Ngarra, Larrkardi, 2005, synthetic polymer paint on paper.

Just one generation ago Australian schoolkids were taught that Aboriginal people couldn't count beyond five, wandered the desert scavenging for food, had no civilisation, couldn't navigate and peacefully acquiesced when Western Civilisation rescued them in 1788.

How did we get it so wrong?

Australian historianBill Gammageand others have shown that for many years land was carefully managed by Aboriginal people to maximise productivity. This resulted in fantastically fertile soils, now exploited and almost destroyed by intensive agriculture.

Australian Aboriginals knew more about tides than astronomer Galileo Galilei. Painting by Justus Sustermans

In some cases, Aboriginal people had sophisticatednumber systems, knew bush medicine, and navigated usingstars and oral mapsto support flourishing trade routes across the country.

They mounted fierce resistance to the British invaders, and sometimes won significant military victories such as the raids by Aboriginal warriorPemulwuy.

Only now are we starting to understand Aboriginal intellectual and scientific achievements.

TheYolngu people, in north eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory,long recognisedhow the tides are linked to the phases of the moon.

Back in the early 17th century, Italian scientistGalileo Galileiwas still proclaiming, incorrectly, that the moon hadnothing to do with tides.

See more here:
Aboriginal scientific achievements recognised at last

(CNN) We can blame the Internet for plenty: the proliferation of porn, our obsession with cat videos, the alleged rise of teen trends likebrace yourselfeyeball licking.

But is it also a culprit in helping us lose our religion? A new study suggests it might be.

Allen Downey, a computer scientist at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, set out to understand the national uptick in those who claim no religious affiliation. These arethe nones,which the Pew Research Center considers the fastest-growing religious group in America.

Since 1985, Downey says, the number of first-year college students who say theyre religiously unaffiliated has grown from 8% to 25%, according to theCIRP Freshman Survey.

And, he adds, stats from theGeneral Social Survey, which has been tracking American opinions and social change since 1972, show unaffiliated Americans in the general population ballooned from 8% to 18% between 1990 and 2010.

These trends jibe with what thePew Research Centers Religion & Public Life Projectreported in 2012. It said one in five American adults, and a third of those under 30, are unaffiliated.

Downey says he stepped into the ongoing debate about the rise of the nonesnot because he has a vested interest one way or the other, but because the topic fascinates him. He says its good fodder for study and appeals to students who are learning to crunch real data.

In his paper Religious affiliation, education and Internet use, which published in March on arXiv an electronic collection of scientific papers Downey analyzed data from GSS and discovered a correlation between increased Internet use and religious disaffiliation.

Internet use among adults was essentially at zero in 1990; 20 years later, it jumped to 80%, he said. In that same two-decade period, we saw a 25 million-person spike in those who are religiously unaffiliated.

People who use the Internet a few hours a week, GSS numbers showed Downey, were less likely to have a religious affiliation by about 2%.Those online more than seven hours a week were even more likely an additional 3% more likely to disaffiliate, he said.

See the original post here:
Study: Is the Internet Killing Religion?

(credit: Olivier Morin/Getty Images)

Nancy Egan sees her art as a ministry to bring the Divine to the human world. Following the traditions of en plein air painting, her impressionistic landscapes invoke ones inner self to explore the divine. However, dont assume her sense of spirituality is dogmatic its general and universal. This latter 19th century painting style places the artist in the creativity of the natural environment. Her work is a broad and eclectic view of landscapes as visions that reflect the presence of nature. This second-generation artist now works from her studio in San Clemente, CA. From high school on, she has evolved from a scientific artist to a modern impressionist. Long accomplished in her work, her art reflects a growing creativity easily appreciated by the general art-loving public.

Related: Best Local Los Angeles Artists

Living in Los Angeles, Wu Tsang is a project artist who combines film and performance at venues from London to New York, and Toronto to Los Angeles. A recent example of installation art is his Green Room.This project contrasts public and private space in an interactive environment where museum visitors share functionally with the installation. Mirrors, lights, furniture and flooring collide as the subplot of a Honduran transgender womans escape to Los Angeles for a more open society streams from video screens. He is a 2004 graduate of the School of the Art Institute Chicago, and in 2010 he studied at UCLAs Interdisciplinary Studio. Born in 1982, Wu Tsang challenges conventionality at every level of culture and society.

Juan Capistrn is a multimedia artist who is not shy about exposing political reality and its impact on marginalized communities. His art seeks to enlighten through the visual senses. Originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, he earned a degree from the Otis College of Art and Design in 1999, then in 2002 a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of California, Irvine. His works have been exhibited nationally, as well as in Mexico. In a recent art installation, What We Want, What We Believe: Towards A Higher Fidelity, the artist takes inspiration from Black radicalism and the parallels with Latino experience yielding visual anthems of resistance by repurposing the work of established artists.

