"To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair inevitable."                                                                       - Raymond Williams

"In 2013, the University of California, Berkeley, debuted a course to teach undergraduates the tricks used by scientists to make sense of the world, in the hope that these tricks would prove useful in assessing the claims and counterclaims that bombard us every day.

"It was launched by three UC Berkeley professors — a physicist, a philosopher and a psychologist — in response to a world afloat in misinformation and disinformation, where politicians were making policy decisions based on ideas that, if not demonstrably wrong, were at least untested and uncertain.

"The class, Sense and Sensibility and Science, was a hit and convinced the professors to write a book based on the class that provides tips not only on how to systematically wade through the noise around us to seek the truth, but also how to work with those holding different values to come to a consensus on how to act." - Robert Sanders

Author Interview: Amidst Misinformation, Critical Thinking Needs a 21st Century Upgrade

"Around 85% of the global population identifies as religious. Decades of work in the social sciences have found that religious or spiritual beliefs and practices can improve people’s health and well-being; increase social cohesion, empathy and altruistic behavior; and protect people against cognitive decline or substance abuse. But also, throughout history, religion and spirituality have amplified conflict, polarization and oppression.

"Despite the manifest importance of faith as an influencer of human behavior, neuroscientists have tended to steer clear of studying how people’s beliefs affect their brains and vice versa. This includes investigation of the effects of beliefs in supernatural agents or miracles, practices around worship or prayer and participation in rituals.

"Such avoidance probably stems in part from centuries of powerful religious institutions resisting scrutiny and interrogation. But researchers and funders are also fearful that any investigation of religiosity or spirituality could be seen either as promoting a particular religion, or as flat-out unscientific.

"In 2021, researchers at the Public Health, Religion, and Spirituality Network searched the records of more than 2.5 million project proposals submitted to the US National Institutes of Health since 1985. They noted that spirituality-related terms appeared in only 0.05% of abstracts and 0.006% of titles, whereas religion-related words appeared in 0.09% of abstracts and 0.009% of titles.

"To better understand the human brain — as well as religiosity and spirituality and their effects on human life — this needs to change. We call on scholars from diverse disciplines to help establish a rigorous field: the neuroscience of religion. Our goal is not to debunk or promote religion or spirituality, but to understand the neural mechanisms underlying their effects." - Patrick McNamara, William Newsome, Brie Linkenhoker & Jordan Grafman

Article: Neuroscientists Must Not Be Afraid to Study Religion

"As Nazis in the late 1920s and ’30s were wreaking havoc on (and ultimately genocide of) the German Jewish populace regardless of social, political, cultural or religious class, antisemitism in the United States was also catching fire, stoked by wealthy bigots, sanctimonious religious figures and xenophobic politicians. This was a time when billionaire Henry Ford’s newspaper, The Deaborn Independent, published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a rabidly antisemitic fabrication alleging a Jewish plot to take over of the world, which was soon republished by the magazine Social Justice, edited by the influential radio personality and Jew-hater Father Charles Coughlin. U.S. Congressman, Rep. John Raskin, meanwhile, accused “international Jews” of trying to drag the nation into a war in Europe.

"The threat of violence against Jews and other persecuted chosen people led to The American Jewish Committee launching an anti-hate campaign … in secret! Strategically, it was important that the campaign not be about Jews alone, but all forms of bigotry. Hispanic, Irish and Asian American hate was lambasted in pamphlets, booklets and editorial cartoons. (Arab Americans had yet to be recognized.) In order to condemn bigotry, the American Jewish Committee enlisted many popular graphic commentators of the day from multiple ethnic and religious backgrounds to work on the project.

"The American Jewish Committee’s role in the campaign has been dubbed a “secret war,” and has now been collected in a slim yet powerful volume titled Cartoonists Against Racism: The Secret Jewish War on Bigotry (Yoe Books/Dark Horse) by Rafael Medoff, a founding director of The Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and artist and comics historian Craig Yoe." - Steven Heller

Article: The Daily Heller: Cartoons Attack Hate and Prejudice in America