The Protocols of the Elders of Christendom

americanthinker |  Theocracy-watcher Katherine Yurica "the most immoral political program ever adopted by a political movement in this country." At Illuminati Conspiracy Archive, Paul and Phillip Collins say that it "echoes the revolutionary fervor of Robespierre's radical Jacobinism."

The object of this fear and loathing? An obscure essay (now available only on web archives) titled "The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement," written in 2001 by Eric Heubeck, a former associate of the late Paul Weyrich at the Free Congress Foundation. Not only has his essay been removed from Free Congress's website, but Heubeck has apparently withdrawn from public life, as this author has not been able to contact him.

In the estimation of Yurica and her fellow leftists, Integration concretely articulates a plan developed by "Christian Theocrats" to seize political power and use it forcefully to dismantle the domain of liberalism (secularism, welfare, multiculturalism, affirmative action, etc.) and enforce a fundamentalist Christian order in America. In brief, Yurica sees Integration as an American, Christian version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

This is the full meaning of the smear term "Dominionism" coined by the left. As Yurica sees it, this evil plan is well on its way to victory; one can visualize her shuddering as she imagines jackbooted, goose-stepping "Theocrats" chanting "Sieg Heil!" 

the outgroup intolerance hypothesis for schizophrenia

rpsych |  This article proposes a reformulation of the social brain theory of schizophrenia. Contrary to those who consider schizophrenia to be an inherently human condition, we suggest that it is a relatively recent phenomenon, and that the vulnerability to it remained hidden among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Hence, we contend that schizophrenia is the result of a mismatch between the post-Neolithic human social environment and the design of the social brain. We review the evidence from human evolutionary history of the importance of the distinction between ingroup and out-group membership that lies at the heart of intergroup conflict, violence, and xenophobia. We then review the evidence for the disparities in schizophrenia incidence around the world and for the higher risk of this condition among immigrants and city dwellers. Our hypothesis explains a range of epidemiological findings on schizophrenia related to the risk of migration and urbanization, the improved prognosis in underdeveloped countries, and variations in the prevalence of the disorder. However, although this hypothesis may identify the ultimate causation of schizophrenia, it does not specify the proximate mechanisms that lead to it. We conclude with a number of testable and refutable predictions for future research.

Granny Goodness in League With Soros to Cognitively Infiltrate the Catholic Church?!?!?!?!

Newsmax |  Yesterday, I stopped short of asking Hillary Clinton to fire John Podesta, her campaign chairman. In light of the latest Wikileaks revelations, she has no choice but to cut all ties with this man. The man is hell bent on creating mutiny in the Catholic Church and must therefore be fired.

We have long known that George Soros is the single most influential donor to dissident, and anti-Catholic, organizations. Now we know from Wikileaks what I long have suspected: John Podesta has been the most influential point man running offense for Soros.

Together, they have sought to manipulate public opinion against the Catholic Church.

In 2012, Sandy Newman, founder of the left-wing group, Voices for Progress, asked Podesta for advice on how best to "plant the seeds of the revolution." The revolution he sought was an attempt to sunder the Catholic Church.

Newman, who is Jewish, confessed that he was a rookie at trying to subvert the Catholic Church. But he was determined to do so. "There needs to be a Catholic Spring," Newman told Podesta, "in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church."

Podesta not only endorsed the plan to create a revolution within the Catholic Church — he boasted that he had been working on this for years. "We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this," he said. "Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have be bottom up."

He recommended that Kathleen Kennedy Townsend be consulted on this effort.

The evidence is indisputable: Both of these groups, Catholics in Alliance and Catholics United, were created by Podesta, and funded by Soros, for the express purpose of staging a revolt within the Catholic Church.

Tards Much Slicker Than They Were Back in the Segregation Schools Days

sltrib | "No American citizen or institution [should] be labeled by their government as bigoted because of their religious views, and dismissed from the political life of our nation for holding those views," the letter declared. "And yet that is precisely what the Civil Rights Commission report does."

Labeling ideas and arguments with which one disagrees "racist" or "phobic," these leaders argued, "not only cheapens the meaning of those words, but can have a chilling effect on healthy debate over, or dissent from, the prevailing orthodoxy."

The letter closed with a plea to Obama, Hatch, R-Utah, and Ryan, R-Wis., to "renounce publicly the claim that 'religious freedom' and 'religious liberty' are 'code words' or a 'pretext' for various forms of discrimination."

Last month, one of the signers, Charles Haynes, founding director of Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute, held up Utah's efforts on behalf of religious freedom and nondiscrimination as an example of genuine balance between the two.

In 2015, with the blessing and encouragement of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Utah Legislature approved a measure protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals from housing and workplace discrimination while safeguarding some religious liberties.

