Thinking

Religion as a belief system goes back hundreds of thousands of years. So why are so many of the religious peoples of today so focused on a supposed God that goes back only 5,000 years? The answer lies in how our brains work.

“It’s a common enough scenario. A vegetarian has been invited to a friend’s place for dinner. The host forgets that the guest is a vegetarian, and places a pork chop in front of her. What is she to do? ”    

And thanks to Alvin Plantinga, they have a rational conversation.

The U.S. has been steadily losing its religion for decades — but that trend might ramp up significantly in the years to come.

Pew Research also reports that 10 nations are outright hostile to religion.

Those head-scratchers can be “symmetrical” or “asymmetrical.” Here’s how.

Knowing who you are can stop you from becoming who you want to be.  

Adults tend to become lazy with their thinking, backing into moral and ethical wrongdoing without noticing fully what they’re doing. 

Is atheism on the rise, or is religion? At times we hear polls claiming both, but new research shows it’s not that simple. 

Don’t settle for comfortable and familiar thoughts, reach for what you don’t know, says Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt.

Go back to school, Agora style. Philosophy can train us to respond to life’s problems rather than merely react. One such training camp is coming to Baltimore. 

Rabbi Darren Levine explains how the psychology of happiness intersects with religious practice.

Hitler is commonly thought to have been an atheist, a claim that’s often used in debates about the perils of atheistic belief on a mass scale. But was he?

Hope is not as soft or as passive an emotion as we think. Here’s how ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ can teach us the philosophy and function of hope as a response to possibility.

There is a philosophical way of looking at the current arguments to remove Confederate statues, and it’s one that dates back to Ancient Greece. 

Richard Dawkins responds to the Alt-Right, Trump’s policies, and discusses the evil potential of ideology.

Where are the four “horsewomen” of new atheism? Well, here are two of them, secular scholars Rebecca Goldstein and Susan Jacoby. 

There is no end to philosophies on living a good life, just as there is no end to those wanting to sell you a program for doing so.

Fr. Thomas Joseph White on the source of our religious inclinations.

Can philosophy give you true understanding about life, the universe, and everything? Sometimes it Kant.

Does a good deed “pay off” a bad deed? A lot of people view their actions this way, says Scotty Hendricks. 

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. But if you’re a Michelin Star chef with a restaurant to run, you’re going to need a better coping strategy.

Humans are a programmable species, and we live inside the most ancient operating system of all — ideology.

You have to be a little envious of those who have faith—they have a motivational force behind them that is near impossible to beat. What if there was a secular equivalent, wonders philosophy professor Sam Newlands.

Two sociologists examine how religious practice impacts African American and Latino marriages.

Here are five ORBITER-recommended podcasts sure to challenge your thinking on what it means to be human in this world.

This week, Bill Nye tackles one of the most complicated hypotheticals of all time.

What does Robert Sapolsky—an “utter, complete, atheist”—think about the persistence of magical thinking in our modern world?

A key cognitive bias isn’t a bug, it’s just operator error (and easily correctable by using reason as nature intended).

Physics finds no trace of God so far—but does it matter?