JULIET EILPERIN, - The Washington Post
Stephan: The loss of the sharks will further accelerate the breakdown of the world ocean's ecology which will impact humanity enormously -- and negatively. As a species we seem to be collectively unable to constrain our immediate greed and to even conceive of a long-term life-affirming policy. The power of greed, like heroin addiction seems to overpower even our sense of self-survival.
Pacific reef shark populations have plummeted by 90 percent or more over the past several decades, according a new study by a team of American and Canadian researchers, and much of this decline stems from human fishing pressure.
Quantifying the decline for the first time, the analysis published online Friday in the journal Conservation Biology demonstrates that shark populations fare worse the closer they are to people – even if the nearest population is an atoll with fewer than 100 residents.
The team of eight scientists examined the results of a decade of underwater surveys across 46 Pacific islands and atolls, and found densities of reef sharks – gray, whitetip and blacktip reef sharks as well as Galapagos and tawny nurse sharks – ‘increased substantially as human population decreased
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GAIL COLLINS, - The New York Times
Stephan: This report reveals yet another path of greed masquerading as a trend for better education. The more I read, the more I become convinced that until national wellness is our first priority we have no long term hope as a healthy culture. We are in the throes of a kind of addiction madness, to which everything must be sacrificed.
Let’s talk about talking pineapples.
Actually (spoiler alert!) I’m going to use the pineapple as a sneaky way to introduce the topic of privatization of public education. I was driven to this. Do you know how difficult it is to get anybody to read about ‘privatization of education?
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AARON MEHTA and R. JEFFREY SMITH, - Nation of Change
Stephan: All of this death traces not only to our shamefully lax gun laws, but to the insanity and utter failure of the American war on drugs. These thousands of dead lie at the feet of a long string of cowardly and corrupt U.S. government officials, and a small group of immoral and greedy corporations that together maintain this awful prohibition.
South of the border, war is raging with guns mostly supplied by merchants in the United States.
The Government of Mexico has estimated that almost 50,000 people have been killed since 2006, a toll that has made its top officials irate about the persistent flow of weapons south. Some law enforcement officials in the U.S. government share the Mexican’s concern, but their attempts to stanch the flow by obtaining better intelligence about it have badly singed their fingers.
The notorious ‘Fast and Furious
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Saturday, April 28th, 2012
GARY G. KOHLS, MD, - Rense.com
Stephan: This is an overly polemic, but factually accurate depiction of the psychiatric branch of the illness profit system. As you read this keep in mind that one out of four women in the U.S. are on a long term anti-depressant regime. We are deeply, deeply, unhappy as a people; and because we won't tell ourselves the truth, we cannot reverse this trend.
Since the introduction of major tranquilizers like Thorazine and Haldol, ‘minor
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