"Peace between those who worry that religious claims are code for bigotry and those who seek religious accommodations will not be possible," Haynes wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece, "without setting aside name-calling, committing to civil dialogue and working for common-ground solutions."

Though the religious leaders' letter was addressed to Hatch as well as the other two officeholders, Utah's senior senator already has responded to the civil rights report.

"The report adopts a stunted and distorted version of religious liberty, suggesting that claims of religious conscience are little more than a cloak for bigotry and hatred," Hatch said. "I reject the false picture of religious liberty presented."

everyone gets what he deserves...,

princeton |  ‘The great tragedy of science,’ the Victorian biologist Thomas Huxley said in 1870, ‘is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.’ At the risk of being unfashionable, we part ways with present-day methodologists and go back to simpler times, in which theory, to be considered valid, had to accord with experienced reality. Confronting theory with evidence is not simple or easy, and we do not mean to dismiss the many writers who point this out. One of us has tried it himself, confronting George Akerlof’s economic theory of ‘the market for lemons’ (recognized by a Nobel Prize in 2001) with the facts of the historical used-car market, the subject of Akerlof’s article. 3 A key premise was found to be wrong, the theory as stated was not genuinely testable, and some of its predictions were not borne out. Our reason for insisting on reality is that theory is not only about how to understand the world (epistemology), or how the world is constituted (ontology)— it is also about how life should be conducted, that is, theory is ‘normative’. So much hangs on the benefits and sufferings that economics has the power to inflict that we have to insist on asking, ‘Is it true and does it work?’ 4 Other sources of authority can do without that kind of justification: commitment and inner belief have no need for external confirmation. Authority is often resistant to argument and evidence. Officials, priests, prophets, and leaders do not always submit to the test of consequences. But the Enlightenment in Europe and America ordained a quest for truth by means of critical argument and evidence. The sciences abide by this method, and economics, when it aspires to the same esteem, is presumed to do so as well.

What are the ‘norms’ that economics lays down? They start from the laudable principle of maximizing well-being, or ‘welfare’. Welfare, however, is defined merely as what individuals want, and only that. That is the principle of ‘methodological individualism’. A social improvement takes place when somebody can get more of what they want, without depriving anybody else. This is a ‘Pareto improvement’ (after Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist). When there is no slack, nobody can gain without somebody else losing. We get there by means of exchange: people sell what they want less of (including their labour), and buy what they want more of. Everybody has something to sell. If everyone trades freely, the system achieves a benign equilibrium, which is ‘Pareto efficient’. This was supposedly anticipated in the eighteenth century by Adam Smith as being like the work of an ‘invisible hand’. 5

In such a system, everyone gets the value of what they can sell, and what they get is what they are due. This imaginary marketplace belongs with a larger set of doctrines, ‘Just World Theories’. The concept comes from social psychology, but is used differently here. 6 The idea is simple: a Just World Theory says that everyone gets what he deserves. If the Spanish Inquisition burned heretics, that was only what they deserved. If peasants were starved and exiled in Soviet Russia, they got what they deserved. Likewise the Nazis and the Jews. Just World Theories are ubiquitous; they are political, religious, ethnic, gendered, and cultural. They justify the infliction of pain.

strange bedfellows in the oregon wildlife refuge collective insecurity club...,

NYTimes |  “There’s no question that there is now a brand of success associated with Bundy family standoffs,” said Tarso Ramos, the executive director of Political Research Associates, a think tank that studies right-wing movements. “And the success of this standoff in surviving so far has emboldened factions that once decried the effort to act in a more confrontational manner.”

Mr. Ramos pointed to the Oath Keepers, whose president, Stewart Rhodes, issued a statement during the first week of the standoff saying his group would not get involved. Mr. Rhodes later changed course, announcing that he would send an Oath Keeper team to Oregon, albeit without long guns or camouflage gear and only to “keep the peace.”

The Oath Keepers are staying in Burns, not at the wildlife refuge. Well before this protest began, Mr. Ritzheimer and Mr. Rhodes had a public falling out.

Not everyone agreed that a muted federal response had fueled the growth of the occupation. Mr. Pitcavage argued that if the government had cracked down on the Bundys, as it did at conflicts in Waco, Tex., and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, it could easily “draw attention to the effort and draw more people like a magnet.”

Nor was everyone in Oregon there because of an antigovernment agenda.

“I do not understand the culture,” said Kristi Jernigan, 44, from Tennessee, who was among the women in the compound’s kitchen feeding the occupation. Ms. Jernigan said she had little interest in politics and had arrived only “to spread love.”

