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    Browehs Before Yawehs: A Secular Guide to Forgiveness
    Browehs Before Yawehs: A Secular Guide to Forgiveness
    Browehs Before Yawehs: A Secular Guide to Forgiveness
    Ebook70 pages56 minutes

    Browehs Before Yawehs: A Secular Guide to Forgiveness

    By D.D. Walker

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    About this ebook

    Blending science and comedy, Browehs Before Yahwehs: A Secular Guide to Forgiveness, discusses how debate and ridicule impedes the progress of secular thought while giving an alternative strategy to changing religious minds. The book uses a postmodern narrative to illuminate forgiveness through satirizing the "just-so stories" espoused by religion and evolutionary psychology. By dwelling on the past and ancestors, religion and evolutionary psychology minimizes humankind’s potential to create meaning in the present for a better future.

    Discussion between secular people and religious individuals turns toxic when the only conversation on the subject of religion is debate and/or ridicule. The book contextualizes religions’ attempts to explain forgiveness and advocates for understanding of scientifically illiterate people throughout history, who probably suffered from PTSD. Science can clarify the imperfect examples of forgiveness in religious texts and help to give people what they want in life: social connection.

    "Just because an individual has the capacity to grasp the moment of The Big Bang, the slow gradual nature of evolution, or the ins and outs of Jaime Lee Curtis’ digest system because of Activia yogurt, does not mean that he or she has an iota of scientific insight regarding forgiveness." Each of the book's six chapters outlines a different aspect of the forgiveness process by introducing pop-culture-themed neurological metaphors. The book gives the reader a humorous understanding of the daily practice of forgiveness as an effort to create meaning in the present by abandoning sentimental stories of the past.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherD.D. Walker
    Release dateJul 15, 2015
    ISBN9781310193262
    Browehs Before Yawehs: A Secular Guide to Forgiveness
    Author

    D.D. Walker

    D.D. Walker is a psychologist, gadfly, and pop culture fanatic from Denver, Colorado.

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      Book preview

      Browehs Before Yawehs - D.D. Walker

      Browehs Before Yahwehs: A Secular Guide to Forgiveness

      By D.D. Walker

      Contents

      Preface

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Afterword

      References

      Preface: Let Them Eat Neurological Cheesecake

      During the experiment of life, the science of forgiveness is a mixed methods research design. Forgiveness involves combining quantitative data (i.e. physical reactions and self-reported thoughts/feelings/behaviors) with the qualitative data of an individual’s life (i.e. environment, culture, history, and context). From exiting the vagina to pulling the plug, the brain works as an egocentric qualitative researcher keeping a work in progress story of the individual. Sometimes adaptive, other times not adaptive, whatever story unfolds the body reacts in real time with stress hormones, sexual appetite, a good laugh, or any number of complex combinations of behaviors/emotions/thoughts.

      To best illuminate a secular guide to forgiveness, I use popular culture imagery to construct a soft science fiction social constructionist model of consciousness. Soft science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction that addresses the soft sciences like psychology (Clute & Nicholls, 1995). To be a fan of science fiction is to have hope of a future, a shared tenant of forgiveness. Social constructionism (Leeds-Hurwitz, 2009) is a sociological theory that reality is constructed via shared experiences (i.e. religion, pop culture). Everybody’s brain reacts to a shared historical and cultural context that either values or disvalues the individual’s identity (age, ethnicity, religious status, sex, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). Plus, social constructionism needs one just-so story to counterbalance the various just-so stories espoused by evolutionary psychology.

      Evolutionary psychology posits that shared psychological features across cultures result from adaptations of our primitive ancestors, and attempts to explain why behavior occurs (Tooby & Cosmides, 2005). Evolutionary psychologists typically espouse an evolved variation of the idea that behavior results from genes neurologically expressed as module in the brain that enabled primitive man’s adaptation. Evolutionary psychologists have become the pseudo-qualitative researchers of what many critics call Flintstonian Darwinism (Sleutels, 2013).

      The worst variations of evolutionary psychology tell just-so stories to rationalize modern sexism with research like women prefer pink because Wilma Flintstone had to find pink berries while Fred hunted (Hurlbert & Ling, 2007). As far as evolutionary psychology and women the results often attempt to prove sexist stereotypes of female sexuality based of perceived biological differences of the brain while giving men a free pass. Hormone exposure to brain development, socialization, and how the physical size differences of the sexes make direct physical comparison of brains difficult, often muddies research in hard science research, but it does not keep evolutionary psychologists from speculating about imaginary modules.

      Evolutionary psychologists have attempted to embark on less political ground and theorized Kin Detection modules that cause disgust towards incest (Lieberman, Tooby & Cosmides, 2007). Actual qualitative researchers (Shor & Simchai, 2009) later found an exception with the Israeli kibbutzim that self-reported incestuous thoughts, but did not act on the impulses because of the social ramifications. Evolutionary psychologists don’t do neurobiology and have yet to find a module system in the brain (Myers, 2013).

      Modules often serve as neurological metaphor in the pseudo-qualitative research of evolutionary psychology meaning to explain any neurological reaction that produces a behavior. In the evolutionary psychology metaphor the brain’s modules work like a circuit board that produces a behavior (Myers, 2013). The closer metaphor, however, is that the brain works like a neurological echo chamber with behavior resulting from different and competing portions of the brain’s memory networks. Echoes become faint, not reenergized time over time. Neurologically, the brain does a poor job of documenting the individual’s story, never mind our pre-historic ancestors.

      Unreliable neurological hardware, history, social context, and privilege do not do the Ashkenazi Jewish designer genes justice insists Harvard Psychologist and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker (2006), ready to lead a new eugenics movement. Speaking to the Center for Jewish, the best selling author and two time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize spoke with certainty about connections between genetics and an outmoded view of intelligence for a historically marginalized group that could be true. Pinker insists that the American Psychological Association recommends using Intelligence Quotient (IQ) testing as the best predictor of intelligence, whereas the paradigm is shifting towards how intelligence manifests in cultures, away from narrow Eurocentric notions of intelligence (Benson, 2003).

      Good science works from the premise that my hypothesis is wrong and sets to disprove the hypothesis to shed dogmatic metaphorical paradigms. The rubber sheet theory of evolutionary psychology operates from the opposite mindset and always offers a new solution

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