paragraph_text: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is a 2006 book by the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, in which the author argues that religion is in need of scientific analysis so that its nature and future may be better understood. The "spell" that requires "breaking" is not religious belief itself but the belief that it is off-limits to or beyond scientific inquiry.

paragraph_text: Jean Bethke Elshtain (January 6, 1941–August 11, 2013) was an American ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual. She was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the University of Chicago Divinity School with a joint appointment in the department of political science.

paragraph_text: Tyson has written and broadcast extensively about his views of science, spirituality, and the spirituality of science, including the essays "The Perimeter of Ignorance" and "Holy Wars", both appearing in Natural History magazine and the 2006 Beyond Belief workshop. In an interview with comedian Paul Mecurio, Tyson offered his definition of spirituality: "For me, when I say spiritual, I’m referring to a feeling you would have that connects you to the universe in a way that it may defy simple vocabulary. We think about the universe as an intellectual playground, which it surely is, but the moment you learn something that touches an emotion rather than just something intellectual, I would call that a spiritual encounter with the universe." Tyson has argued that many great historical scientists' belief in intelligent design limited their scientific inquiries, to the detriment of the advance of scientific knowledge.

paragraph_text: The Review of Politics was founded in 1939 by Gurian, modeled after German Catholic journals. It quickly emerged as part of an international Catholic intellectual revival, offering an alternative vision to positivist philosophy. For 44 years, the Review was edited by Gurian, Matthew Fitzsimons, Frederick Crosson, and Thomas Stritch. Intellectual leaders included Gurian, Jacques Maritain, Frank O'Malley, Leo Richard Ward, F. A. Hermens, and John U. Nef. It became a major forum for political ideas and modern political concerns, especially from a Catholic and scholastic tradition.

paragraph_text: The Gettier problem, in the field of epistemology, is a landmark philosophical problem with our understanding of knowledge. Attributed to American philosopher Edmund Gettier, Gettier - type counterexamples (called ``Gettier - cases '') challenged the long - held justified true belief (or JTB) account of knowledge. On the JTB account, knowledge is equivalent to justified true belief, and if all three conditions (justification, truth, and belief) are met of a given claim, then we have knowledge of that proposition. In his three - page 1963 paper, titled`` Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?'', Gettier showed, by means of two counterexamples, that there were cases where individuals had justified the true belief of a claim but still failed to know it. Thus, Gettier claimed to have shown that the JTB account was inadequate -- it could not account for all of the knowledge. The JTB account was first credited to Plato, though Plato argued against this very account of knowledge in the Theaetetus (210a).

paragraph_text: John Milton (9 December 16088 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, man of letters, and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem "Paradise Lost" (1667), written in blank verse.

paragraph_text: The swan song (ancient Greek: κύκνειον ᾆσμα; Latin: carmen cygni) is a metaphorical phrase for a final gesture, effort, or performance given just before death or retirement. The phrase refers to an ancient belief that swans (Cygnus spp.) sing a beautiful song just before they are to die, having been silent (or alternatively, not so musical) during most of their lifetime. This belief, whose basis in actuality is long - debated, had become proverbial in ancient Greece by the 3rd century BC, and was reiterated many times in later Western poetry and art.

paragraph_text: A sociological comparative study by the Pew Research Center found that Jehovah's Witnesses in the United States ranked highest in statistics for getting no further than high school graduation, belief in God, importance of religion in one's life, frequency of religious attendance, frequency of prayers, frequency of Bible reading outside of religious services, belief their prayers are answered, belief that their religion can only be interpreted one way, belief that theirs is the only one true faith leading to eternal life, opposition to abortion, and opposition to homosexuality. In the study, Jehovah's Witnesses ranked lowest in statistics for having earned a graduate degree and interest in politics.

paragraph_text: To better illustrate this idea, Bassett focuses his analysis of the role of nineteenth-century maps during the "scramble for Africa". He states that maps "contributed to empire by promoting, assisting, and legitimizing the extension of French and British power into West Africa". During his analysis of nineteenth-century cartographic techniques, he highlights the use of blank space to denote unknown or unexplored territory. This provided incentives for imperial and colonial powers to obtain "information to fill in blank spaces on contemporary maps".

paragraph_text: Islamism is a controversial concept not just because it posits a political role for Islam but also because its supporters believe their views merely reflect Islam, while the contrary idea that Islam is, or can be, apolitical is an error. Scholars and observers who do not believe that Islam is merely a political ideology include Fred Halliday, John Esposito and Muslim intellectuals like Javed Ahmad Ghamidi. Hayri Abaza argues the failure to distinguish between Islam and Islamism leads many in the West to support illiberal Islamic regimes, to the detriment of progressive moderates who seek to separate religion from politics.

paragraph_text: Carol Anne Tavris (born September 17, 1944) is an American social psychologist and feminist. A public intellectual, she has devoted her career to writing and lecturing about the contributions of psychological science to the beliefs and practices that guide people's lives, and to criticizing "psychobabble," "biobunk," and pseudoscience. Her many writings have dealt with critical thinking, cognitive dissonance, anger, gender, and other topics in psychology.

paragraph_text: John McCaslin (born October 31, 1957) is an American broadcaster and author. He is the former co-anchor of "America’s Morning News", produced by Talk Radio Network. On a daily basis for nearly two decades, he penned a syndicated political column titled "Inside the Beltway".