“You’d be surprised at all the different people here,” she said.

mormon outlier cliven bundy has fourteen children genetically apt to bite the hand that feeds them...,

motherjones |  As one of the leaders of a band of armed, anti-government activists who have taken over a National Park Service building in Oregon, Ammon Bundy has denounced the "tyranny" of the federal government. And he has brought a new round of attention to the anti-government militia movement that in 2014 rallied behind his father, Cliven Bundy, when the elder Bundy and armed supporters confronted federal agents in Nevada. But not long ago, Ammon Bundy sought out help from the government he now decries and received a federal small-business loan guarantee.

Ammon Bundy runs a Phoenix-based company called Valet Fleet Services LLC, which specializes in repairing and maintaining fleets of semitrucks throughout Arizona. On April 15, 2010—Tax Day, as it happens—Bundy's business borrowed $530,000 through a Small Business Administration loan guarantee program. The available public record does not indicate what the loan was used for or whether it was repaid. The SBA website notes that this loan guarantee was issued under a program "to aid small businesses which are unable to obtain financing in the private credit marketplace." The government estimated that this subsidy could cost taxpayers $22,419. Bundy did not respond to an email request for comment about the SBA loan.

On Monday, ABC News reported that Bundy and the "militia members occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge set up a roadblock, and two armed members manned a guard tower that is usually used to spot wildfires." Bundy has vowed to occupy the site in Burns, Oregon, for years. He participated in that tense 2014 standoff near his father's ranch; at one point he was tased by federal law enforcement agents for kicking a police dog.

It's not clear what Bundy and his fellow anti-government protesters, who include his brother Ryan, are trying to achieve through their standoff at the wildlife refuge. In an interview posted on his family's Facebook page, Bundy said the group would leave when the federal government allows local ranchers to use their land the way they want to. But he didn't specify what that means.

The takeover began following a protest against a judge's decision to re-sentence an Oregon rancher and his son for arson. The two men admitted to starting blazes that grew out of control, but they maintained they had a right to light these fires to protect their land from invasive species. They have both already served prison time, but a judge determined their sentences were too short. The convicted ranchers have rejected Bundy's takeover of the refuge center, saying Bundy and his comrades do not speak for them. In a December 11 letter, Ammon Bundy and his supporters declared, "We hold compelling evidence that the U.S. Government abused the federal court system" in the case of the convicted ranchers.

Guns, God, and Captain Moroni

OPB |  During an April 2014 standoff with federal officials, supporters and members of the Bundy militia cited Book of Mormon passages centering on Captain Moroni. There were also several flags quoting Captain Moroni’s own writing on his “title of liberty.” Often next to American flags, these banners read “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children.”

Cliven Bundy - the Nevada Rancher who called on militia and anti-government forces to help him in the showdown with the Bureau of Land Management – cited his own Mormon faith as a reason for what he viewed as a favorable outcome. As quoted by the Salt Lake City Tribune:

“If the standoff with the Bundys was wrong, would the Lord have been with us?” he asked, noting no one was killed as tensions escalated. “Could those people that stood (with me) without fear and went through that spiritual experience … have done that without the Lord being there? No, they couldn’t.”

Those remarks represent the deep commitment to the Bundy brand of faith. Abraham Bundy – Cliven’s great-grandfather – was a deeply religious man who was driven from prior homes first by flood, and then by revolution. He settled what would become Bundyville, home to a one-room schoolhouse and a scattering of homesteads in a harsh stretch of desert.

Ultimately, the small town Abraham Bundy founded would be abandoned, after the Bundy family could not secure water and grazing rights from the federal government.

Bundy has previously said in interviews that relocation played a significant role in shaping his family’s outlook toward the federal government.

Those views are intertwined with Bundy’s faith. Speaking in St. George, Utah, after the standoff with the Bureau of Land Management, Bundy posed these questions to a crowd of mostly conservative Mormons, as reported by the Spectrum of St. George:

“If our (U.S.) Constitution is an inspired document by our Lord Jesus Christ, then isn’t it scripture?” Bundy asked.

“Yes,” a chorus of voices replied.

“Isn’t it the same as the Book of Mormon and the Bible?” Bundy asked.

“Absolutely,” the audience answered.

rotflmbao..., wattles and their "family research" council...,

alternet |  Mega-family superstar, Josh Duggar, has resigned his position as lobbyist for the Family Research Council after In Touch Magazine published a police report confirming that JimBob and Michelle Duggar of TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting” fame’s oldest son confessed to molesting several female minors in 2002 - 2003.

According to the 2006 police report, Duggar family patriarch, JimBob actively covered up Josh’s confession and neglected to notify authorities or provide professional help for Josh and/or his victims. To make matters worse, Josh’s pregnant wife, Anna Duggar, believes her husband is a changed man and continues - along with the couple’s three young children - to live with an admitted child sex offender. And to top it all off, the Duggar family publicly declared that God used the tragic situation to draw their family closer to Him.

