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Author: William Sims Bainbridge
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739116784
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Across the Secular Abyss explains the cultural chasm we currently face, with a traditional religion-based society behind us, and an as-yet unknown secular society ahead. For over a century, scholars, social scientists, and policy makers have debated the apparent erosion of religious faith and wondered whether Western Civilization was turning its back on religion. Today, the issue has reached a crisis point. In the U.S., a new battle between faith and science has erupted within educational institutions, as political polarization progressively divides the country along religious lines. After a century-long truce in which religion and science implicitly agreed to leave each other alone, science is again invading the territory of religion, most obviously in cognitive science that is debunking religious notions of the human soul, and in the broad convergence of many branches of science into one that leaves few gaps where supernatural beliefs could survive. Religion, for its part, is resisting a range of emerging technologies that could transform human nature, namely human reproductive cloning and the kinds of transformative technologies advocated by the Transhumanist movement. Although pure Atheism has little to offer people, and Atheists tend to be people lacking in social obligations, entirely new possibilities are offered by emerging technologies such as computer emulation of human personalities.
Author: William Sims Bainbridge
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739116784
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Get Book Here
Book Description
Across the Secular Abyss explains the cultural chasm we currently face, with a traditional religion-based society behind us, and an as-yet unknown secular society ahead. For over a century, scholars, social scientists, and policy makers have debated the apparent erosion of religious faith and wondered whether Western Civilization was turning its back on religion. Today, the issue has reached a crisis point. In the U.S., a new battle between faith and science has erupted within educational institutions, as political polarization progressively divides the country along religious lines. After a century-long truce in which religion and science implicitly agreed to leave each other alone, science is again invading the territory of religion, most obviously in cognitive science that is debunking religious notions of the human soul, and in the broad convergence of many branches of science into one that leaves few gaps where supernatural beliefs could survive. Religion, for its part, is resisting a range of emerging technologies that could transform human nature, namely human reproductive cloning and the kinds of transformative technologies advocated by the Transhumanist movement. Although pure Atheism has little to offer people, and Atheists tend to be people lacking in social obligations, entirely new possibilities are offered by emerging technologies such as computer emulation of human personalities.
Author: W. Bainbridge
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137490594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144
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Book Description
This book demonstrates principles of Ancestor Veneration Avatars (AVAs), by running avatars based on eleven deceased members of one family through ten highly diverse virtual worlds from the violent Defiance to the intellectual Uru: Myst Online, from the early EverQuest to the recent Elder Scrolls Online.
Author: Luppicini, Rocci
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1466622121
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 874
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Book Description
"This book provides insights to better enhance the understanding of technology's widespread intertwinement with human identity within an advancing technological society"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Vít Šisler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315518325
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Game studies has been an understudied area within the emerging field of digital media and religion. Video games can reflect, reject, or reconfigure traditionally held religious ideas and often serve as sources for the production of religious practices and ideas. This collection of essays presents a broad range of influential methodological approaches that illuminate how and why video games shape the construction of religious beliefs and practices, and also situates such research within the wider discourse on how digital media intersect with the religious worlds of the 21st century. Each chapter discusses a particular method and its theoretical background, summarizes existing research, and provides a practical case study that demonstrates how the method specifically contributes to the wider study of video games and religion. Featuring contributions from leading and emerging scholars of religion and digital gaming, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in the areas of digital culture, new media, religious studies, and game studies across a wide range of disciplines.
Author: Peter Clarke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191557528
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1063
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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion draws on the expertise of an international team of scholars providing both an entry point into the sociological study and understanding of religion and an in-depth survey into its changing forms and content in the contemporary world. The role and impact of religion and spirituality on the politics, culture, education and health in the modern world is rigorously discussed and debated. The study of the sociology of religion forges interdisciplinary links to explore aspects of continuity and change in the contemporary interface between society and religion. Using a combination of theoretical, methodological and content-led approaches, the fifty-seven contributors collectively emphasise the complex relationships between religion and aspects of life from scientific research to law, ecology to art, music to cognitive science, crime to institutional health care and more. The developing character of religion, irreligion and atheism and the impact of religious diversity on social cohesion are explored. An overview of current scholarship in the field is provided in each themed chapter with an emphasis on encouraging new thinking and reflection on familiar and emergent themes to stimulate further debate and scholarship. The resulting essay collection provides an invaluable resource for research and teaching in this diverse discipline.
Author: Amoretti, Francesco
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1605662550
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
Provides analysis of the relationship between digital information technologies and politics, relating these issues to the historical system transformation.
Author: John F. Brinster
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1456826840
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
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Author: William Sims Bainbridge
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0857299042
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
The newest communication technologies are profoundly changing the world's politics, economies, and cultures, but the specific implications of online game worlds remain mysterious. The Virtual Future employs theories and methods from social science to explore nine very different virtual futures: The Matrix Online, Tabula Rasa, Anarchy Online, Entropia Universe, Star Trek Online, EVE Online, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade, and The Chronicles of Riddick. Each presents a different picture of how technology and society could evolve in coming centuries, but one theme runs through all of them, the attempt to escape the Earth and seek new destinies among the stars. Four decades after the last trip to the moon, a new conception of spaceflight is emerging. Rather than rockets shooting humans across vast physical distances to sterile rocks that lack the resources to sustain life, perhaps robot space probes and orbiting telescopes will glean information about the universe, that humans can then experience inside computer-generated environments much closer to home. All nine of these fantastically rich multiplayer masterpieces have shown myriads of people that really radical alternatives to contemporary society could exist, and has served as a laboratory for examining the consequences. Each is a prototype of new social forms, a utopian subculture, and a simulation of technologies that have yet to be invented. They draw upon several different traditions of science fiction and academic philosophy, and they were created in several nations. By comparing these nine role-playing fantasies, we can better consider what kind of world we want to inhabit in the real future.
Author: Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199334420
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 588
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Book Description
When a waiting world learned on April 12, 1955, that Jonas Salk had successfully created a vaccine to prevent poliomyelitis, he became a hero overnight. Born in a New York tenement, humble in manner, Salk had all the makings of a twentieth-century icon--a knight in a white coat. In the wake of his achievement, he received a staggering number of awards and honors; for years his name ranked with Gandhi and Churchill on lists of the most revered people. And yet the one group whose adulation he craved--the scientific community--remained ominously silent. "The worst tragedy that could have befallen me was my success," Salk later said. "I knew right away that I was through--cast out." In the first complete biography of Jonas Salk, Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs unravels Salk's story to reveal an unconventional scientist and a misunderstood and vulnerable man. Despite his incredible success in developing the polio vaccine, Salk was ostracized by his fellow scientists, who accused him of failing to give proper credit to other researchers and scorned his taste for media attention. Even before success catapulted him into the limelight, Salk was an inscrutable man disliked by many of his peers. Driven by an intense desire to aid mankind, he was initially oblivious and eventually resigned to the personal cost--as well as the costs suffered by his family and friends. And yet Salk remained, in the eyes of the public, an adored hero. Based on hundreds of personal interviews and unprecedented access to Salk's sealed archives, Jacobs' biography offers the most complete picture of this complicated figure. Salk's story has never been fully told; until now, his role in preventing polio has overshadowed his part in co-developing the first influenza vaccine, his effort to meld the sciences and humanities in the magnificent Salk Institute, and his pioneering work on AIDS. A vivid and intimate portrait, this will become the standard work on the remarkable life of Jonas Salk.
Author: Colin Milburn
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391481
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
The dawning era of nanotechnology promises to transform life as we know it. Visionary scientists are engineering materials and devices at the molecular scale that will forever alter the way we think about our technologies, our societies, our bodies, and even reality itself. Colin Milburn argues that the rise of nanotechnology involves a way of seeing that he calls “nanovision.” Trekking across the technoscapes and the dreamscapes of nanotechnology, he elaborates a theory of nanovision, demonstrating that nanotechnology has depended throughout its history on a symbiotic relationship with science fiction. Nanotechnology’s scientific theories, laboratory instruments, and research programs are inextricable from speculative visions, hyperbolic rhetoric, and fictional narratives. Milburn illuminates the practices of nanotechnology by examining an enormous range of cultural artifacts, including scientific research articles, engineering textbooks, laboratory images, popular science writings, novels, comic books, and blockbuster films. In so doing, he reveals connections between the technologies of visualization that have helped inaugurate nano research, such as the scanning tunneling microscope, and the prescient writings of Robert A. Heinlein, James Blish, and Theodore Sturgeon. He delves into fictive and scientific representations of “gray goo,” the nightmare scenario in which autonomous nanobots rise up in rebellion and wreak havoc on the world. He shows that nanoscience and “splatterpunk” novels share a violent aesthetic of disintegration: the biological body is breached and torn asunder only to be refabricated as an assemblage of self-organizing machines. Whether in high-tech laboratories or science fiction stories, nanovision deconstructs the human subject and galvanizes the invention of a posthuman future.
