About two weeks ago, I posted a little item called The Teflon God, about the highly evolved and adaptive unfalsifiability of religious “memeplexes”, in response to an item by William Vallicella.
My post attracted the notice of Dennis Mangan, proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, and he commented on it in a post of his own, which in turn prompted me to respond here. The discussion has carried on since then over at Dennis’s place, where he has since posted a third item in the series.
One of the commenters on this most recent post at Dennis’s place — a person who had signed in as “thursday” — linked to a most interesting item over at the excellent website (and member of our exclusive blogroll) Gene Expression. The item linked to was about a series of studies showing a correlation between “religiosity” and the measurable psychological characteristic known as “Conscientiousness” (yes, they have ways of quantifying these things these days). This result, I’m sure, comes as no surprise to the religious, but is interesting in the light of recent ideas of religion as a group-level adaptation, such as those put forward by David Sloan Wilson.
Taking advantage of the “hyperlink” feature that has made the World Wide Web increasingly popular over recent decades, I visited “thursday’s” own website, and found it to be of such good quality that I am adding it to our sidebar at once, and recommending it to you all. It is a weblog called The Man Who Is Thursday — a reference to G.K. Chesterton’s novel of almost the same name — and is currently featuring an excellent essay about the mechanics of genius. I recommend it to you all.
Meanwhile, I assumed — correctly, as it turned out — that a blogger of this caliber must have an interesting blogroll of his own, so I chose a link almost at random, and ended up at Unqualified Reservations, the home of a writer calling himself Mencius Moldbug. I immediately found myself drawn into an outstanding series of posts about religion and atheism, entitled How Richard Dawkins Got Pwned. Onto the sidebar it goes.
No wonder there never seem to be enough hours in the day.