Jesus Friggin’ Christ, what a mess! As a former Quiverfull believer, I recognize in this Duggar family debacle several essential beliefs which are widely held amongst fundamentalist Christians which shackle True Believer’s™ common sense to an outdated and irrelevant god-myth and seriously impair their ability to make sound moral choices.

JimBob and Michelle Duggar live in a fantasy world of their own making, and they believe that, just like in the fairy tales, they all will live happily ever after. While confessing to not being a perfect family, and admitting their family faces challenges and struggles every day, the Duggars are convinced “that dark and difficult time caused [the family] to seek God like never before,” which in their minds, means the molestation really wasn’t so bad, and in fact, has turned out to be a kind of blessing in disguise since each one of them “drew closer to God,” as a result of “something so terrible.”

According to the “eternally happy ending” story which the Duggars are telling themselves, the little girls whom Josh allegedly groped and fondled are not victims or even survivors of sexual abuse, but are instead equated with the “highly favored” Old Testament Joseph whose brothers sold him into slavery: What Satan meant for evil, God used for good.

Suffering in this life is insignificant - even trifling - compared to the faith-strengthening and soul-saving purpose of trials which will be richly rewarded with eternal life in Heaven … so praise the fucking Lord for whatever misery He sends to you and your children.

rule of law and academic political correctness are fin d'siecle american orthodoxy

thefourthway |  Q. Does school stand for self-initiation?
A. What does self-initiation mean? It is all words. What would it mean?

Q. If schools are so important, why do they not have more influence in the world?
A. Schools can only act through people who are interested in them. They can do nothing if they are surrounded by people who are indifferent. The possibility of schools influencing life is conditioned by the general attitude to schools. In order to have influence, schools must have people who are interested and who would obey. But this must come from below, it cannot be produced by schools. Schools can throw B influences into the world, but if people are not interested in them, they can do nothing. They cannot use violence.

Q. Can a school lose by giving away its knowledge?
A. A school can lose in many different ways. We shall come to this question later on. It depends whom it gives to. If it gives just in general and does not receive anything, certainly it will lose. If one has money and begins to give it to everybody, whether they deserve it or not, certainly one will lose one's money.

Q. You said that if we want a school we must take part in building it. How can we do that?
A. You must remember that the level of a school depends on the level of being of the people who constitute it. If there are not enough people with magnetic centre, there can be no school. But it is not simply coming to lectures and accepting what one hears that shows the presence of a
magnetic centre.

Q. Would the spreading of school ideas and school language among other people be of any help from the point of view of the school?
A. Ideas cannot be spread in the right form—it is important to understand that. It would be very good if it could be done, but it cannot. Words would remain, but the ideas themselves would be different. If it were enough to spread them, why are schools necessary? The language will spread itself, maybe even in our lifetime, but the ideas will enter into the general currency in a wrong form. For instance, there would be no distinction between 'doing' and 'happening'.

Q. We talk of schools and different levels. Is it not rather confusing? What do higher levels mean?
A. Why do you find the idea of higher levels confusing? For instance, we can take this idea of levels quite simply in relation to ourselves: using all our mental capacities we can think only up to a certain level, but if we could use higher centres, for instance higher emotional centre which already needs more or less complete self-remembering, then certainly on the same subject we could think quite differently and find many more connections in things which we do not notice now. That shows different levels of thinking, and sometimes we actually have glimpses of a higher level of thinking, so we may have some material for observation, because even now we can think differently on the same subject.

And as regards different levels of people, we meet with results of work of people obviously belonging to higher planes; we cannot say that our experience of ordinary life is limited to results of work of people like ourselves. Take the New Testament, and there are also works of art, esoteric writings, Christian literature and so on which obviously cannot belong to ordinary people. The existence of people of higher development is not imagination, not a hypothesis, but an actual fact. So I do not understand in what way it is confusing; I do not see how one can think without recognizing this fact. It is a definite fact that people live not only on the level on which we are but can exist on different levels.

From this point of view humanity can be regarded as divided into four concentric circles. The three inner circles are called Esoteric, Mesoteric and Exoteric. The fourth is the outer circle where men 1, 2 and 3 live. Schools act as gates through which man No. 4, who is between the outer and the Exoteric circle, can pass. Man No. 5 belongs to the Exoteric circle, man No. 6 to the Mesoteric and man No. 7 to the Esoteric or the innermost circle. The outer circle is also called the circle of the confusion of tongues, for in this circle people cannot understand one another. Understanding is possible only in the inner circles.

