Nontheist Quakers
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Nontheist Quakers
Nontheist Quakers (also known as nontheist Friends) are those who engage in Quaker practices and processes, but who do not necessarily believe in a theistic God or Supreme Being, the divine, the soul or the supernatural. Like traditional Quakers, also known as Friends, nontheist Friends are interested in realizing peace, simplicity, integrity, community, equality, and social justice in the Society of Friends and beyond. Beliefs Quakers in the unprogrammed or "silent worship" tradition of Quaker practice began to examine the significance of nontheistic beliefs in the Society of Friends during the 20th century. Non-theism among Quakers probably dates to the 1930s, when some Quakers in California branched off to form the Humanist Society of Friends (today part of the American Humanist Association), and when Henry Cadbury professed agnosticism in a 1936 lecture to Harvard Divinity School students. In 1976, a Friends General Conference Gathering hosted a Workshop for Nontheist ...
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Quakers
Quakers are people who belong to the Religious Society of Friends, a historically Protestantism, Protestant Christian set of Christian denomination, denominations. Members refer to each other as Friends after in the Bible, and originally, others referred to them as Quakers because the founder of the movement, George Fox, told a judge to "quake before the authority of God". The Friends are generally united by a belief in each human's ability to be guided by the inward light to "make the witness of God" known to everyone. Quakers have traditionally professed a priesthood of all believers inspired by the First Epistle of Peter. They include those with Evangelical Friends Church International, evangelical, Holiness movement, holiness, liberal, and Conservative Friends, traditional Quaker understandings of Christianity, as well as Nontheist Quakers. To differing extents, the Friends avoid creeds and hierarchical structures. In 2017, there were an estimated 377,557 adult Quakers ...
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Materialist
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism according to which matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materialism, mind and consciousness are caused by physical processes, such as the neurochemistry of the human brain and nervous system, without which they cannot exist. Materialism directly contrasts with monistic idealism, according to which consciousness is the fundamental substance of nature. Materialism is closely related to physicalism—the view that all that exists is ultimately physical. Philosophical physicalism has evolved from materialism with the theories of the physical sciences to incorporate forms of physicality in addition to ordinary matter (e.g. spacetime, physical energies and forces, and exotic matter). Thus, some prefer the term ''physicalism'' to ''materialism'', while others use them as synonyms. Discoveries of neural co ...
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Consensus Decision-making
Consensus decision-making is a group decision-making process in which participants work together to develop proposals for actions that achieve a broad acceptance. #Origin and meaning of term, Consensus is reached when everyone in the group ''assents'' to a decision (or almost everyone; see ''stand aside'') even if some do not fully agree to or support all aspects of it. It differs from simple unanimity, which requires all participants to support a decision. Consensus decision-making in a democracy is consensus democracy. Origin and meaning of term The word ''consensus'' is Latin meaning "agreement, accord", derived from ''consentire'' meaning "feel together". A noun, ''consensus'' can represent a generally accepted opinion – "general agreement or concord; harmony", "a majority of opinion" – or the outcome of a consensus decision-making process. This article refers to the process ''and'' the outcome (e.g. "to decide ''by'' consensus" and "''a'' consensus was reache ...
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Biology
Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and distribution of life. Central to biology are five fundamental themes: the cell (biology), cell as the basic unit of life, genes and heredity as the basis of inheritance, evolution as the driver of biological diversity, energy transformation for sustaining life processes, and the maintenance of internal stability (homeostasis). Biology examines life across multiple biological organisation, levels of organization, from molecules and cells to organisms, populations, and ecosystems. Subdisciplines include molecular biology, physiology, ecology, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, and systematics, among others. Each of these fields applies a range of methods to investigate biological phenomena, including scientific method, observation, ...
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Evolutionary Biology
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes such as natural selection, common descent, and speciation that produced the diversity of life on Earth. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biology emerged through what Julian Huxley called the Modern synthesis (20th century), modern synthesis of understanding, from previously unrelated fields of biological research, such as genetics and ecology, systematics, and paleontology. The investigational range of current research has widened to encompass the genetic architecture of adaptation, molecular evolution, and the different forces that contribute to evolution, such as sexual selection, genetic drift, and biogeography. The newer field of evolutionary developmental biology ("evo-devo") investigates how embryogenesis is controlled, thus yielding a wider synthesis that integrates developmental biology with the fields of study covered by the earlier evolutionary synthesis. Subfields ...
