Is the Lose of Religious Liberties Inevitable in a Modern Society?

By: Alexandria Addesso

Religion has long been the scapegoat of many of the world’s problems; poverty, ignorance, immorality, backwardness, and war. It is believed and frequently perpetuated that most wars were started and carried out because of religion, such instances were usually deemed “holy wars”. But do these notions suggest that there must be a war fought against religion itself?

Most first-world Western Nations are highly secularized. Where religions were once used to dictate moral standards and laws, now modern “norms” seem to be the guiding light. Such nations that lean toward secularism seem to hold atheism as the highest intellectual belief structure (or rather lack thereof). So what does that mean for those who still practice religions or formal faith structures?

Religious liberty and freedoms are hot-button topics in current events. The newly elected United States president, just days after being inaugurated, signed an executive order that banned people from entering the country if their visas were from 7 particular countries and if they were also Muslim. And while some may not disagree with these measures and brand the United States as a “Christian” nation, the state department completely disregarded the
Christian genocide that was ongoing in the Middle East and Africa for several years.



What is the cost we pay for progressiveness? Technological and scientific advances seem to push the need for the protection of religious liberties and freedoms further and further away. Would a religion-free society be better than a religious one? There is no doubt that many people would fight to establish the former, and there are currently people working for just that.

But with a look back on history to nations that tried to eliminate religions and make all such practices illegal does not paint a perfect picture, but rather just the gruesome opposite. The Cristero Rebellions in the 1920s where the Mexican government tried to suppress Catholicism and kill off clergy is one such example of such wickedness. The religionless Soviet Union is another. Yet in most of these cases the faith of such adherents only seemed to grow stronger, even unto death. So should these religious liberties be protected like any other human right or should they be part of the “final test”? Stay vigilant.

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The Philosophy in Modern Times: We Really Need its Values

For many people philosophy is an obscure and largely outdated discipline that has little relevance in the real world. I’ve taught an introductory philosophy course for many years and many of my students come into the course with the idea that philosophy is little more than opinions wrapped in big words and focuses on topics that have no bearing on practical matters like paying for school or landing a job. So what’s the point? Why do people study philosophy and what, if any, value does it have?

I’ve found the study of philosophy to be life changing. This isn’t a slogan for me. Philosophy has proven to be immensely satisfying and valuable. Here are seven reasons why.

It broadens my world
Like the freed prisoner in Plato’ allegory of the cave, studying philosophy forced me to think differently about the world around me. Prior to studying philosophy, the world was simple, dogmatism came cheap, and frankly, the world was pretty bland. Don’t get me wrong, simplicity is great when things are simple. Few of us seek to make life needlessly more complicated. But complexity can actually be quite wonderful when it opens up new vistas. As I’ve aged, I’ve learned to appreciate fine cooking and all the adornments that go along with it (like a good wine and an enveloping atmosphere). As many an epicurean will tell you, the best cooking is generally not simple cooking. Tasting excellent food that has layers of perfectly balanced flavors that were prepared over hours or days and that come alive with the right wine or a hand-crafted bread is among the most enriching experiences one can have. Philosophy does the same for me with ideas. Getting past the boxed mac-and-cheese simple answers to a feast of nuanced philosophy is, simply, wonderful.



It trains my mind
The mind is in many ways like a muscle. It needs to be exercised, stretched, and pushed to the limit to be at its best. Philosophy can be very tough. As Alvin Plantinga has said, “Philosophy is just thinking hard”. Philosophy as a discipline, has forced me to think more precisely and carefully. It is teaching me how to frame problems and where to go to make better sense of those problems. It always pushes me to be a better thinker. For me, there was an unexpected outcome to stretching my mind to my intellectual limits. It makes many of the more mundane, daily challenges I face much easier to handle. And training your body to bench press, two hundred pounds makes opening the pickle jar quite a bit easier.