All this means there are degrees.

A man who lives in the outer circle is under the law of accident, or, if he has a strongly expressed essence, his life is more governed by the laws of his type or the laws of fate. But when a man begins to work towards consciousness, he already has direction. This means a change, perhaps not perceptible, but nevertheless cosmically a change. Only individual effort can help man to pass from the outer circle into the Exoteric circle. What refers to a man in the outer circle does not refer to a man who begins to work. He is under different laws, or rather, different laws begin to touch a man who begins to work. Each circle is under different laws.

america: club life - may the best intentional communities win

Time | We're used to choosing to join together for a goal—or not—whenever we want to 

Over the course of the last 15 years or so, there’s been an explosion in the number of charter schools around the country. According to the latest figures (from 2012), some 2.1 million students are enrolled in schools run by private groups awarded public money. The schools bear optimistic names like “YES Prep North Central” (in Houston) and “Animo Leadership High” (in Inglewood, California). Beyond the specific concerns about education, the charter school movement is powered by a particularly American world-view, one rooted in the ethos of the dissident Protestant churches that were the foundation of early American culture: Citizens opting out of a hierarchical system to pursue personal goals by joining together in a local, voluntary society.

This ideological impulse – which I and others call “voluntarism” – is a cultural trait that helps explain why the United States remains different from comparable wealthy, western nations. Broadly speaking, voluntarism is not another term for American individualism, although it entails individualism. Voluntarism is the way Americans reconcile individualism and community. And we can feel the weight of American voluntarism in our approaches to public issues, not only in charter schools, but in debates about issues like Obamacare and gay marriage as well.

Other western nations, by contrast, consider health care a civil right of citizens and a moral obligation of government. American tradition, however, treats health care as an individual’s personal responsibility, or at least as a personal responsibility exercised through voluntary association, as in workplace health insurance. When the debate around gay marriage shifted from a discussion of God, gender, sex, and propriety to a debate over individual rights, tolerance, and the personal freedom of Americans to choose their partners, the struggle for marriage equality became easier.

American voluntarism makes it hard for social-democratic reformers to persuade their fellow citizens to accept the types of ambitious state-run initiatives common in most western democracies, such as universal healthcare, free pre-schools and guaranteed labor rights. Conversely, the spirit of American voluntarism makes it harder for non-Americans to understand our public policies, which are often caricatured as being nakedly Darwinian.

 That American society was notably different — exceptional was the term — from other western societies was a staple for much of twentieth-century social science. Researchers have offered up lists of hows and whys, trying to distill the difference. I joined the enterprise when I started researching my 2010 book, Made in America, and the evidence spoke to the centrality of voluntarism in understanding American culture and its so-called exceptionalism.

if only the cathedral could stop bellyaching, get off its ass, and find something useful to do...,

physorg | "This study tests the model that the mind cares about physical features only to the extent that they suggest social relationships," explained Pietraszewski. "It shows that the reason the mind attends to race at all is to keep track of people's affiliations. When race proves not to be a factor, the alliance detection system attends to it only minimally, if at all."

"The method we used is entirely unobtrusive," said Tooby. "People don't know what you're measuring, and they couldn't control it even if they did. It shows the principles by which you're categorizing people implicitly. In and of itself, implicitly assigning people to racial categories is not racism. But if you combine the tendency to categorize by race with a negative evaluation, that is racism."

According to Tooby, when race does not predict who's on what side of an issue or who's supporting whom, the mind discards it as an element for identifying alliances. "Traditionally, the general impression people had was that when you learn to be racist, it gets deeply inscribed and sneaks out in subtle ways and it's slow to change," he explained. "One of the striking implications of this research is that the tendency to categorize by race is easy to eliminate.

"The common-sense interpretation of why you see racial categories in the world is because different kinds of people exist, and they look different from each other. Therefore, just like you pick up differences between pears and peaches, you pick up different races in the world," continued Tooby. "But at the genetic level the differences are really hard to see. It's just not the case that people of one race have a large series of genes that people from another race lack; you just don't see that."

The question then becomes why racial differences are so visually salient to people. "We see race in the world because patterns of alliance and cooperation have trained us to sort people into categories that way," he said. "And this training requires that our visual systems pick up tiny differences and amplify them until what we see matches the alliance structure of our social world. Young children are often surprised when adults describe players on their favorite team as being of a different race. They don't see it."

"This research suggests that our minds retrieve race because it predicts alliances in our social world," said Cosmides. "When other cues predict cooperative alliances better, the mind reduces its reliance on racial categories. That's why we refer to the content of your cooperation, not the color of your skin."

For years, she added, social scientists have tried unsuccessfully to identify social situations that decrease the extent to which people categorize others by race. "One of the reasons people had assumed it was so difficult is because it's supported by these perceptual differences," she said. "But we also show that when you have purely perceptual categories—like wearing red shirts versus yellow shirts—and when shirt color doesn't mean anything about coalitions or social differences, people barely pick it up, or they don't pick it up at all. You can't just say people categorize others by skin color because their visual system can't help it."

If categorizing individuals by race is a reversible product of a cognitive system specialized for detecting alliance categories, changing behavior might have more powerful effects than changing minds, the researchers said. "Many people assume you need to change how people think about racial issues to eliminate racism," Cosmides explained. "This research suggests that if cooperation across racial lines continues to increase in our society, our tendency to think about people in racial terms will fall away. Cooperation should change how people think."

why people have to periodically poleaxe potatoheads...,

royalsocietypublishing |  Centralized sanctioning institutions have been shown to emerge naturally through social learning, displace all other forms of punishment and lead to stable cooperation. However, this result provokes a number of questions. If centralized sanctioning is so successful, then why do many highly authoritarian states suffer from low levels of cooperation? Why do states with high levels of public good provision tend to rely more on citizen-driven peer punishment? Here, we consider how corruption influences the evolution of cooperation and punishment. Our model shows that the effectiveness of centralized punishment in promoting cooperation breaks down when some actors in the model are allowed to bribe centralized authorities. Counterintuitively, a weaker centralized authority is actually more effective because it allows peer punishment to restore cooperation in the presence of corruption. Our results provide an evolutionary rationale for why public goods provision rarely flourishes in polities that rely only on strong centralized institutions. Instead, cooperation requires both decentralized and centralized enforcement. These results help to explain why citizen participation is a fundamental necessity for policing the commons.

is this the accidental end of marriage, family, religion, and capitalism?

HuffPo | What if the next big thing really isn't a thing at all? What if it's a way? And what if this way doesn't bring neatly folded answers but rather a basket of disheveled questions? Often what moves our world goes unnoticed because we are looking somewhere else for something else.

I am ever amazed at what I accidentally learn on the way to seemingly more important things. I was recently part of a blue-ribbon panel on the future viability of retirement. The primary topic of conversation was the impending specter of a maddening throng of boomers using the political process to tip the scales of economic fortune in their favor to the detriment of all others. Prevailing logic has it that my generation will use its strength in numbers at the voting booth to maintain the status quo. This assumes that the generations that follow us will naturally carry the burden of our age. Yet, what has been lost in the conversation is the possibility that Millennials -- our semi-adult 20-something children -- might just opt out of our plan and more importantly our world view.

Many young people are now taking the opposite track of their parents' and eschewing social and economic convention to challenge what we take to be civil society. On our way to developing innovative solutions to our imminent retirement debacle I learned from some of the most credible researchers on the planet that our children aren't marrying; they have become the refuseniks of our competitive corporate culture and have effectively eschewed organized religion and even a belief in the almighty.

It is indeed difficult to imagine a world absent of marriage, capitalism and religion. For many of us these are the reliable struts that keep us upright and brace us when our world is akilter. But try as we might to hold firm to our ways the turn and churn of it all leaves us spinning. True innovation is born out in the very places where there is no solid ground.

Perhaps we should start with perfunctory look at some facts that suggest such an outrageous teaser:

sectarianism: these humans purportedly becoming less violent - with one exception

alternet |  Studies demonstrate the world is becoming less violent, and that human warfare is on the decline. There is one aspect of the human existence, however, that continues to ignite humans to commit violence and atrocities against fellow humans. A major new study published by the Pew Research Center [3] shows that religious hostilities reached a 6-year high in 2012.

Dr. Steven Pinker, Pulitzer prize-winning author and Harvard psychology professor, writes, “Today we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.” Pinker points out, wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and wars don’t kill as many people as they did in the Middle Ages, for instance. Also, global rates of violent crime have plummeted in the last few decades. Pinker notes that the reason for these advances are complex but certainly the rise of education, and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes of others has played its part.

Religiosity, however, continues to play its part in promoting in-group out-group thinking, which casts the difference between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments. Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, observes, “Faith inspires violence in two ways. First, people often kill other human beings because they believe the creator of the universe wants them to do it…Second, far greater numbers of people fall into conflict with one another because they define their moral community on the basis of their religious affiliation: Muslims side with Muslims, Protestants with Protestants, Catholics with Catholics.”

According to the Pew Research Center, a third (33%) of the 198 countries and territories included in the study had high religious hostilities in 2012, up from 29% in 2011 and 20% as of mid-2007. Notably, religious hostilities increased in every major region of the world except the Americas, with the most dramatic increases felt in areas still reeling from the effects of the 2010-11 political uprisings known as the Arab Spring.

