Human dignity—is it a useful concept in bioethics, one that sheds important light on the whole range of bioethical issues, from embryo research and assisted reproduction, to biomedical enhancement, to care of the disabled and the dying? Or is it, on the contrary, a useless concept—at best a vague substitute for other, more precise notions, at worst a mere slogan that camouflages unconvincing arguments and unarticulated biases?

Religious and spiritual expression is always embedded in societal structures. If social structures are moving towards the form of distributed networks, what kind of evolution of spiritual expression can we expect? In this essay, we will first describe the general societal changes that we see emerging, and expect to become more prevalent in the future, then examine to what degree these changes will have an impact on individual and collective spiritual expression. The reader has to bear with us in the first general part, which explains the peer to peer dynamic, in order to understand its application to spirituality, which is the subject of the second part of the essay. Finally, in the third and final part, we will discuss a few concrete examples.

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

Presented here in two parts are reflections on Ken Wilber’s Integral Methodological Plu-ralism (IMP). Part one presents four phenomenal domains within the eight zones of IMP that relate to four zone pairs. The purpose of the study is to point out the similarities that characterize the zone pairs, clarify and differentiate the nature of each of the four domains, and particularly to identify and illuminate the specific nature of the phenomena that arise in zones #5 and #7 within the IMP system. Part two of the paper takes up each zone in more detail and provides examples and comments.

With their essay “The Death of Environmentalism,” released last October, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus ignited a firestorm in the U.S. environmental movement and around the world. Despite the extreme threat of climate change, “not one of America’s environmental leaders is articulating a vision of the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis,” wrote Shellenberger and Nordhaus. Instead, they argued, modern environmentalism has become too focused on technical policy fixes and single-issue politics and is “no longer capable of dealing with the world’s most serious ecological crisis.” More important, perhaps, is the idea that environmentalism can no longer rely on a negative, complaint-based style of activism that fails to engage with the public.

A collection of writings, quotes, and debates regarding God, Jesus Christ, Bible, Christian apologetics, theology, church, atheism, skepticism, The Jesus Seminar, G.A. Wells, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, evolution, theistic-evolution, eugenics, the Kansas State School Board evolution ruling, and historical quotes by the Founding Fathers regarding America's relationship with God. Richard Dawkins, Stephen J. Gould, William Provine.

essays and debates by Richard Carrier

Welcome to another discussion of "The Great Ideas." Today we're going to consider the idea of God. It should not surprise you to learn that the idea of a Supreme Being is itself supreme among "The Great Ideas." In the Syntopicon where we were working on the 102 Great Ideas of Western thought we found this out as we went through all of the 102 ideas, we found that the idea of God was the idea to which there were more references in the literature of western writings, poetry, philosophy, theology and science and references by more diverse authors, different kinds of authors than occurred in the case of any other idea; both in the extent of the references and the variety of the references, the discussion of God is the largest single discussion that has gone on in the intellectual tradition of the West.

Aikido Entrepreneurship: good business winning the game to evolve it -- integrating power, conservation and trusteeship