154 | Reza Aslan on Religion, Metaphor, and Meaning

154 | Reza Aslan on Religion, Metaphor, and Meaning

Religion is an important part of the lives of billions of people around the world, but what religious belief actually amounts to can vary considerably from person to person. Some believe in an anthropomorphic, judgmental God; others conceive of God as more transcendent and conceptual; some are animists who attribute spiritual essence to creatures and objects; and many more. I talk with writer and religious scholar Reza Aslan about his view of religion as a vocabulary constructed by human beings to express a connection with something beyond the physical world — why one might think that, and what it implies about how we should go about living our lives.

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Reza Aslan received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of numerous books, including No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam; Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth; and God: A Human History. He has also worked in television, producing and writing documentaries, and serving as a consulting producer for the drama series The Leftovers. He recently started a podcast, Metaphysical Milkshake, with actor Rainn Wilson.


Jaksot(416)

23 | Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on Embodied Cognition, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy

23 | Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on Embodied Cognition, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy

Brains are important things; they're where thinking happens. Or are they? The theory of "embodied cognition" posits that it's better to think of thinking as something that takes place in the body as a...

19 Marras 20181h 7min

22 | Joe Walston on Conservation, Urbanization, and the Way We Live on Earth

22 | Joe Walston on Conservation, Urbanization, and the Way We Live on Earth

There's no question that human activity is causing enormous changes on our planet's environment, from deforestation to mass extinction to climate change. But perhaps there is a tiny cause for optimism...

12 Marras 20181h 28min

21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind

21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind

We humans love to tell ourselves stories about why things happened the way they did; if the stories are sufficiently serious, we label this activity "history." Part of getting history right is simply ...

5 Marras 20181h 20min

20 | Scott Derrickson on Cinema, Blockbusters, Horror, and Mystery

20 | Scott Derrickson on Cinema, Blockbusters, Horror, and Mystery

Special Halloween edition? Scott Derrickson is a film-lover first and a director second, but he's been quite successful at the latter -- you may know him as the director and co-writer of Marvel's Doct...

29 Loka 20181h 23min

19 | Tyler Cowen on Maximizing Growth and Thinking for the Future

19 | Tyler Cowen on Maximizing Growth and Thinking for the Future

Economics, like other sciences (social and otherwise), is about what the world does; but it's natural for economists to occasionally wander out into the question of what we should do as we live in the...

22 Loka 201859min

18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory

18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory

String theory is a speculative and highly technical proposal for uniting the known forces of nature, including gravity, under a single quantum-mechanical framework. This doesn't seem like a recipe for...

15 Loka 20181h 12min

17 | Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis

17 | Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis

The job of science fiction isn't to predict the future; it's to tell interesting stories in an imaginative setting, exploring the implications of different ways the world could be different from our a...

8 Loka 20181h 11min

16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future

16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future

Aging -- everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundwo...

1 Loka 20181h 4min

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