This post contains the quiz mentioned in chapter 24 of my book. The chapter is included in the post so even if you haven't read it you can still take the quiz.

New Atenism’s core narrative integrates cosmological and moral ideas based upon what we know, what reason has revealed to be most likely

A list of books in roughly the order of their impact on New Atenism.

We live in thought, we observe through extension. Reason builds the bridge between the two and constantly tests it to improve its integrity.

An Elephant Herder is not simply a rider who controls his own elephant. An Elephant Herder is someone who helps design the paths that many elephants travel.

We often think we’re experiencing life as independent beings, but in truth, we are satellites of the sun. We orbit not just physically but biologically and emotionally. The sun is everything to us and yet we almost always take this well-established fact for granted.

It is human nature to be guided more by emotion than reason. It is more often the self-satisfying sense of superiority and the praise from your tribe that drives not only the “idiots” but those who oh so reasonably call them that.

Calling others stupid is a way of telling yourself “I’m smart,” or at least smarter than they are. In addition to this personal satisfaction there are social rewards. Declaring that someone outside of your tribe is stupid is a quick way to get approval from inside yours.

Soft music from the phone on her nightstand lifts her from a deep sleep to drowsy semi-awareness. As the volume of the music grows, she’s pulled into the present and silences the phone before it wakes her wife. She slips out from under the covers, out of the bedroom and into the guest bathroom where she laid out her exercise clothes the night before.

He wakes before dawn to head to the steel mill for another 12-hour shift, just as he does every single day save for July 4th, which Mr. Carnegie has deemed the only work holiday of the year. The bed, really just a cot, he rents from the company is shared with another worker who does the night shift.

Even though God saw fit to bless her with a daughter, she still felt the loss of her son deeply and at times wondered how a loving and merciful God could take her child from her. He will one day welcome her through the gates of heaven so she can be with her son again. There are moments when clinging to this hope is the only thing that keeps her going.

The treaty their father signed with the Lenape Indian Chief Tamanend in 1683 declared they would "live in peace as long as the waters run in the rivers and creeks and as long as the stars and moon endure," made him a beloved figure but said nothing about what was to be done if the money ran out.

Waking up before sunrise to prepare a breakfast of bread, dates and beer, she can already feel the heat that will make work midday impossible. Beer is the beverage of choice because her family grows wheat and barley--the two most common crops in ancient Egypt--and because the Nile River is the water source for everything from crops, to all cleaning and the community toilet.

She wakes up with a start at the sound of a stick cracking. Thinking the noise might be a predator, she instinctively pulls the six-month old baby sleeping next to her close. Upon realizing it’s her mate tending the fire they built last night, she relaxes.

The “mind/body" problem has been a major source of philosophical debate since pretty much the beginning of philosophical debate. Philosophers call the belief that the mind and body are separate “dualism” and the belief they aren’t “monism.” Dualism typically leads to all sorts of appealing stuff including an immortal soul or even the entire universe being conscious--just like us!

There may be no better example of a “first world problem” than having access to too many calories rather than too few. The knowledge that made it so easy for us to acquire mouth-watering food at virtually any moment, however, has a dark side: the inverse relationship between the effort required per calorie for a food choice and how healthy a choice it is.

Mutant meals don’t just come from genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Our recently acquired ability to directly splice and dice genes in a lab is just the latest method we’ve come up with to alter the genetics of the plants and animals we put on our plates.

In addition to playing football, Reggie was an ordained minister who frequently preached in his church and proselytized pretty much everywhere else. The story of how Reggie defied authority to pursue the truth through direct examination of evidence provides a great illustration of the difference between faith and reason and between belief and knowledge.

If you’re looking for something that will facilitate humility about the level of your own knowledge and gratitude for how collective reason’s network of domain experts allows each of us to tap into that knowledge with our tiny slice, “Critique of Pure Reason” by Immanuel Kant is as good as it gets.

What has reason revealed about the value of reason? Modern psychologists and neuroscientists have shown how the emotional center of our brains, the limbic system, controls the reasoning neocortex far more often than the reverse.