Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Religion — religion as a subject — its relation to science, religious belief and practice, and how religious practitioners are treated.
9 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-129 v3 | Epistemic injustice in the clinical care of practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions | Porcher & Santaella (2026), DOI-10.1080/09515089.2026.2623889. When clinicians override a patient’s religious interpretation of her experience in domains where medicine has no interpretive authority (“interpretive exclusivism”), they commit an epistemic injustice — racialised in the Brazilian case — that the authors say only epistemic humility remedies. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no reachable copy: Taylor & Francis refused the request, and no preprint or repository copy was found (the UFRGS repository did not respond). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-194 v3 | Religion and Science | De Cruz (2017), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-science/. A survey, not an argument. It reports that the scholarly field rejects the conflict model the public holds, and it finds Barbour’s four-way taxonomy (conflict, independence, dialogue, integration) influential but neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Its survey of five traditions shows the relation varies with creed and colonial history, and it describes the field fragmenting into claim-by-claim “science engaged theology”. Its metaphysical content is concentrated in §1.2 (methodological vs ontological naturalism) and §3.1 (divine action under deterministic, chaotic and quantum physics; primary vs secondary causation; chance and providence). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-107); worth reading as the standard orientation to the science–religion literature and as a map of the divine-action and naturalism debates; it is a survey, so its claims are only as strong as the works it cites, and it is written from within the (largely Christian) field it describes. |
| LIT-466 | Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being | Shanahan (2025), arXiv:2503.16348. Asks whether consciousness talk can be stretched to disembodied, 2024-vintage LLM agents. Their time would be discrete and discontinuous, a string of unlike beads. Their “I” has two palatable referents, the model across conversations and a self confined to one conversation that “flickers into being with each user interaction”, and we may slip between them. Such selves can be edited, copied and merged, and smeared across branching simulacra. Every candidate site dissolves, which Shanahan reads as Buddhist emptiness, and turns back on human selfhood. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-376) in arXiv v3 (July 2025), the only text there is; worth reading as the one paper here that argues directly about what an LLM’s self is, rather than whether it has one. Its answer: two conceptions are in play, a self sited in the model and “fleeting, flickering” selves sited in single conversations, and we may slip between them; every candidate site “dissolves upon close examination”, and Shanahan takes that to the Buddhist conclusion that there is no inherent self, here or in us. It is avowedly “poetic”, not literal, and its examples are invented usages, not data. |
| LIT-500 | Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures | Atari et al. (2023), DOI-10.1037/pspp0000470. The Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2: 36 items, six per foundation, for Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority and Purity, built and tested on 25 populations (N ≈ 8,700) in local languages. Equality and Proportionality correlate weakly (mean r = .21). Purity is the foundation most related to cultural distance from the U.S. (r = .43) and to religiosity. The individualizing–binding split appears in only three of 19 national networks. The MFQ-2 explains more variance in 30 criterion scores than the MFQ-1 (mean adjusted R² .37 against .30). | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-398), from the APA accepted manuscript; worth reading as the current Moral Foundations measure (the MFQ-2) and the theory’s current list of six foundations, with Fairness split into Equality and Proportionality, and as the place MFT answers morality-as-cooperation directly: Curry et al. 2019 “left out Purity as an important and less-WEIRD moral foundation”. Its strongest evidence for that, Purity’s association with cultural distance from the U.S., rests on the one subscale that fails its own measurement-invariance threshold. Its samples are online panels in 25 populations, not small-scale societies. |
| LIT-507 | Moral psychology is relationship regulation: Moral motives for unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality | Rai & Fiske (2011), DOI-10.1037/a0021867. Relationship regulation theory: moral judgments are not about features of acts (harm, unfairness, impurity) but about whether acts fit the relationship model in force. Fiske’s four relational models each carry a moral motive: Unity (communal sharing), Hierarchy (authority ranking), Equality (equality matching) and Proportionality (market pricing). The motives are universal; cultures differ in where they apply them. So violence, inequality and “impure” acts can be morally required, and purity and ingroup loyalty are one motive. A review, with no new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-405); worth reading as the relational alternative to both Moral Foundations Theory and morality-as-cooperation, and as the source of the Equality/Proportionality split the MFQ-2 later adopted. It is a theoretical review with no new data. It agrees with morality-as-cooperation that morality exists to sustain cooperative relationships, and differs from it on purity (a Unity motive, the same motive as ingroup loyalty), on harm (violence can be morally required) and on the units (four relational models, not seven game-theoretic problems). |