The Four People You Meet at Every Drug Deal is Jibade-Khalil Huffmans latest exhibition. Comprised of photos, sculptures, text and slide video, this master of storytelling through art uses the here-and-now as well as history to explore society and culture. Straying from conventional interpretations is one of his main components, or better said counterpoint. His art shows his experimental accomplishments in poetry. He complicates themes and meanings of more traditional art, but the thought-provoking results are made apparent. Both an artist and a writer, he seeks the paradoxes and absurdities that are not always apparent to the mind. In person, this up-and-coming artist exudes personality as he draws the familiar toward new vistas.

Related: Best Impressionist Art In Los Angeles

Marina Pinsky uses sculpture and photography to drive artistic images. Born in Moscow in 1986, and now working in Los Angeles, she is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and has a Master of Fine Arts from UCLA. Her works, many times called immersive, take common photos that are then re-worked, often to abstraction. From timepieces to architecture, and from light to shadow, photography as art reaches new levels with her work. Sublime in meanings, and indirectly direct, the work of the young artist shows inherent talents that are sure to evolve in the years ahead.

Robert Cuthbert is a freelance writer covering all things Los Angeles. His work can be found on Examiner.com.

See more here:
Best Up-And-Coming Visual Artists In Los Angeles

Barbara Ehrenreich is an unambiguously serious writer. She reliably produces powerfully convincing books and essays about politics, history and social justice, moving people to outrage and action without ever obfuscating her subjects in a cloud of her own emotions.

In Ehrenreichs own words: As a journalist, I search for the truth. But as a moral person, I am also obliged to do something about it. She traffics in facts and brooks no nonsense, and therefore one has not previously found her books shelved cozily near to those with spiritual themes.

But Ehrenreich is a seeker, and clearly powerless to resist a full dive into a subject that captures her, so she now gives us Living With a Wild God: a reluctantly begun but vigorously rendered book she describes as a philosophical memoir and/or metaphysical thriller.

Ehrenreichs best-known work to date has been Nickled and Dimed, in which she described her year spent undercover subsisting on the minimum wage in America. Ehrenreich an accomplished writer of social justice journalism with a Ph.D. in cell biology chose to work as waitress, hotel maid, etc., as a way of revealing the challenges and costs of this work to those who do it by necessity.

Over 20 books into her career, Ehrenreich is a builder of strong cases who does not mince words, and shes reliably not only unsentimental, but often ANTI-sentimental (even when chronicling her own cancer). So, one does not expect her to indulge in much belly-button gazing: shes an activist, and theres work to be done.

Living With a Wild God does not introduce us to Ehrenreichs belly-button, but it does take us deep into her history, her mind, and her experience of her own spirit, soul, essence or whatever one calls it. What DO we call it? What is it anyway? What are we? What is The Other, and where do we stand in relation to it? Ehrenreichs journalistic attentions have turned to the Mount Everest of truths: an oldie, a biggie and likely too challenging for any lesser explorer to surmount.

Living With a Wild God begins with Ehrenreich discovering an old journal while gathering her papers for donation to a university. The journal reconnects her with her childhood self, and reminds her that she was already taking on the big questions as a small girl. She encounters these questions at various points over the course of her life, bringing her eventually to the answers she sees now, from her vantage point on the brink of old age.

Ehrenreich lays out her autobiographical details as plain matters of fact, but theres no avoiding their emotional impact: she clearly did not have a pleasant childhood, and lived largely in alienated isolation, accompanied by an alcoholic father and an intense, troubled mother whose life eventually ended in suicide. Ehrenreich by her own generally reliable description was a ferociously intelligent, curious, emotionally endangered child, whose temperament and circumstances positioned her to seek more, and ultimately find it.

Ehrenreich through her present-day words, and quotes from her adolescent writings describes her young self as having been on a quest that climaxed in the central drama of her spiritual life, at age 17. Throughout her atheist childhood she experienced occasional dissociative episodes that she was capable of describing in detail yet less capable of contextualizing for herself. The ultimate episode came when the teenage Ehrenreich found herself on a strange and vaguely dangerous errand in the cinematically named town of Lone Pine. She describes the transformative experience she had there, but cautions:

Here we leave the jurisdiction of language, where nothing is left but the vague gurgles of surrender expressed in words like ineffable and transcendent. For most of the intervening years my thought has been: If there are no words for it, then dont say anything about it. Otherwise you risk slopping into spirituality, which is, in addition to being a crime against reason, of no more interest to other people than your dreams.

See the original post here:
Barbara Ehrenreichs Living With a Wild God will enlighten, inspire, comfort

(CNN) We can blame the Internet for plenty: the proliferation of porn, our obsession with cat videos, the alleged rise of teen trends like brace yourself eyeball licking.

But is it also a culprit in helping us lose our religion? A new study suggests it might be.

Allen Downey, a computer scientist at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, set out to understand the national uptick in those who claim no religious affiliation. These are the nones, which the Pew Research Center considers the fastest-growing religious group in America.

Since 1985, Downey says, the number of first-year college students who say theyre religiously unaffiliated has grown from 8% to 25%, according to the CIRP Freshman Survey.

And, he adds, stats from the General Social Survey, which has been tracking American opinions and social change since 1972, show unaffiliated Americans in the general population ballooned from 8% to 18% between 1990 and 2010.

These trends jibe with what the Pew Research Centers Religion & Public Life Project reported in 2012. It said one in five American adults, and a third of those under 30, are unaffiliated.

Downey says he stepped into the ongoing debate about the rise of the nonesnot because he has a vested interest one way or the other, but because the topic fascinates him. He says its good fodder for study and appeals to students who are learning to crunch real data.

In his paper Religious affiliation, education and Internet use, which published in March on arXiv an electronic collection of scientific papers Downey analyzed data from GSS and discovered a correlation between increased Internet use and religious disaffiliation.

Internet use among adults was essentially at zero in 1990; 20 years later, it jumped to 80%, he said. In that same two-decade period, we saw a 25 million-person spike in those who are religiously unaffiliated.

People who use the Internet a few hours a week, GSS numbers showed Downey, were less likely to have a religious affiliation by about 2%.Those online more than seven hours a week were even more likely an additional 3% more likely to disaffiliate, he said.

Originally posted here:
Is the Internet killing religion?

(CNN) We can blame the Internet for plenty: the proliferation of porn, our obsession with cat videos, the alleged rise of teen trends like brace yourself eyeball licking.

But is it also a culprit in helping us lose our religion? A new study suggests it might be.

Allen Downey, a computer scientist at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, set out to understand the national uptick in those who claim no religious affiliation. These are the nones, which the Pew Research Center considers the fastest-growing religious group in America.

Since 1985, Downey says, the number of first-year college students who say theyre religiously unaffiliated has grown from 8% to 25%, according to the CIRP Freshman Survey.

And, he adds, stats from the General Social Survey, which has been tracking American opinions and social change since 1972, show unaffiliated Americans in the general population ballooned from 8% to 18% between 1990 and 2010.

These trends jibe with what the Pew Research Centers Religion & Public Life Project reported in 2012. It said one in five American adults, and a third of those under 30, are unaffiliated.

Downey says he stepped into the ongoing debate about the rise of the nonesnot because he has a vested interest one way or the other, but because the topic fascinates him. He says its good fodder for study and appeals to students who are learning to crunch real data.

In his paper Religious affiliation, education and Internet use, which published in March on arXiv an electronic collection of scientific papers Downey analyzed data from GSS and discovered a correlation between increased Internet use and religious disaffiliation.

Internet use among adults was essentially at zero in 1990; 20 years later, it jumped to 80%, he said. In that same two-decade period, we saw a 25 million-person spike in those who are religiously unaffiliated.

People who use the Internet a few hours a week, GSS numbers showed Downey, were less likely to have a religious affiliation by about 2%.Those online more than seven hours a week were even more likely an additional 3% more likely to disaffiliate, he said.

See the original post:
RELIGION & INTERNET: The Rise Of The Nones

A classic work on alchemy and mysticism charts an ultimately doomed quest for spiritual enlightenment, says MICHAL BONCZA

The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy And Mysticism by Alexander Roob (Taschen 12.99)

MAKING sense of the world is hard enough in the 21st century, even with all the available paraphernalia of science, philosophies galore and contending religious beliefs to choose from.

Spare a thought then for the souls of the Middle Ages who had only the most rudimentary empiric tools to satiate their desire to comprehend the terrestrial and celestial universes.

Alchemy And Mysticism is a reprint of the Alexander Roob classic, first published in 1997, whose accessible, almanac style charts that quest.

Its also a fascinating mine of information, whose erudite text is accompanied by spectacular illustrations. They range from medieval woodcuts, 16th-18th century colour book panels and assorted diagrams to William Blake illustrations.

Marrying the keenly observed structures and motions of the heavens to the earthly domain required colossal acrobatics in logic that were routinely complicated by the ideological scrutiny of the Holy See in Rome.

The search for universal harmony and all-encompassing spirituality the philosophers stone was to be traced to Adams fall from celestial androgynity, the divine state of grace that protected against the devils temptations.

Hence Adam, a woman and a man at the same time, had the philosophers stone within his grasp until his head was turned by Lucifer, according to the mystic Jacob Bohme. This prompted a separation from his feminine self Sophia wisdom and the ensuing corruption and death.

Finding the path back to that lost paradise and restoring universal homogeneity has absorbed alchemists and mystics for the best part of the last 2,000 years.

Continue reading here:
The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy And Mysticism by Alexander Roob (Taschen 12.99)