esotericvoyage.com

from http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/november/27.40.html

…

Other survey results have been grimmer. At the May 2009 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, top political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell presented research from their book American Grace, released last month. They reported that “young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of five to six times the historic rate (30 to 40 percent have no religion today, versus 5 to 10 percent a generation ago).”

…

And so it begins, the disolution of old religions.  Soon to be replaced by the modern spirituality…  Stay Tuned.

…For example, one friend has had distinctly postmodern misgivings. When his father learned of his decision to leave the faith, he rushed his son a copy of Mere Christianity, hoping the book would bring him back. But C. S. Lewis’s logical style left him cold. “All that rationality comes from the Western philosophical tradition,” he told me. “I don’t think that’s the only way to find truth.”I also met leavers who felt Christianity failed to measure up intellectually.

Shane, a 27-year-old father of three, was swept away by the tide of New Atheist literature. He described growing up a “sheltered Lutheran” who was “into Jesus” and active in youth group. Now he spoke slowly and deliberately, as if testifying in court. “I’m an atheist and an empiricist. I don’t believe religion or psychics or astrology or anything supernatural.”

Others have been hurt by Christians. Katie, a former believer in her early 30s, had been molested by two members of her childhood church. Her mother occasionally still drags her to church. Once, one of her mother’s friends approached Katie with an intense look of concern. She grabbed Katie by the shoulders: “Katie, you’ve become so hard,” she said.

Katie’s voice faltered as she recalled the encounter. “That affected me,” she said. “I don’t want to be hard.” She paused to regain her poise. “But you have to be hard, or else life will hurt you.”

…

About the TV show “Lie to Me” from http://bigsole.blogspot.com/2010/10/lie-to-me-what-was-that-business-about.html

Yes, I did see Tricia Helfer, who played Caprica Six on Battlestar Galactica, in her guest role on Fox’s Lie to Me, Season 3, Episode 4, “Double Blind.” While she is a talented actress, I was more curious about character Cal Lightman’s reference to the Monarch and Viceroy butterflies. So, I looked up how butterflies use mimicry to confuse predators. (Tim Roth plays Lightman)

As explained at Henderson State University in Arkansas, the Monarch (Danaus plexippus) is the dangerous one, just poisonous enough to make birds ill but not kill them. The Viceroy benefits from mimicking the Monarch’s color pattern, but only taste bad:

Another butterfly, smaller than the Monarch but mimicking its color pattern, can be found in areas inhabited by the Monarch. Compare the left photo of the Monarch to the right photo of its mimic. This mimic, called a Viceroy (Limenitis archippus), does not feed on milkweed and is not toxic. It would be acceptable food for a bird, but if the bird has already learned not to eat a Monarch, the bird will leave the Viceroy alone as well. If a bird ate a Viceroy first, it might not learn that the color pattern is meant to be a warning. That would make the mimicry less effective, so there are fewer Viceroys than Monarchs. Lower numbers of Viceroys increase the chances that the first contact a bird has would be with a Monarch.

…

Elizabeth SanFilippo explains at Gather how this butterfly issue relates to Lie to Me’s “Double Blind” episode.

… (Tricia Helfer’s character) Naomi (is) a Viceroy butterfly, mimicking the poisonous Monarch butterfly so predators stay away. Since Naomi is so skilled at deception and Lightman has difficulty reading her, he realizes it’s in his best interests to stay away, too. Although that doesn’t stop him from giving Naomi time to escape.

“Lie to Me” gets it mostly correct.  Wikipedia has a bit more details on the Monarch butterfly.  Mimicry has more than one form; Mullerian and Batesian.

from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-original-tweeter-ndash-finchs-songs-decoded-2138118.html

The elaborate songs of a bird species famed for its wide repertoire of tunes have been decoded for the first time. Scientists have been able to predict the correct sequence of notes and “syllables” in the Bengalese finch’s melodious, but erratic songs.

The team from Pennsylvania State University now believe they can reproduce the bird’s song after studying more than 25,000 melodies recorded from a finch which was kept in a sound-proofed studio on campus for several days. 

The study, carried out by Dr Dezhe Jin is part of a wider investigation into how individual brain cells can control birdsong, which could help to shed light on the complex neural networks involved in human speech.

Earlier work by Dr Jin and his colleagues focused on the simpler songs of the zebra finch – a close relative of the Bengalese version – which has helped to explain how the brain of the bird controlled the complex vocalisation involved when young birds learn to sing the song of their parents.

“Unlike dogs and cats, whose vocalisations are innate and unlearned, songbirds learn a song in much the same way as humans learn a language – through cultural transmission,” said Dr Jin.

“We saw that when one syllable was sung, a specific set of neurons [brain cells] in the clump fired, which in turn caused the next set of neurons to fire and that was associated with the next syllable in the song being sung.

“The sequential bursts of brain activity represent sequential notes in the same piece of music,” he explained.

Both humans and birds arrange sets of learned syllables in a sequence, or syntax, in order to communicate.

The syntax of birds if simpler than that of humans, but scientists believe that understanding it will help the understanding of human speech. The Bengalese finch posed more of a problem than the zebra variety, which learns just one song during its lifetime, because it has such a varied repertoire. The scientists, however, were able to solve the problem of trying to predict its songs by using a variation on a statistical technique called the “hidden Markov model”.

Instead of one-to-one mapping between a syllable in the song and a circuit neural activity in the brain – which has been used to explain the song of the zebra finch – researchers refined the analysis to a “many-to-one” mapping, meaning each syllable of the song was plotted to several neural circuits.

from http://www.hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/precognition-real-cornell-university-lab-releases-powerful-new-evidence-human-mind-can-

…skepticism can be overdone.  Freedictionary.com defines a skeptic as “One who instinctively or habitually doubts, questions, or disagrees with assertions or generally accepted conclusions.”  A certain amount of skepticism is important for science.  While science has sometimes upheld traditional beliefs, it has often upturned them.  Telescopes and spacecraft revealed airless space and hunks of rock in the sky, not gods or ancestors.  But there’s one thing skepticism is not about — it is not about rejecting observed data because it disagrees with current theoretical understanding.  One of the disturbing features of psi research in the last few decades has been the exceptional derision it’s faced from some individuals and groups purporting to advocate rationality and skepticism.

For instance we have CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, pronounced “Psi Cop”), a well-funded organization devoted specifically to debunking claims of psi phenomena, with multimillion dollar headquarters in New York and LA.  In 2006, CSICOP changed its name to CSI (the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), but continues to use the csicop.org Internet domain.

On their website, CSICOP states that their brand of skepticism “does not reject claims on a priori grounds, antecedent to inquiry, but examines them objectively and carefully.”  And yet, listen to Lee Nisbet, former Executive Director of CSICOP: “[Belief in psi is] a very dangerous phenomenon. Dangerous to science, dangerous to the basic fabric of our society… We feel it is the duty of the scientific community to show that these beliefs are utterly screwball.”  To my mind, this isn’t skepticism — it’s dogma.  A real skeptic would want to investigate claims like Bem’s with an open mind, to understand the real truth, regardless of beliefs or biases one way or another.

…