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History
History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the Human history, human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. Some theorists categorize history as a social science, while others see it as part of the humanities or consider it a hybrid discipline. Similar debates surround the purpose of history—for example, whether its main aim is theoretical, to uncover the truth, or practical, to learn lessons from the past. In a more general sense, the term ''history'' refers not to an academic field but to the past itself, times in the past, or to individual texts about the past. Historical research relies on Primary source, primary and secondary sources to reconstruct past events and validate interpretations. Source criticism is used to evaluate these sources, assessing their authenticity, content, and reliability. Historians strive to integrate the perspectives o ...
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Primatology
Primatology is the scientific study of non-human primates. It is a diverse discipline at the boundary between mammalogy and anthropology, and researchers can be found in academic departments of anatomy, anthropology, biology, medicine, psychology, veterinary sciences and zoology, as well as in animal sanctuaries, biomedical research facilities, museums and zoos. Primatologists study both living and extinct primates in their natural habitats and in laboratories by conducting field studies and experiments in order to understand aspects of their evolution and behavior. Sub-disciplines As a science, primatology has many different sub-disciplines which vary in terms of theoretical and methodological approaches to the subject used in researching extant primates and their extinct ancestors. There are two main centers of primatology, Western primatology and Japanese primatology. These two divergent disciplines stem from the unique cultural backgrounds and philosophies that went int ...
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The Relaxation Response
''The Relaxation Response'' is a book written in 1975 by Herbert Benson, a Harvard physician, and Miriam Z. Klipper. The response described in the book is an autonomic reaction elicited by a mental device and a passive attitude that has been used for altered states of consciousness throughout various religious traditions and cultures. The scientific characterization of the relaxation response was initially prompted by research studies on Transcendental Meditation ("TM"), a yogic meditation technique, that was presented primarily to people in the Western world. Origin Benson writes in his book, "We claim no innovation but simply a scientific validation of age-old wisdom". People from the Transcendental Meditation movement, who felt they could reduce blood pressure using TM, visited Harvard Medical School in 1968, asking to be studied. The school, which at the time was studying the relationship of monkeys' behavior and blood pressure, told them "No, thank you." But when they per ...
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Bodymind
Bodymind is an approach to understand the relationship between the human Human body, body and mind where they are seen as a single integrated unit. It attempts to address the mind–body problem and resists the Western traditions of mind–body dualism. Dualism vs holism In the field of philosophy, the theory of dualism is the speculation that the mental and the physical parts of us, like our minds and our bodies, are different or separate. Modern understanding "The mind is composed of mental fragments- sensations, feelings, thoughts, imaginations, all flowing now in an ordered sequence, now in a chaotic fashion…. On the other hand, the body is constructed under the underlying laws of physics, and its components obey the well-enumerated laws of physiology. It is these characteristic differences between these two – between mind and body – that lead to the Mind-Body problem.". While Western populations tend to believe more in the idea of dualism, there is also good resear ...
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Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regard to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural selection, natural and sexual selection in human evolution, sexual selection or non-adaptive Spandrel (biology), by-products of other adaptive traits. Adaptationist thinking about Physiology, physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, Lung, lungs, and the liver, is common in evolutionary biology. Evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking in psychology, arguing that just as the heart evolved to pump blood, the liver evolved to detoxify poisons, and the kidneys evolved to filter turbid fluids there is modularity of mind in that different psychological mechanisms evolved to solve different adaptive problems. These evolutionary ...
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Cognitive Anthropology
Cognitive anthropology is a subfield of anthropology influenced by Linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and biological anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences (especially experimental psychology and cognitive psychology) often through close collaboration with historians, Ethnography, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, Musicology, musicologists, and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation (logic), interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge, in the sense of what they think subconsciously, changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them. History Cognitive anthropology arose as part of efforts designed to understand the relationship between language and thought, with lingu ...
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Human Evolution
''Homo sapiens'' is a distinct species of the hominid family of primates, which also includes all the great apes. Over their evolutionary history, humans gradually developed traits such as Human skeletal changes due to bipedalism, bipedalism, dexterity, and complex language, as well as interbreeding with other hominins (a tribe of the Homininae, African hominid subfamily), indicating that human evolution was not linear but weblike. The study of the origins of humans involves Interdisciplinary, several scientific disciplines, including Biological anthropology, physical and evolutionary anthropology, paleontology, and genetics; the field is also known by the terms anthropogeny, anthropogenesis, and anthropogony—with the latter two sometimes used to refer to the related subject of hominization. Primate evolution, Primates diverged from other mammals about (Myr, mya), in the Late Cretaceous period, with their earliest fossils appearing over 55 mya, during the Paleocene. Prima ...
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