The study demonstrates there has been a sizable increase in the share of countries with high or very high levels of social hostilities involving religion. “Incidents of abuse targeting religious minorities were reported in 47% of countries in 2012, up from 38% in 2011, and 24% in the baseline year of the study (2007).” Pew cites several illustrations of religious minorities being attacked by the perpetrators of the majority faith. In Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka, for example, monks attacked Muslim and Christian places of worship in April 2012. Several worshippers were killed in an attack on a Coptic Orthodox Church in Libya, which according to the U.S. State Department was the first attack on a church in Libya since the 2011 revolution.

“One of the common things we see in that group of countries is sectarian conflict,” said Brian J. Grim, senior researcher at Pew Research. “In Pakistan, even though minority religious groups like Christians face hostility, there’s also inter-Muslim conflict between Sunnis, Shias and Ahmadi Muslims.”

muslim americans exemplify diversity potential

gallup | In the first-ever nationally representative study of a randomly selected sample of Muslim Americans, Gallup reveals that Muslim Americans are the most racially diverse religious group surveyed in the United States, with African Americans making up the largest contingent within the population, at 35%.

This finding is one of many in Gallup's report, Muslim Americans: A National Portrait, which compares the opinions of Muslim Americans with those of the general U.S. population, revealing important differences in terms of gender equality, civic engagement, life evaluation, religiosity, and more.

Gender Equality

The report also reveals that Muslim American women are one of the most highly educated female religious groups in the United States, second only to Jewish American women. In addition, as a group, Muslim Americans have the highest degree of economic gender parity at the high and low ends of the income spectrum.

Muslim American women are equally as likely as men to say they attend mosque at least once a week, which stands in sharp contrast to the trend seen in some predominantly Muslim countries where men are more likely than women to report attending a religious service in the last week.

Civic Engagement Among Young Muslim Americans

The report also examines the views of Muslim American youths (aged 18 to 29) and how their levels of civic engagement compare with those of young Americans of other religious backgrounds. For example, the report finds that only 51% of young Muslim Americans are registered to vote, which is one of the lowest percentages among young Americans surveyed.

is evangelism going out of style?

 barna | Gospel tracts, sidewalk evangelism, street preachers with bullhorns—all of these things seem like evangelistic efforts of yesteryear. But if this seems true, where does that leave the state of evangelism today? Is faith-sharing a fading practice, or does it simply look different today? In all their innovative efforts to engage culture, have Christians left this ancient practice so integral to their faith behind?

Barna Group has charted evangelistic practices and attitudes for more than two decades, and the latest study sheds light on the gaps between evangelism in theory and practice, the social groups who are sharing their faith the most, and the surprising ways economics color one's outreach efforts.

Evangelism in Theory and In Practice
When asked if they have a personal responsibility to share their faith with others, 73% of born again Christians said yes. When this conviction is put into practice, however, the numbers shift downward. Only half (52%) of born again Christians say they actually did share the Gospel at least once this past year to someone with different beliefs, in the hope that they might accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.

As with most convictions, there usually lies a dividing line between theory and practice. When it comes to evangelism, that dividing line looks different among various demographics.

Barna defines evangelicals according to adherence to nine theological perspectives (defined in the details below), including one's personal responsibility to share their faith in Christ with others. So in this study, of course, evangelicals (100%) claim this responsibility by definition. Nearly seven out of 10 have acted on this conviction within the last year, meaning evangelicals have the highest rate of evangelism among the various religious segments that Barna examined.

What stands out among the data, however, is that evangelicals also have among the highest rates of failure in follow-through from conviction to action when it comes to sharing their faith. Nearly one-third (31%) believe they should evangelize, but have not done so—at least within the past year.

Catholics (34%), on the opposite end of the spectrum, are the least likely across Christian faith traditions to affirm their personal responsibility to share their faith. Yet, this minority is also the most consistent in linking their belief and behavior. Roughly one-third of all Catholics (34%) believe they should evangelize, while one-third of born again Catholics actually do.

the evolutionary roots of the base revisited...,

In the above CDC map, the key indicates the number of births for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19 in a state. For example, in dark green states, there are 50 or more pregnancies for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19.

TheAtlantic | In 2009, a landmark study found a strong correlation between religion and teen pregnancy. The CDC's newest data suggests not much has changed. Teen pregnancy closely follows the contours of America's Bible belt, according to the map (above) from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

There is good news: teen births are at their lowest level in more than 60 years (10 percent lower than 2009, 43 percent below their peak in 1970). But the geographic variation is substantial.

