Median income isn't directly comparable with median home price since many income earners aren't home owners. It would be interesting to composite this with price-to-rent ratios and see whether the same patterns hold.

I live in Thailand. I don't define what "real" Buddhism is...I can simply walk up to ordinary folks and ask them what is Buddhist, and what isn't. Spurred on by the recent Buddhism-related posts, that's what I've done. 
 
Maybe one problem is this: Abrahamic/Western religions are more exclusive. Most Christians would have a huge hangup with a Hanuman statue in their churches, but it's not unusual to see a Jesus figure on a Hindu shrine. In the South of Thailand, there's even a mixing of Buddhism and Islam. Step into the Himalayas, and the guy who exorcises evil spirits from your wife is probably Bonpo, not Buddhist (yes, Bon survives!) And Hinduism/Buddhism is rampant all over middle and Southern Thailand. 
 
Given the Abrahamic exclusivity, it wouldn't be surprising if a western researcher attributed every supernatural belief in Thai society to Buddhism. In the spirit of not allowing elites to define a religion, however, when the Thai on the street tells me "this is Buddhist...that is Hindu", shouldn't we take him at his word?

Thailand is the most Buddhist country on the planet. There you will find spirit houses on nearly every other street corner. 
 
Talk to almost any Thai. They'll tell you those spirit houses ("sahn", in Thai) come from the Hindu religion. Does every supernatural belief in a Buddhist country have to be "Buddhist"?

I saw Harris speak and was surprised by the amount of time he spent contrasting Eastern and Abrahamic religion. He seems to believe that the contemplative methods can be extracted from the supernatural gobbledygook. Hard-core rationalists might reject the possibility that the self can investigate the self. Labeling Harris as a reality-dessicating rationalist certainly misses the point.

If MacDonald is at the cocktail party and is bothered that someone affirmed the power of prayer but doesn't just smile politely or attempt to change the subject, then there's something wrong with her. 
 
If a gay man is at a business meeting, and the subject turns to mammary preferences........? MacDonald has chosen to resolve her dilemma by "coming out", instead of forcing a smile. Something's wrong with her?  
 
Hey Ken, your mom or grandma believe in God?  
 
Interesting GNXP question. My biological folks have been fairly hard-core atheists for several generations. My adoptive family is Christian. I'm pretty much agnostic/atheist. So in addition to studies of separated twins and the like, I've got in-your-face anecdotal evidence that religiosity merely boils down to a few base pairs here and there. 
 
Given the genetic component, I don't see any sense in trying to massively reprogram my lovely parents (or anyone else). That's where Dawkins might be flawed. But let's get real-world: a close relation's politics are entirely based on the notion that Jesus is due to re-emerge in Israel, so Israel must be protected at all costs. What to do?

MacDonald is tweaked that a certain subgroup has undue influence amongst conservatives. Say, she's at a cocktail party, and someone expresses his belief that God answered his prayer; she's expected to engage this consensual reality. 
 
I'm swinging back to sympathizing with Dawkins. You can quote Spinoza, and render God as subtle as you will. You can agonize over whatever might reoccupy the God template in your brain following His extirpation. You can confound the auxiliary verbs "should" and "must" (we should be moral...God must exist). But we're still talking about Carlin's "invisible man in the sky".

I read the whole thread. Basically, the writer takes MacDonald's "The proportion of Americans who believe in Biblical revelation remains depressingly high" and inflates it to the extreme. Before you know it, MacDonald is a disciple of the cult of technological progress (as are all atheists), arguments about morality without God (impossible, proof supplied) are being rehashed, and Darwin is getting all twisted (e.g. natural selection serves to make creatures live longer). Yecchhhh.

In the article, Dawkins also mentions keeping Hussein around to better understand his relationship with the American government in the 80's. 
 
I recall reading a long article (in the New Yorker?) about Hussein's journey to power, his tastes in movies and books (fairly banal), etc., and walking away with the impression that the guy was just your standard tribal big man ("pu yai", here in Thailand) who was merely in the right places at the right times.

