That loud crack heard throughout the evangelical world when national research showed that more than half of American evangelicals believe people of other religions can go to heaven wasn’t thunder from an angry God.

This crack came from the rock upon which the modern American evangelical movement sits. It was splitting right down the middle.

There is both rejoicing and lamentation.

I am among those rejoicing.

The universalist/evangelical finding, which came from the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, was one more sign that American Christianity is entering the most exciting era in our lifetime. Some people believe a new awakening is at hand. Others believe a reformation is in the making. No one knows how long it will take or how far it will go.

What’s clear is that people in the pews are taking back their faith, wresting it from leaders who helped sell the idea that only the most fundamentalist brands of Christian belief could succeed and that their words alone represented that belief.

As an evangelical from Corsicana wrote recently about a powerful evangelical leader, "I found myself not wanting to be this ventriloquist’s dummy anymore."

Southern Baptist Convention leaders were among those lamenting. So they did their own study, which showed that only 20 percent of evangelicals think people of other religions will get a go-to-Heaven pass.

That would be good news for them, except Southern Baptist researchers didn’t use the same criteria in picking their evangelicals that the Pew study used. The Pew study counted anyone who called themselves an evangelical or some variation thereof. That standard reliably returns 25 percent of Americans.

“If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?”—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55 BC.


Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably.

The finding won’t give many physicists a moment’s worry, because traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics embrace unpredictability already. The best anyone can hope to do, quantum theory says, is predict the probability that a particle will behave in a certain way.

But physicists all the way back to Einstein have been unhappy with this idea. Einstein famously grumped, “God does not play dice.” And indeed, ever since the birth of quantum mechanics, some physicists have offered alternate interpretations of its equations that aim to get rid of this indeterminism. The most famous alternative is attributed to the physicist David Bohm, who argued in the 1950s that the behavior of subatomic particles is entirely determined by “hidden variables” that cannot be observed.

Conway and Kochen say this search is hopeless, and they claim to have proven that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself, rather than just in quantum theory. And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.

One of the driest deserts in the world, the Saharan Tenere Desert, hosted at least two flourishing lakeside populations during the Stone Age, a discovery of the largest graveyard from the era reveals.

The archaeological site in Niger, called Gobero, was discovered by Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago, during a dinosaur-hunting expedition. It had been used as a burial site by two very different populations during the millennia when the Sahara was lush.

Careful examination of 67 graves - a third of the 200 plots on the site - has uncovered unprecedented details about the lifestyles of the people who inhabited the green Stone Age "desert", says Sereno.

"The first people who used the Gobero cemetery were Kiffian, hunter-gatherers who grew up to two metres tall," says Elena Garcea of the University of Cassino in Italy and one of the scientists on the team. The large stature of the Kiffian suggests that food was plentiful during their time in Gobero, 10,000 to 8,000 years ago.

It's perhaps the most depressing fact of this campaign so far that the first major encounter between McCain and Obama will be presided over by a mega-pastor and in a church. Here's Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with the man who is taking American politics one step further away from the vision of the Founding Fathers. Take this particular piece of blather:

I believe in the separation of church and state, but I do not believe in the separation of politics from religion. Faith is simply a worldview. A person who says he puts his faith on the shelf when he's making decisions is either an idiot or a liar. It's entirely appropriate for me to ask what is their frame of reference.

The entire basis for Western secular government, which rests on the capacity of people to distance absolute truth from political affairs, is based on idiocy or lies? I wonder if Warren has ever read Locke, or Hobbes, or Machiavelli or would even understand the term secularism if it knocked him square off his pedestal. Then here we have full-on Christianism in foreign policy:

Two women were ordered held without bail yesterday on charges that they participated in the starvation death of a child whom they considered a "demon" because he wouldn't say amen after his meals, according to police charging documents.

Standing side by side in court, Queen Antoinette, 40, and Trevia Williams, 21, refused to be represented by city public defenders during their bail review at the Central Booking and Intake Center. Police say Antoinette was the leader of a cult and that Williams was one of her followers; each is charged with first-degree murder.

When asked by District Judge Charlotte M. Cooksey whether she wanted a preliminary hearing, Antoinette asked the judge to explain what happens during one - and then declined it.

"No, no, I don't want one," she said. Williams also declined a preliminary hearing. During such a hearing, prosecutors show the probable cause that led to an arrest.

08-12) 17:25 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.

Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC's review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts - not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.

Otero's ruling Friday, which focused on specific courses and texts, followed his decision in March that found no anti-religious bias in the university's system of reviewing high school classes. Now that the lawsuit has been dismissed, a group of Christian schools has appealed Otero's rulings to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

"It appears the UC is attempting to secularize private religious schools," attorney Jennifer Monk of Advocates for Faith and Freedom said Tuesday. Her clients include the Association of Christian Schools International, two Southern California high schools and several students.

