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Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't |
List Price: $25.00
Your Price: $25.00 |
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Product Info |
Reviews |
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Rating: Summary: A waste of time for any student Review: After reading this book, it is clear to me that Slone has many misunderstandings about the religions he discusses. He also shows a strong bias towards cognitive science, but that is understandable since it is he field of study. He uses cognitive science to try to explain things which don't need explaining, because most people already understand what he terms, "Theological Incorrectness". He brings no new information to the discussion, and adds a number of misunderstandings and falsehoods, and I think that this book is a hinderance to the very field of study which it was meant to benefit.
Rating: Summary: A Must Read! Review: Brilliantly written! Slone has combined intellectual science with energetic communication to make this a must-read for both beginners and religious gurus. He has succeeded in keeping a potentially overwhelming subject matter alive and comprehensible with contemporary theories and an engaging new look at religious followers. Jason Slone has made a valuable contribution to the scientific study of religion.
Rating: Summary: Finally A book About Religion That Says Something! Review: Slone has done what scholars have tried to do for years. He takes a theory about the way religious people behave and think and applies a method that can actually be tested. This, young grasshoppers, is called method. You see Slone is one of the bright new scholars who understands that simply belonging to a "snobby book club" and going in circles talking about "insert big postmodern scholar here" is not scientific, academic, an/or intellectual. Well, it is not intellectual to people that actually are trying to advance a theory of their own. Hell, even a theory of someone else. Slone's explanation of Buddhism is, quite frankly, refreshing. If Cognitive Science has nothing to add to the domain of culture and/or religion, then why are Psychologists, Archaeologist, Linguists, Historians, Evolutionary Biologists, and other "scientists" participating in the new and exciting method? The reason is that we can go beyond recycle and regurgitation. It's called science.
Rating: Summary: Some good insights I haven't seen before Review: Slone's book will make the "reflexive" or "intuitive" religious believer uncomfortable, because it defines personal intuition and emotion as parts of ourselves that have been formed in the crucible of the brain's evolution, much like what many people think of as "animal instincts."
Slone suggests that there is a wide gulf between religous philosophers and average believers, and that the latter are predisposed to belief because the kind of brains that produce religious belief are, for other reasons, the kind of brains that helped our early ancestors survive in a hostile enviornment. All of Slone's examples from particular religions that show the contradictions between religious dogma or philosophy and popular expressions of the same religion seem to be a sort of lure to draw religous thinkers into Slone's way of conceiving of an origin of religious thought that need not involve an actual deity at all, which is the really interesting part.
I won't spoil the surprise and say WHAT it is about a well-tuned brain that, accidentally, also tends to produce religious thinking. To find out, read the book!
Because I am both an atheist and someone who is interested in cognitive psychology (I like Steve Pinker's work, for instance), I am inclined to feel that Slone's explanation of run-of-the-mill religous belief makes a lot of sense. I'd like to see these explanations expanded in a later book, and perhaps brought together with other evolutionary theories of the more social aspects of religion.
However, I fully expect people with a large emotional investment in religion to run from this book screaming.
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