Teen birthrates are highest in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, and New Mexico,. There are slightly lower concentrations in the neighboring states of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Arizona. New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts have the lowest rates of teen births.

What factors lie behind this geographic pattern?

With the steady statistical hand of my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander, I took a quick look. Of course, the correlations we found are not the same thing as causation. Other factors we have not considered may come into play.

Teenage births remain high in more religious states. The correlation between teenage birthrates and the percentage of adults who say they are “very religious” is considerable (.69). The 2009 study posited that attitudes toward contraception play a significant role, noting that "religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself."

Teen birthrates also hew closely to America’s political divide. They are substantially higher in conservative states that voted for McCain in 2008 (with a correlation of .65) and negatively correlated with states that voted for Obama (-.62).

Class plays a substantial role as well. Teen births are negatively associated with average state income (-.62), the share of the workforce in knowledge, professional, and creative class jobs (-.61), and especially with the share of adults who are college graduates (-.76). Conversely, teen birthrates are higher in more working class states (with a positive correlation of .58).

Overall, teen birthrates remain highest in America’s most religious, politically conservative and blue-collar states.

a right-wing christian fundamentalist

CNN | As Norway struggles to come to terms with its greatest loss of life in decades, all eyes are on the man charged in the explosion in central Oslo and the deadly shooting rampage at a youth camp.

While police have not officially named him, Norwegian television and newspaper reports have identified the suspect as 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik, of Norwegian origin.

A picture is emerging, gleaned from official sources and social media, of a right-wing Christian fundamentalist who may have had an issue with Norway's multi-cultural society.

Norwegian and international news outlets have run photographs of a blond man with blue-green eyes and chiseled features, dressed in a preppy style.

A victim who was shot during the attack at the youth camp on Utoya island told CNN Saturday that he had seen pictures of Breivik taken from what is believed to be his Facebook page and shown on NRK and TV2. The victim said he recognized the man from the news reports as the gunman.

Breivik is a member of the Oslo Pistol Club and has three weapons registered in his name, according to leading Norwegian newspaper VG, citing Norway's official weapons register. They are a Glock pistol, a rifle and a shotgun, VG reported.

A post in Breivik's name on an online forum, Document.no, from December 2009, talks about non-Muslim teenagers being "in an especially precarious situation with regards to being harassed by Islamic youth."

"I know of many hundred occasions where non-Muslims have been robbed, beaten up and harassed by Islamic gangs," the post reads. "I had a best friend between the ages of 12-17 who was a Pakistani, so I was one of the many protected, cool 'potatoes' that had protection. But this also made me see the hypocrisy up close and personal and made me nauseous."

A Twitter account attributed to Breivik by Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has only one message, dated July 17. "One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who has only interests," it says, adapting a quote from 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill.

why we are all different (and not all religious)

epiphenom | So, on to the paper by Robert Rowthorn, which I see now has even been picked up by the Denver Post!

Just to explain a bit of the background. Rowthorn is an economist, and his paper is basically a model of what would would happen if you have a gene (strictly speaking [and for Bjørn's benefit], an allele) that predisposes for membership of a group, and if that group has high reproduction.

What he shows is that the gene spreads incredibly quickly - just 10 generations after it appears, 80% of the population have it. After 20 generations, 95% have it, and it keeps increasing until that figure reaches 100%.

Because the gene spreads, membership of the group increases. It starts off a little slower, and never quite reaches 100% (because even gene carriers can opt out in this model).

Since there is a gene for religion, and the religious (especially the ultra-conservatives) have more kids, you can easily see how this model directly relates to the real world.

And that, Dear Reader, is why 95% of the world's population are Orthodox Jews!

Oh. Alright there is clearly something wrong with the model, but that's OK. Models are usually wrong, and the fun part comes in trying to figure out why. And this model is particularly interesting because it touches on a number of popular misconceptions.

Some are specific to this model but there's also a much bigger issue underlying all this: just why is there so much variation in how religious people are, if (as some theorists will have you believe) religion is so beneficial?

But first, let's look at some specific problems with the assumptions in this model. First off, it isn't really a model of religion, despite the title of the paper. It's a model of conservatism.

Rowthorn starts from some basic assumptions. That global birthrates have fallen, but they have fallen more slowly among the most religious (and not at all among certain sects like Orthodox Jews and the Amish). That conservatism and religion are inextricably linked (and that they have a simple genetic basis). And that religion is inextricably linked to high birth rates.

A quick survey just of European history will quickly show that the last two assumptions don't hold. There have been countless examples of religious anti-conservative movements - the Protestant reformation is just the most obvious example, but there are numerous others, like the anti-slavery movement and the 12th century reformation.

Religion is invented by people, and religion can be radical and innovative - according to their needs.