For heartsick former supporters of John Edwards, this week offers an edifying tabloid alternative: the civil trial of Victoria Osteen, wife of megachurch minister and televangelist Joel Osteen, for assaulting a flight attendant. The issue was what is sometimes described as a "spill" and sometimes as a "stain" on the armrest of Mrs. Osteen's first class seat, which the flight attendant refused to clean up with sufficient alacrity because she was busy assisting others aboard. Although there is no evidence that the spill consisted of tuberculosis-ridden phlegm or avian flu-rich bird poop, Osteen was mightily pissed, allegedly pushing and punching the flight attendant and making such a ruckus that the Osteen family had to be removed from the flight.

I would be more sympathetic to the flight attendant, Sharon Brown, if she weren't demanding 10 percent of Osteen's fortune to compensate for injuries including a "loss of faith" and hemorrhoids somehow incurred from a frontal assault. But it isn't easy being a flight attendant in this era of layoffs, pay cuts and packed planes -- certainly not compared to being a millionaire on her way to Vail. Whatever dubious substance Victoria Osteen faced on that first class armrest, she should have been able to derive some serenity from the fact that the church she co-pastors draws 40,000 worshippers a week and that her husband has been dubbed "America's Most Influential Christian."

Just another celebrity meltdown set off by insufficiently servile servers? Recall Russell Crowe's 2005 assault with a telephone on a SoHo hotel clerk, or Naomi Campbell's attacks with similar weapons -- cell phone and Blackberry -- on members of her own staff. But there's a curious antecedent here that Christians would do well to ponder: In 1997, another megachurch pastor and leading televangelist -- Robert Schuller -- was prosecuted for an eerily similar first class tantrum.

 A toddler whose remains were found inside a suitcase in Philadelphia this spring was starved to death by members of a religious cult, including his mother, in part because he refused to say "amen" after meals, police said.

Ria Ramkissoon, the mother of Javon Thompson, was charged Sunday with first-degree murder in the boy's death, and Baltimore police said Monday that three other members of a group called 1 Mind Ministries have also been charged with first-degree murder. Police and Ramkissoon's family say the group is a cult.

Members did not seek medical care for Javon when he stopped breathing, and the boy died in his mother's arms, according to court documents that described police interviews with a confidential informant and two children. He would have been about 15 months old when police say adults stopped feeding him in December 2006.

Ramkissoon, 21, was being held Monday in the psychiatric ward of Baltimore's Central Booking and Intake Center, and a bail review was postponed until Tuesday. Her public defender declined comment.

The three other people charged in Javon's death - Queen Antoinette, 40, also known as Toni Ellsberry or Toni Sloan; Marcus Cobbs, 21; and Trevia Williams, who turns 21 on Tuesday - were already in custody. They were arrested in May in New York City on warrants charging them with failure to appear in court in Baltimore. Those charges stemmed from a scuffle with police in a child custody dispute.

After two tremendous growth spurts — one in size, followed by an even more important one in cognitive ability — the human brain is now a lot like a teenage boy.

It consumes huge amounts of calories, is rather temperamental and, when harnessed just right, exhibits incredible prowess. The brain's roaring metabolism, possibly stimulated by early man's invention of cooking, may be the main factor behind our most critical cognitive leap, new research suggests.

About 2 million years ago, the human brain rapidly increased its mass until it was double the size of other primate brains.

"This happened because we started to eat better food, like eating more meat," said researcher Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai.

But the increase in size, Khaitovich continued, "did not make humans as smart as they are today."

The early shift

...The Villa of the Papyri is believed to have been owned by Roman statesman Lucius Calpurnius Piso, father-in-law of Julius Caesar. He was a man of wealth and refined taste. Like many members of the Roman elite of the time, Piso looked back fondly to the glories of ancient Greece. His library, written mostly in Greek, was dominated by works of the Epicurean school, which sought a salve for the troubled soul in the taming of runaway desire.

Epicurus, the creed's founder, was a fourth century BC atomist philosopher with an atheistic bent and a medicinal aim. He wanted to remedy human pain in this life rather than prepare sufferers for the next. "Nothing to fear in God," he wrote, displaying a talent for pithy distillation. "Nothing to feel in death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured."

Shortly before 300BC Epicurus withdrew his followers to a commune outside Athens, known to all as The Garden. Friendship and frugality were its guiding principles. In fact, Epicurus would regard the modern use of the adjective epicurean as a travesty of his ideals. "Plain fare gives us as much pleasure as a costly diet," he said. True pleasure for Epicurus was a "pot of cheese", though he was thought to enjoy a tipple from a wineskin.

Ancient gossip links him with a fellow communard called Mammarion (big breasts), which only shows that the sage was human.

Epicureanism takes up a radical position in the Hellenistic world, standing apart from the philosophical mainstream. When Paul addresses the Athenians, in Acts 17 of the Bible, he speaks of Epicureans and Stoics in the same breath. Christianity, naturally, set itself firmly against Epicurean materialism and its implicit atheism. But the Stoics were equally stern disputants. Epicureans, as a result, found themselves traduced by their fellow pagans and damned by the early church. The Garden, nevertheless, flourished for some eight centuries....

"Epicurus's philosophy exercised so widespread an influence that for a long time it was touch and go whether Christianity might not have to give way before it," writes Lawrence Durrell in a tone of lament....