| LIT-1351 v2 | Evidence synthesis indicates contentless experiences in meditation are neither truly contentless nor identical | Woods, Windt & Carter (2022). An evidence synthesis of 135 texts by eight teachers of Shamatha (Wallace), Transcendental and Stillness Meditation identifies 65 features of the so-called contentless goal-states. The states are described as lacking thoughts, concepts, perceptions, images and memories but keeping wakefulness, calm, stillness, bliss, knowing, freedom and unity. They are the same across practices on 14 features, different on 4 (chiefly Shamatha’s attentional stability and vividness) and unclear on 47. So, on the texts, most are not truly contentless, and they are not identical. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1070) from the submitted preprint on MindRxiv (osf.io/ve7z2); worth reading as the systematic case that meditative states called contentless are described by their own teachers as lacking thoughts, perceptions, images and memories but keeping wakefulness, calm, stillness, bliss, a non-conceptual knowing, freedom and unity, and as differing across Shamatha, TM and Stillness Meditation, chiefly in Shamatha’s far greater attentional stability and vividness. 135 texts by eight teachers, 65 features: the same on 14, different on 4, unclear on 47. Its main limit is that the evidence is teachers’ descriptions, not practitioners’ reports, and that “not truly contentless” rests on counting qualities such as calm and simplicity as content, which the paper does not define. |
| LIT-1373 v2 | Reconstruction of Tradition: Modernity, Tourism and Shaolin Martial Arts in the Shaolin Scenic Area, China | Su (2016). Shaolin martial arts served imperial authorities before 1949 and were restricted and forbidden in the Mao era (1949–1978); since 1978, UNESCO’s heritage conventions, China’s heritage policies and tourism have reconstructed them as “Shaolin Kungfu”. The reconstruction serves contemporary political and economic needs and positions “experts” and local residents unequally. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on access. The article and its 2019 reprint are closed: Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open location for either DOI, Semantic Scholar marks it closed, and CORE has metadata only. Taylor & Francis (tandfonline.com) and the Routledge chapter page (taylorfrancis.com) returned 403 to this client. The Internet Archive has no copy of the article or of the book Martial Arts in Asia (Hong & Ok, eds.), and Internet Archive Scholar answered with an anti-scrape check; ResearchGate returned 403; a web search found no author-posted copy (the author is Xiaoyan Su, Luoyang Normal University, per OpenAlex), only a blog review. The summary is the abstract’s, unchecked. Registered from the owner’s branched exchange of 2026-10-22, “Branch · Graph Learning Applications”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1943 | The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports | Metzinger (2024), MIT Press, open access. More than 500 anonymised reports of “pure awareness” from an online survey of meditators (1,403 usable respondents from 57 countries, 92 questionnaire items, twelve factors), grouped by theme in 34 chapters with commentary. The book’s thesis is that consciousness can occur without time, self-location, an egoic self-model or a first-person perspective. It models pure awareness as a highest-level but “nonegoic self-model” of the organism’s own epistemic openness, its tonic alertness, and so treats a first-person perspective as content, not a condition, of consciousness. The evidence is retrospective report from a self-selected sample. The methods chapter concedes that such reports cannot show the state was selfless when it occurred, while the summary calls nonegoic consciousness “empirically established”. | Active — skimmed 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1499), from the publisher’s open-access PDF: the introduction, the theoretical commentary of chapters 2, 4, 8, 25, 28 and 31, all of chapter 34 and the epilogue’s ethics sections were read; the report chapters were sampled, not read through. Worth reading as the fullest statement of Metzinger’s later account of consciousness without a self. It offers “pure awareness” as minimal phenomenal experience and models it as a highest-level but nonegoic model of the organism’s own epistemic openness. Its evidence is retrospective, self-selected reports from meditators. The methods chapter concedes the limits of that evidence and the summary overstates what it shows. |
| LIT-1994 v2 | Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China | Slingerland (2003), doi:10.1093/oso/9780195138993.001.0001. Registered unread from the exchange “Assess SDT Coverage” of 2026-11-02 (reader of U17). Not named by A. The sinological reading against which CLAIM-541’s reading of wu-wei as well-timed small control should be checked (its defeater). | Unavailable — searched 2026-11-03 for a lawful full text and none was reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex reports it closed with no repository copy; Crossref lists only Oxford Academic. A whole in-copyright book on a file host would not count (ADR-064). CLAIM-541’s defeater, a sinological reading of wu-wei, therefore stays untested against this book. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |