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The following came from an educational podcast, About World Religions (or something like that).
Axes of Comparison
There are several important axes of comparison among religions.
Universal and...
Fragments from the book
Replace white with black
"Once they replaced the colonial rulers [of Africa], they wanted to become just like them. They wanted to be all-powerful and omnipresent. We just...
Arthur A. Goldsmith, in Africa’s Overgrown State Reconsidered: Bureaucracy and Economic Growth, comments that the time of creation is an extremely important period for an organization because...
Our visionaries must be far clearer about the nature of our struggle. In their understandable efforts to say what we are not doing—fighting Islam or provoking Arab peoples—they have failed...
Below you will find an interesting assortment of quotations about atheism and atheists. I have always found atheists an interesting bunch, just as I find organized religion an interesting...
A Time for Truth
It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory,...
All pages that are book fragments will list here.
Types of Influence and Persuasion
Education
Advertising
Propaganda
Indoctrination
Thought Reform
Focus of body of knowledge
Many bodies of knowledge, based on scientific findings in...
Here are some interesting business and economics stories. It reminds me of something an economics professor used to say - You can ask five economists a question, and get seven answers. And...
Proposition
New movements draw from religiously inactive
Christian Growth
Most studies of early Christianity stress its very rapid growth, though usually very few figures are actually...
Definitions
Sect vs. Cult
Propositions
Worldly dimension of religious commitment
Otherworldly dimension of religious commitment
Universal dimension of religious commitment
Christianity was a...
Definitions
Marginalization
Propositions
Resolve marginalization
Cultural continuity
Existing social networks
Some historians believe that Christianity was not able to convert very many Jews....
Two major epidemics swept the Roman empire in 165 and 251. Although contemporary Christian writers such as Cyprian (bishop of Carthage), Eusebius, and Dionysius (bishop of Alexandria), and other...
Definitions
Primary and Secondary conversion
The early church seemed especially attractive to Pagan women, in part because Christianity accorded higher status to women than did the Greco-Roman...
Christianity was an urban movement. Wayne Meeks, author of The First Urban Christians, wrote that “within a decade of the crucifixion of Jesus, the village culture of Palestine had been left far...
Christianity was an urban movement, so we must understand cities of the time. Stark focuses on Antioch in this chapter.
Cities were packed
Greco-Roman cities were small in terms of area and...
Propositions
Religious compensators
Perceived value of compensator
Collectivity creates value
Credible evidence for compensators
Credibility for religious leaders
Martyrs are credible
Religion...
A cult is usually founded by one person, who is the ultimate leader. He (it is almost always a male) makes all the decisions. They are “self-appointed, persuasive persons who claim to have a...
In 1990, sociologist Elinor Ostrom argued that external authorities might not be necessary in governing what she called common pool resources (CPRs). Ostrom studied the ways that people shared...
Helpful Links
Common Pool Resources
One of my driving ambitions is to strengthen community and encourage collaboration everywhere. Every society is a complicated network, like an ecosystem. The...
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Davis Dollars
My Community, My World blog
Nick Discovers blog
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This page is a category page for fragments from the book Cults in our Midst by Margaret Thaler Singer.
Categories:
book fragments
How the United States Marine Corps Differs from Cults
The Marine recruit clearly knows what the organization is that he or she is joining. What will be expected of him or her and what will...
When your Joe Schmo says "cult," he means an evil, manipulative group that controls its members and hides from the public. For this sense of the word, see my notes on Margaret Thaler Singer's...
The official's heart must stand at attention before his mind.
A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky
The highest measure of democracy is neither the 'extent of freedom' nor the 'extent of equality', but rather...
From page 97-99:
From time to time I will…hear someone compare cults to an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or to some other group with a charismatic leader…AA does not recruit...
In Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany, “over half of those surveyed had some form of negative reaction to mobile phone use in public.” Sadie Plant quoted Goffman by way of explaining the...
Economic geography is mainly (though not exclusively) concerned with the locational analysis of productive activities. Four major sets may be identified:
Primary activity: the extractive sector...
Natural Property
In order to regulate the environment, the government usually converts the environment into property and commodities.
What exactly is property? It is usually something rival (only...
This is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.
There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.
Anybody could have...
Massive outbreaks of cooperation precipitated the collapse of communism. In city after city, huge crowds assembled in nonviolent street demonstrations, despite decades of well-founded fear of...
Paper stuff
"Follow the dots" sign
"Take one" sign for codeword
Code word cards
"Look Behind You" sign
"Take one of each" sign
"For more shenanigans…" sign
Our calling cards
"Make Mischief" for...
This page is just a category page.