It continually challenges me
This probably goes without saying and is closely related to the point above. Philosophy is challenging not only because it tackles hard problems, but because it unrelenting in its demand for clarity. A friend of mine who was struggling with the question of God’s existence once expressed exasperation with the unsettled nature of the philosophical literature on the question. “If you read a good argument for one position one month, the next month there will be three journal articles with counterarguments that show why the first argument was wrong.” This constant dialogue with no clear end can be very frustrating. But it also forces us to learn how to evaluate what we’re thinking about and synthesize it. This challenge is something I find invigorating. I expect it to last a lifetime.



It makes me careful
One of the greatest lessons I’m learning from studying philosophy is that there are very few easy answers to life’s intractable problems. Philosophy has pushed me to labor over the nuance of a word or phrase. It encourages me to constantly challenge my assumptions and to slow down and be patient while looking for something that might resemble an answer. Finishing a great book in philosophy most of the time means concluding with more questions than I started with. While this can sound frustrating to some, it has brought a great deal of peace to me. I’m learning that when it comes to ideas, the journey is quite a bit more enjoyable than the destination.

It changes my point of view
There’s a popular bumper sticker that reads, “Hire a teenager while he still knows everything.” It’s funny--at least to everyone but teenagers--because with age we come to learn that life is nuanced and requires changing our minds about a great many things. Philosophy provides the means by which I can consider views of points. I would not otherwise consider and to look in a different way at problems I once thought were solved. Think of where’d you’d be, if you still believed all the things you were certain of when you were twelve. Healthy change generally means growth and that’s a good thing.

It tempers dogmatism
I’m learning that dogmatism may partly be rooted in a desire to be secure. While security generally is something to be prized, when it comes to the life of the mind, too much security can actually be a detriment. Because logic is so central to philosophy, it’s natural to think that intellectual problems all have hard-and-fast logical outcomes and the goal is to find those irrefutable conclusions. If this were the case, dogmatism would be hard to avoid. But philosophy, taken holistically, has led me in the opposite direction. The ambiguity of words, the fuzzy nature of our knowledge of the truth of many facts, the influence of the passions and desires, the imprecision of experience, and the obvious limitations of our mind should introduce a great deal of intellectual humility and tentativeness to our worldview. Philosophy as a discipline (and, in my opinion, when done properly) exposes both the power and the limitations of logic. As G.K. Chesterton rightly observed, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”



It puts things in perspective
As I alluded to above, philosophy is teaching me how to understand the relative importance of ideas. It’s all too easy to view every idea as equally important and to want to “go to the mat” for every idea we find disagreeable. But by having to go deep on concepts, I’ve learned that some ideas are worth wrestling with and others are not. There are a lot of very interesting ideas to labor over, argue about, and spend time on. There are a lot of others that aren’t. Philosophy is helping me figure out which are which.
Source: Paul Pardi

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What Did Neanderthals Leave to Modern Humans? Some Surprises

At Vanderbilt University, John Anthony Capra, an evolutionary genomics professor, has been combining high-powered computation and a medical records databank to learn what a Neanderthal heritage — even a fractional one — might mean for people today.
We spoke for two hours when Dr. Capra, 35, recently passed through New York City. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

-Let’s begin with an indiscreet question. How did contemporary people come to have Neanderthal DNA on their genomes?

-He replied: “we hypothesize that roughly 50,000 years ago, when the ancestors of modern humans migrated out of Africa and into Eurasia, they encountered Neanderthals. Mating must have occurred then, and later.”

One reason we deduce this is because the descendants of those who remained in Africa — present day Africans — don’t have Neanderthal DNA.

What does that mean for people who have it?
At my lab, we’ve been doing genetic testing on the blood samples of 28,000 patients at Vanderbilt and eight other medical centers across the country. Computers help us pinpoint where on the human genome this Neanderthal DNA is, and we run that against information from the patients’ anonymized medical records. We’re looking for associations.



What we’ve been finding is that Neanderthal DNA has a subtle influence on risk for disease. It affects our immune system and how we respond to different immune challenges. It affects our skin. You’re slightly more prone to a condition where you can get scaly lesions after extreme sun exposure. There’s an increased risk for blood clots and tobacco addiction.