paragraph_text: A number of novel ideas about religion developed with the Enlightenment, including Deism and talk of atheism. Deism, according to Thomas Paine, is the simple belief in God the Creator, with no reference to the Bible or any other miraculous source. Instead, the Deist relies solely on personal reason to guide his creed, which was eminently agreeable to many thinkers of the time. Atheism was much discussed, but there were few proponents. Wilson and Reill note that, "In fact, very few enlightened intellectuals, even when they were vocal critics of Christianity, were true atheists. Rather, they were critics of orthodox belief, wedded rather to skepticism, deism, vitalism, or perhaps pantheism." Some followed Pierre Bayle and argued that atheists could indeed be moral men. Many others like Voltaire held that without belief in a God who punishes evil, the moral order of society was undermined. That is, since atheists gave themselves to no Supreme Authority and no law, and had no fear of eternal consequences, they were far more likely to disrupt society. Bayle (1647–1706) observed that in his day, "prudent persons will always maintain an appearance of [religion].". He believed that even atheists could hold concepts of honor and go beyond their own self-interest to create and interact in society. Locke said that if there were no God and no divine law, the result would be moral anarchy: every individual "could have no law but his own will, no end but himself. He would be a god to himself, and the satisfaction of his own will the sole measure and end of all his actions".

paragraph_text: The BC Refederation Party argues that there are three constitutional flaws in Canada. The first, that there exists no confederation document approved democratically. The second, that there exists no democratically achieved constitutional documents federally or provincially and the third, that there is no constitutional basis for the federal government's rights to collect income tax.

paragraph_text: Hannah John - Kamen as Ava Starr / Ghost: A woman with molecular instability, who can phase through objects; she is only considered a ``villain ''because her attempts at survival clash with the heroes' goals. The character is traditionally portrayed as male in the comics, but the creative team believed that the character's gender was irrelevant to its portrayal, and felt casting a woman would be more interesting. John - Kamen enjoyed this`` blank - slate'' aspect, allowing her to mold the character as her own. Producer Stephen Broussard said that they wanted to cast a lesser - known actress to help maintain the mystery of the character, and John - Kamen ``blew us away ''. RaeLynn Bratten portrays a young Ava Starr.

paragraph_text: The modern idea of the theory, however, is attributed mostly to John Locke's expression of the idea in Essay Concerning Human Understanding (he uses the term ``white paper ''in Book II, Chap. I, 2). In Locke's philosophy, tabula rasa was the theory that at birth the (human) mind is a`` blank slate'' without rules for processing data, and that data is added and rules for processing are formed solely by one's sensory experiences. The notion is central to Lockean empiricism. As understood by Locke, tabula rasa meant that the mind of the individual was born blank, and it also emphasized the freedom of individuals to author their own soul. Individuals are free to define the content of their character -- but basic identity as a member of the human species can not be altered. This presumption of a free, self - authored mind combined with an immutable human nature leads to the Lockean doctrine of ``natural ''rights. Locke's idea of tabula rasa is frequently compared with Thomas Hobbes's viewpoint of human nature, in which humans are endowed with inherent mental content -- particularly with selfishness.

paragraph_text: Democracy, social-contract theory, separation of powers, religious freedom, separation of church and state – these achievements of the Reformation and early Protestantism were elaborated on and popularized by Enlightenment thinkers. Some of the philosophers of the English, Scottish, German, and Swiss Enlightenment - Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Toland, David Hume, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Wolff, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau - had Protestant backgrounds. For example, John Locke, whose political thought was based on "a set of Protestant Christian assumptions", derived the equality of all humans, including the equality of the genders ("Adam and Eve"), from Genesis 1, 26-28. As all persons were created equally free, all governments needed "the consent of the governed." These Lockean ideas were fundamental to the United States Declaration of Independence, which also deduced human rights from the biblical belief in creation: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

paragraph_text: Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom and political authority, as well as map out a view of the public sphere through private and public reason. Kant's work continued to shape German thought, and indeed all of European philosophy, well into the 20th century. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of England's earliest feminist philosophers. She argued for a society based on reason, and that women, as well as men, should be treated as rational beings. She is best known for her work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791).

paragraph_text: Courts have distinguished between two types of civil disobedience: "Indirect civil disobedience involves violating a law which is not, itself, the object of protest, whereas direct civil disobedience involves protesting the existence of a particular law by breaking that law." During the Vietnam War, courts typically refused to excuse the perpetrators of illegal protests from punishment on the basis of their challenging the legality of the Vietnam War; the courts ruled it was a political question. The necessity defense has sometimes been used as a shadow defense by civil disobedients to deny guilt without denouncing their politically motivated acts, and to present their political beliefs in the courtroom. However, court cases such as U.S. v. Schoon have greatly curtailed the availability of the political necessity defense. Likewise, when Carter Wentworth was charged for his role in the Clamshell Alliance's 1977 illegal occupation of the Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant, the judge instructed the jury to disregard his competing harms defense, and he was found guilty. Fully Informed Jury Association activists have sometimes handed out educational leaflets inside courthouses despite admonitions not to; according to FIJA, many of them have escaped prosecution because "prosecutors have reasoned (correctly) that if they arrest fully informed jury leafleters, the leaflets will have to be given to the leafleter's own jury as evidence."

paragraph_text: It is a synonym for ummat al - Islamiyah (Arabic: الأمة الإسلامية ‎) (the Islamic Community), and it is commonly used to mean the collective community of Islamic peoples. In the Quran the ummah typically refers to a single group that shares common religious beliefs, specifically those that are the objects of a divine plan of salvation. In the context of Pan-Islamism and politics, the word Ummah can be used to mean the concept of a Commonwealth of the Believers (أمة المؤمنين ummat al - mu'minīn).

Question: What was the basis of the political beliefs of the man who argued we ware born with intellectual blank slates?
Answer: a set of Protestant Christian assumptions