In the process of studying religions, we often overlook the secular aspects of religious organizations. This paper examines the basic flows of money in different spiritual organizations, and attempts to correlate the types of income with the structure of the priestly hierarchy. This analysis is by no means comprehensive. In the end, more questions are raised than are answered. Patrick Cody Reli...

It is well known that the Nazis treated human beings with extreme cruelty but it less widely recognized that the Nazis also took some pains to develop and pass extensive animal protection laws. How could the Nazis have professed stich concern for animals while treating humans so badly? It would be easy to dismiss Nazi proclamations on animals as mere hypocrisy but there may be other explanation...

Much of the hype around nanotechnology relies on the notion that it is novel and revolutionary. A large part of that in turn relies on the purportedly revolutionary ability of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope to manipulate individual atoms. However, novelty always involves a comparison of similarity and difference with what came before. Furthermore, the novelty of the STM was negotiated and re...

Joyce (1998) argues that for any credence function that doesn’t satisfy the probability axioms, there is another function that dominates it in terms of accuracy. But if some potential credence functions are ruled out as violations of the Principal Principle, then some non-probabilistic credence functions fail to be dominated. We argue that to fix Joyce’s argument, one must show that all epistem...

The (recent, Bayesian) cognitive science literature on the Wason Task (WT) has been modeled largely after the (not-so-recent, Bayesian) philosophy of science literature on the Paradox of Confirmation (POC). In this paper, we apply some insights from more recent Bayesian approaches to the (POC) to analogous models of (WT). This involves, first, retracing the history of the (POC), and, then, re-e...

In creating an appraisal policy to support the documentation of a church, synagogue or other religious movement, an archives must decide whether to gloss over the religious aspect of its mission and seek to document itself as an organization which happens to be religious, or to attempt to engage the messy question of belief to document the faith group itself. This paper will examine the problem...