Cover comments for The Spiritual Brain

Okay, the box is getting slit along the sides, and the packing fluff is flying everywhere. Here are some advance comments from people in the know about The Spiritual Brain, the book to which this blog is dedicated :

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, author of Why God Won't Go Away says

The Spiritual Brain is a wonderful and important book that provides new insights into our experience of religion and God. It offers a unique perspective to the ongoing dialogue between science and religion. This book is a necessary read for both the scientist and the religious person.

-Andrew Newberg, M.D. Associate Professor of Radiology and Director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania. Co-author of Why We Believe What We Believe.

Consciousness researcher Dean Radin, author of The Conscious Universe says:

Is spiritual experience an illusion caused by a misfiring brain, as many scientists believe, or is it something more? In The Spiritual Brain neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and journalist Denyse O’Leary persuasively argue that it is indeed something more. This means the mainstream neurosciences may have overlooked something of profound importance about who and what we are. If you have a mind, you will find The Spiritual Brain a refreshing antidote to the strange arguments offered by some scientists who insist that their minds, and yours, are meaningless illusions.

- Dean Radin, PhD, Senior Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences and author of The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds

We promise it will be as good as all that ... and way more!

More huffing and puffing for the anti-God crusade

Here’s yet another item, by Anthony Gottlieb, promoting the new "atheists with attitude", in the New Yorker. This one claims that there are 500 million of them worldwide:

After making allowances for countries that have, or recently have had, an officially imposed atheist ideology, in which there might be some social pressure to deny belief in God, one can venture conservative estimates of the number of unbelievers in the world today. Reviewing a large number of studies among some fifty countries, Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California, puts the figure at between five hundred million and seven hundred and fifty million. This excludes such highly populated places as Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, and Nigeria, for which information is lacking or patchy. Even the low estimate of five hundred million would make unbelief the fourth-largest persuasion in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.

Dude, what you smoke? Change your brand. The vast majority of the world's atheists are probably non-materialist atheists, which means that they are of little use to the current Ivy League-Oxbridge anti-God squad.

There are so few materialist atheists of any type, outside faculty lounges, that they are dead last in likely future belief systems.

Incidentally, I would be curious to know why editors of legacy media don't catch on and get tired of all this hot air. Do they attend special seminars that tell them, "Don't ask around. Just believe this is hot!"?

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), anoverview of the intelligent design controversy, and of Faith@Science. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).