To our surprise, it appears that some Neanderthal DNA can increase the risk for depression; however, there are other Neanderthal bits that decrease the risk. Roughly 1 to 2 percent of one’s risk for depression is determined by Neanderthal DNA. It all depends on where on the genome it’s located.

Was there ever an upside to having Neanderthal DNA?
It probably helped our ancestors survive in prehistoric Europe. When humans migrated into Eurasia, they encountered unfamiliar hazards and pathogens. By mating with Neanderthals, they gave their offspring needed defenses and immunities.



That trait for blood clotting helped wounds close up quickly. In the modern world, however, this trait means greater risk for stroke and pregnancy complications. What helped us then doesn’t necessarily now.

Did you say earlier that Neanderthal DNA increases susceptibility to nicotine addiction? Yes. Neanderthal DNA can mean you’re more likely to get hooked on nicotine, even though there were no tobacco plants in archaic Europe.

We think this might be because there’s a bit of Neanderthal DNA right next to a human gene that’s a neurotransmitter implicated in a generalized risk for addiction. In this case and probably others, we think the Neanderthal bits on the genome may serve as switches that turn human genes on or off.

Aside from the Neanderthals, do we know if our ancestors mated with other hominids? We think they did. Sometimes when we’re examining genomes, we can see the genetic afterimages of hominids, which haven’t even been identified yet.




MORE REPORTING ON HUMAN ORIGINS
A few years ago, the Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo received an unusual fossilized bone fragment from Siberia. He extracted the DNA, sequenced it and realized it was neither human nor Neanderthal. What Pääbo found was a previously unknown hominid he named Denisovan, after the cave where it had been discovered. It turned out that Denisovan DNA can be found on the genomes of modern Southeast Asians and New Guineans.

Have you long been interested in genetics?
Growing up, I was very interested in history, but I also loved computers. I ended up majoring in computer science at college and going to graduate school in it; however, during my first year in graduate school, I realized I wasn’t very motivated by the problems that computer scientists worked on.

Fortunately, around that time — the early 2000s — it was becoming clear that people with computational skills could have a big impact in biology and genetics. The human genome had just been mapped. What an accomplishment! We now had the code to what makes you, you, and me, me. I wanted to be part of that kind of work.

So I switched over to biology. And it was there that I heard about a new field where you used computation and genetics research to look back in time — evolutionary genomics.



There may be no written records from prehistory, but genomes are a living record. If we can find ways to read them, we can discover things we couldn’t know any other way.

Not long ago, the two top editors of The New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial questioning “data sharing,” a common practice where scientists recycle raw data other researchers have collected for their own studies. They labeled some of the recycling researchers, “data parasites.” How did you feel when you read that?
I was upset. The data sets we used were not originally collected to specifically study Neanderthal DNA in modern humans. Thousands of patients at Vanderbilt consented to have their blood and their medical records deposited in a “biobank” to find genetic diseases.

Three years ago, when I set up my lab at Vanderbilt, I saw the potential of the biobank for studying both genetic diseases and human evolution. I wrote special computer programs so that we could mine existing data for these purposes.

That’s not being a “parasite.” That’s moving knowledge forward. I suspect that most of the patients who contributed their information are pleased to see it used in a wider way.

What has been the response to your Neanderthal research since you published it last year in the journal Science?

Some of it’s very touching. People are interested in learning about where they came from. Some of it is a little silly. “I have a lot of hair on my legs — is that from Neanderthals?”

But I received racist inquiries, too. I got calls from all over the world from people who thought that since Africans didn’t interbreed with Neanderthals, this somehow justified their ideas of white superiority.

It was illogical. Actually, Neanderthal DNA is mostly bad for us — though that didn’t bother them.

As you do your studies, do you ever wonder about what the lives of the Neanderthals were like?
It’s hard not to. Genetics has taught us a tremendous amount about that, and there’s a lot of evidence that they were much more human than apelike.

They’ve gotten a bad rap. We tend to think of them as dumb and brutish. There’s no reason to believe that. Maybe those of us of European heritage should be thinking, “Let’s improve their standing in the popular imagination. They’re our ancestors, too.’”
Source: Claudia Dreifus

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