RE: This is Your Brain on Marketing

"This idea, simple as it seems, requires us to completely re-imagine our assumptions about memory. It reveals memory as a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. The recall is altered in the absence of the original stimulus, becoming less about what we actually remember and more about what we’d like to remember. It’s the difference between a “Save” and the “Save As” function. Our memories are a “Save As”: They are files that get rewritten every time we remember them, which is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. And so that pretty picture of popcorn becomes a taste we definitely remember, and that alluring soda commercial becomes a scene from my own life. We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out, are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal."

David Brooks, The Social Animal, LINK

Quotable: Hitchens

Since we live in a scientific age, I imagine that stout atheists are driven more than anything by impatience to finish the job. When science is poised to solve every remaining mystery and technology unfolds every new convenience, why should we keep any allegiance to an outworn world view?

- Christopher Hitchens

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/05/16/deepak_chopra_atheists_mistake.DTL#ixzz1OqUcNkIi

Dyrness on Fundamentalism and Modernity

"How can conservative Christians, who entered the century determined to oppose modernism and all it stood for, end up being so influenced by the culture this modernism produced? We have noted that Marsden stressed the anti-modern character of twentieth-century fundamentalism, which led to its consistent opposition and the cultural polemics it engendered. In his history of Wheaton College during this period (1921-65), for example, Michael Hamilton argues that Wheaton demonstrates the ability of fundamentalism, like its evangelical forebears, to adopt modern technology and appropriate (especially) the youth culture in its evangelistic and mission institutions."

What is happening here? How did a movement nourished by the separatism of the holiness movement become so enamored of cultural innovation? The answer, I believe, lies in the inability of conservative Christians to understand the nature of the cultural challenge and their tendency to conceive of its problems in strictly intellectual terms, they did not understand the challenge of social modernism."

William Dyrness, The Earth is God's, New York: Orbis Books, 1997, pg 61.