Hello, and welcome to the world of Nicksights. Well, they're mostly culled from the work of others, but you know what they say about great artists…
This site is really meant to organize my...
If you are allowed to edit pages in this Site, simply click on edit button at the bottom of the page. This will open an editor with a toolbar pallette with options.
To create a link to a new page,...
One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus callosum...
The url for images attached to this page is: http://nicksights.wikidot.com/local--files/images/filename
Why post information here rather than in documents on my computer, where formatting is easier? It’s the links, stupid! This allows interesting interconnections between different topics.
As this...
Who can join?
Anyone who's interested in making contributions to this site can join. The idea is to gather interesting information about a variety of subjects. Really, whatever tickles your fancy...
Marcus J. Borg comments that the big-bang theory is remarkably similar to God’s first act of creation: Let there be light. One scientist observes on the big-bang theory:
For the scientist who...
Sometimes, similar military organizations in the same country, even given the same strategic objective, formulate different missions to achieve that objective and select different indicators to...
Letter to Warner Bros: A Night in Casablanca
While preparing to film a movie entitled A Night in Casablanca, the Marx brothers received a letter from Warner Bros. threatening legal action if they...
This is a response by H. G. Wells to Hilaire Belloc. Belloc objects to evolution. Says Martin Gardner in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, “Where is one to place the dozens of...
Hello! Nicholas Barry, at your service.
I created this wiki because I wanted to organize all the personal research I had saved on my computer. Word documents don't allow me to link between...
A graph of world population shows an exponentially rising curve. We can graph world population against world economy, and will find that growth in the economy is outpacing population growth....
When there is an equal risk of winning and of losing, if you had only two lives to win, you might still wager; but if there were three lives to win, you would still have to play (since you are...
A question for the astute reader:
How much should public servants be paid? This includes elected officials, appointed officials, bureaucrats, police officers, rangers, etc.?
Of course there is no...
A conception of politics as decision making is at least as old as Plato and Aristotle. It is reflected in the language and concerns of political thought, from the earliest political philosophers...
Dan Shnur, a Republican political strategist, comments that the ability of rich people to donate lots of money to political campaigns robs those without such money (including the whole group of...
If you do not do politics, you will be done in by politics. While this may not be true of individuals, it is certainly so for whole groups. And, of course, a whole group fails to participate when...
These pages are about Africa's politics in particular.
In response to the spread of protectionism, the French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1851) wrote the following fictitious petition, in which French candle makers ask for protection from...
This page is a category page for open questions. Readers are encouraged to contribute to these pages, either by adding content or insights directly to the page body, or by leaving thoughts in...
You'll find my articles on religion are much more social-scientific than religious. I don't think an objective view of religion detracts from its sacred side, though. Explaining why someone...
If our science education were as paltry as this list of science articles, we'd be in trouble. I'm working on it.
In the fourth place, everything possible should be done to free sexual relations from the economic taint. At present, wives, just as much as prostitutes, live by the sale of their sexual charms;...
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This page is a category page for fragments from the book Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold.
Smart Mobs fragments
Fragments from the book
Tragedy of the Commons
Hardin, author of “The Tragedy of...
I came into UC Davis as an Economics major, and picked up International Relations (which was mostly Political Science), but I soon found that each left out important parts of the way people...
Modern politics are as replete with symbols, ritual, ceremony, and myth as the societies more familiar to anthropological tradition. Politicians announce public support for positions they fail to...
Tactics of reform fall generally into three categories:
Destabilize a person’s sense of self
Get the person to drastically reinterpret his or her life’s history and radically alter his or her...
This is a test of everything I've done so far! Actually, it's just a test of whether the middle div element will stretch or not.
Stretchy border images
For the moment this objective...
One of the most striking statements of this theme has come from Kenneth Boulding, an eminent economist and imaginative social thinker. In justifying his view that the present moment represents a...
Robert Wright, in The Moral Animal, explains that around the time that Darwin’s Origin of Species, some people sought to base their morals on the “morals” of Nature and of Evolution and...
This is the page for The Rise of Christianity, by Rodney Stark. I have summarized the arguments by chapter. I have not been particularly careful to use quotation marks when taking phrases from the...
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Nicholas Barry: About the...
I recently heard Robert Sutton speaking at Stanford. He and Jeffrey Pfeffer have written a book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense, in which they champion what they rather...
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A Wiki ([ˈwiː.kiː] <wee-kee> or [ˈwɪ.kiː] <wick-ey>) is a type of website that allows users to add, remove, or otherwise edit...
A. J. Liebling once said, Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one. And while government is, at its best, for the people, it rarely seems to be by the people or of the people....
