An artist's rendering of Joseph Smith's first vision

Karen Armstrong, a popular historian of religion whose bestselling A History of God brought her to national prominence in 1993, is back in the news. Her new book, The Case for God, revisits some familiar  territory in a stimulating survey of Western religious history, but this time Armstrong packages her message in an admonition to both conservative Christians and bellicose atheists, mutual antagonists in the cultural skirmishes over religion.  The Wall Street Journal recently commissioned Armstrong and Richard Dawkins, the most outspoken of the new atheists, to respond to the question, “Where does evolution leave God?” (one wonders why they did not also include an informed representative of conservative religion in their symposium).  The two answers were published together, and they make a most interesting study in contrast. Armstrong uses the platform to reprise the argument of her new book:

In the past, many of the most…

Simon Critchley, in action

Philosopher Simon Critchley writes a thought-provoking reflection on happiness on the “Happy Days” blog on nytimes.com. The ancient Greek proverb above is his launching point into thinking about happiness, death, and the prospect of an afterlife.

In short, Critchley explicates the proverb to talk about “my” happiness as something centered in others, in the lives of those outside me, and that “my” happiness cannot be considered as a whole until after I’m dead-and-gone. Thus, we can’t really consider our own happiness without in some way thinking about our own afterlife. An excerpt:

But why should we assume that the question of the afterlife must always be answered with reference to me? Isn’t that just a teensy bit selfish? What is so important about my afterlife? Why can’t I believe in the afterlife of others without believing in my own?

A skeptic might object that I am simply dodging the question. Of course, they…

That’s the subtext to The New York Times columnist David Brooks‘ recent piece on religion and science, “The Neural Buddhists.” He’s taking up recent developments in neuroscience, and coming to the conclusion that present and future debates between religion and science will not be over the existence of God, but over whether or not organized religion contributes to or harms the brain’s intuitions toward transcendence and spirituality.

Thus, the title: science leading to a “neural Buddhism.”

Or, as he says: “The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”

In other words, it’s the standard line: “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Whatever that means.

But, consider Brooks’ summary of recent literature in neuroscience:

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different…