How the hell do you have time to read all this and still crap, let alone write?

Where is the link for The Ego Advantage supposed to go?

Argh! Morning brain. Have fixed broken link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/opinion/25brooks.html

Thank you.

Thank you, and thank you for sharing it. I don't read all of the links you post, but many of them catch my eye.

As someone currently studying interpersonal neurobiology, I strongly disagree with the take that neuroscience is deterministic. Factors such as resilience and the exercise of one's own will really are affected by the choices an individual makes. If a deterministic universe were true from a neuroscientific perspective, then you wouldn't have people overcoming vast challenges to succeed like they do (unless of course they're predetermined to succeed...which leads to a logic trail that essentially ends up looking like you're chasing a hound's tail).

The Calvinistic presuppositions cast an extremely long shadow over Protestant Christianity. It's one reason why I have a minimal ability to attend services in all but the most liberal of liturgical-type churches, and it sure as hell isn't Biblical, in my not so humble opinion (and I retain enough of my studies of Biblical Hebrew to assert that it ain't supported linguistically in the Old Testament. In spite of Job, and the problem of Job).

And then...the story about the Methodist preacher who lost his church due to his support of a book that challenges the popular belief in hell. Even the current Catholic Catechism handwaves it, defining it as eternal separation from God by one's own choice. But faiths that depend upon a weekly altar call (not necessarily Methodist but definitely Baptist) play even harder on the concept of hellfire and damnation than those who don't. Non-altar call churches tend to stress the notion that hell is eternal separation from the Divine, but most tend to paint heaven in images so prosaic that it's boring.

(and yes, I have a chuckle for the perennial joke that takes the teller's religion of choice as the Fun One in heaven, while the targeted religion has high walls built up around it to ignore the silliness.)

The funny thing about that "Who's in Hell?" discussion is that the reporter, while never actually coming out and saying so, is obviously convinced that (a) a lot of the negative commentary is coming from the kookiest, fringiest part of the world, (b) is frightened by just how commonplace such vicious kookery is ("Gandi is in Hell!"), and (c) that allegiance to the "Hell is real and you'll go there if you don't belong to our tribe" is pure tribal politics; it's about the threat this heresy represents, the loss of bodies and capital to the resource base of the churches.

I've always thought a WAG was a Wild-Assed Guess.