I recall traveling in a minority region of China (Kashgar) about 20 years ago. The locals would tell you that religion is a drug. But if you ask them what happens in the afterlife, they tell you that you'll meet Mao, sitting on a throne. 
 
Not sure how widespread that particular belief is.

I'm an atheist who thinks life would be bloody boring without a fairly frequent hit of #4. 
 
As for religions that have been seen to co-exist in the minds of believers, toss in the Islam-Buddhism you see in the South of Thailand.  
 
Still, all these examples of "dual" religions involve an eastern religion, which seem to hold that doctrine is merely a path to something higher. This sort of thinking is not merely found at the level of elites.

If you randomly remove half of those sequences, Monte-Carlo-like, you'd likely still find a bias towards sites involved with neuronal adhesion, no?

From the article: "Five other participants reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply offended, while four other attendees said they were not." 
 
Denton, an engineer by training, committed suicide about a year ago, throwing herself out a San Fran apartment. She had been under suspicion of misusing university funds and for obtaining a cushy administrative job for her lesbian lover.

Penn Jillette interviews Dawkins

The absolute value of the December and January 2002 variances off the mean is just about exactly the same. And both those values are about twice the next-highest values. Kinda stinky.

"Of course first I need to get rid of Einstein and thereby clear up this "it's all relative" talk." 
 
At which point your time machine disappears and you get yanked back into the present. Or you perhaps disappear altogether because your father or grandfather died in the invasion of Japan. 
 
Anyway, if we can't even nail down what stress is or what is or is not "stressful", we can't really say whether or not stress accelerates aging. And if we want to fix aging, we need to find the mechanism by which various things accelerate or decelerate it. Telling people to "avoid stress" is less than helpful. 
 
"bioIgnoramus: Blood levels of the hormone cortisol are a proxy for "stress". Not that it helps, since inborn differences almost certainly have major effects on cortisol levels." 
 
And on stress, at least as we commonly understand it. Thus cortisol levels may still be a good proxy for comparison between individuals.

It seems so wasteful to transcribe these sequences and then turn around and degrade them. What am I missing? 
 
Perhaps when you add up all the ATP's involved here, they pale in comparison to the numbers you need for ordinary metabolism.

From an anecdotal view, a lot of the stuff above strikes me as insignificant. I've spent a good deal of time over 18,000 feet, with but a few weeks of acclimating. I've hung out with Tibetan nomads...about as peaceful a group as you can come by. And I traveled in these regions with a Southeast Asian individual, who didn't seem especially prone to disease or hardship.

One which sets a minimum living standard for all.

Why the religion meme over wife-swapping memes? I'd say the religion meme is quite a bit more potent: 
 
1) Believers go to heaven. 
2) Non-believers suffer eternal punishment. 
3) Rewards are given to those who spread the belief system. 
4) Believers should make a lot of babies and train them in the belief. 
5) Believers should kill/punish the non-believers. 
 
The recipe for an efficient meme. 
 
One gets the feelings that some religions are more meme-based than others. 
 
****************** 
 
I'd like to throw "altered states" into the mix as an element of religion. We're not just talking about some borderline schizo shamans in the Amazon...we're talking about ordinary Southern Baptists whose lingo makes it clear that being "reborn" is to be taken as an experience that you either "get" or "don't get".

Hey, I had a conversation with a physicist a few months ago. He hadn't had any children, and rationalized it by saying that as long as he's "contributing to the species", he's doing his genetic duty. 
 
Then I did my best to explain the current view of "group selection". 
 
So misinterpretations of Darwin/evolution can work in both directions.

"You may be right about religion. But that only reinforces for me how non-religious I am. I have never had any interest in my "inner person". " 
 
One aspect of religion seems to be the sublimation, repression, overcoming, etc., of primitive desires. To the extent that one's "inner person" interferes with scientific questioning and answering, I'd think you'd be interested.

What is more basic than proper conduct or proper belief?...proper experience. The possibility that religion exists, to some extent, to explain or invoke various "altered states" should also be considered.