Faith // Current

Is it logical to believe in god?

I think this video is fascinating. It's been a question which I've been going over in my head as of late so I was kind... more

middle_east
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Bush says faith sustained him

President George W. Bush said Thursday that faith changed his life long ago and has sustained him through the challenges of his... more

breakthepower
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Atheists see the bigger picture

A study by Dutch psychologists shows that religious beliefs can effect how we see the world - whether we focus on the details or... more

ProfessorFunk
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Why Believe in a God? - American Humanist Association

The attack against religion continues as an ad campaign will now tackle the question of whether there is a God. What would our... more

doithengiaorg
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Does Religion make you a nicer person?

"Where there is no God, all is permitted."
"Religion poisons everything.""

Are the religious happier than the secular? And does that make you a nicer person? In his article, Paul Bloom talks about this. The conclusion he comes to is less about religion and atheism than it is about a community: joining one or rejecting one--or rejecting one because it rejects you.

(Edited. Check out the link for more.)
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Many Americans doubt the morality of atheists. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, a majority of Americans say that they would not vote for an otherwise qualified atheist as president, meaning a nonbeliever would have a harder time getting elected than a Muslim, a homosexual, or a Jew.

Arguments about the merits of religions are often battled out with reference to history, by comparing the sins of theists and atheists. (I see your Crusades and raise you Stalin!)

In a review published in Science last month, psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff discuss several experiments that lean pro-Schlessinger. In one of their own studies, they primed half the participants with a spirituality-themed word jumble (including the words divine and God) and gave the other half the same task with nonspiritual words. Then, they gave all the participants $10 each and told them that they could either keep it or share their cash reward with another (anonymous) subject. Ultimately, the spiritual-jumble group parted with more than twice as much money as the control. Norenzayan and Shariff suggest that this lopsided outcome is the result of an evolutionary imperative to care about one's reputation. If you think about God, you believe someone is watching. This argument is bolstered by other research that they review showing that people are more generous and less likely to cheat when others are around. More surprisingly, people also behave better when exposed to posters with eyes on them.

Maybe, then, religious people are nicer because they believe that they are never alone.

In a 2004 study, twice as many religious people say that they are very happy with their lives, while the secular are twice as likely to say that they feel like failures.

In general, you might expect people in less God-fearing countries to be a lot less kind to one another than Americans are. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, "[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them."

The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones like Schlessinger, find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything, but it deserves part of the blame for this one."Where there is no God, all is permitted." "Religion poisons everything."" Are the religious... more

seeviv
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49 responses

8 days ago

Prop 8 Opponents March Outside Mormon Temple in Westwood

LOS ANGELES -- Hundreds of supporters of same-sex marriage rallied outside a Mormon temple in West Los Angeles on Thursday... more

injektilokid
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5 responses

12 days ago

Gay-rights advocates to challenge Proposition 8

LOS ANGELES - After losing at the polls, gay-rights advocates filed a legal challenge Wednesday in California Supreme Court to... more

injektilokid
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0 responses

13 days ago

Mormons Divided On Same-Sex Marriage Issue

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been a major player in organizing and funding a proposition to outlaw same-sex... more

injektilokid
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13 responses

14 days ago

Pope urged to admit common ground

When 138 senior Muslim scholars and clergy tried to establish the common ground between Islam and Christianity last year, they... more

bedeboop
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3 responses

14 days ago

Luke Covers the Election

All we get on the US elections over here is story after story about McCain and Obama. So, I headed stateside to find out what the... more

kbryan84
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5 responses

17 days ago

Thousands march in streets to oppose gay marriage ban in California

San Diego, Ca. More than 6000 demonstrators took to the streets last night in San Diego, CA to oppose a marriage ban for same sex... more

injektilokid
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126 responses

16 days ago

HOW ANYONE CAN BECOME A CHRISTIAN

A FRIENDLY TALK CONCERNING ,HOW ANYONE CAN BECOME A CHRISTIAN

PastorRon
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0 responses

21 days ago

WHAT DOES IT MEAN YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN?

A FRIENDLY TALK CONCERNING THE BIBLE QUESTION, WHAT DOES IT MEAN YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN?

PastorRon
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0 responses

21 days ago

TAKE 5 MINUTES AND WORSHIP THE LORD JESUS CHRIST WITH ME.

PastorRon
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0 responses

21 days ago

Pilgrimage to roots of Jewish faith and strife

NABLUS, West Bank: They came in waves, ardent Jewish settlers, religious women from central Israel, black-clad followers of... more

bedeboop
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0 responses

25 days ago

Atheists advertise on London buses - There is no God

BRITISH atheists have raised a pile of cash to tell Londoners there's probably no God and to get on with life.

Apocalipstick
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0 responses

27 days ago

God VS Religions

At a McCain rally Reverend Arnold Conrad gave the opening prayer. Essentially, he acknowledges that God is overseeing the election but asks God to step forward and protect his name since others are praying to Gods of other religions for Obama to win. He is afraid that if Obama wins, then all those in favor of him will profess that their Gods are greater than the real God. You know, the God of the republicans.

Think about it: A) either God has been on vacation for the last eight years or B) God is a republican and is currently running the country along with the rest of the republicans. If so then I think he needs to be fired along with the rest of the religious, right wing, nut jobs. On the other hand, I am under the impression that God is probably allowing us, the American people, to make our own decisions using our own free agency and ability to judge right from wrong. This is exactly why religion and politics should not be married together.

George W. Bush was the republicans’ religious correction to Bill Clinton’s indiscretion. Look where we are now. Bill got a little ungh ungh and George got a whole lot of ching ching not to mention 4182 of our soldiers killed in Iraq, over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians killed, and $10,280,557,842,218.00 (over 10 trillion) in debt. How is your 401k now, how is your mortgage, how is your current job, how is your ability to get the loan you need, how is your ability to send your children to college minus their student loans, how is your wallet at the pump, how is your grocery list filling out, what about the restoration after Katrina, how are we viewed as a nation around the world, what kind of a shining example are we now to the rest of the world?

I think I preferred Bill getting a little ungh, ungh. Bill’s ungh, ungh is between Bill, Hillary, and God; NOT US! So lets GET OUR HEADS THE F*#K OUT OF OUR ASSES! God is not running this show! The village idiot and his cronies have been. That is why we as a nation are in such a mess!

See my post on “Our Country Tis of Thee,” also see my post on “That One,” and you will see what some religious nut jobs have been capable of in the name of God and for the good of the country. Then you wonder how Jesus Christ could have possibly been crucified. It was due to this same kind of mentality that drove the mobs mad enough to do it. All of it done for God’s sake and on the fear of some small minded, God fearing people that believed they were right!!!!!!!!

To further state my case about religion and politics follow this link if you haven't already seen it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwkb9_zB2Pg
At a McCain rally Reverend Arnold Conrad gave the opening prayer. Essentially, he acknowledges that God is overseeing the... more

JuliusBC
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16 responses

1 month ago

Being true to faith means not voting for Obama?

"Many recent letters to the editor claim that voting for a pro-abortion candidate (Barack Obama) is consistent with Catholic... more

DeliaTheArtist
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1 response

1 month ago

Is Religion a Figment of our Imagination?

"A leading anthropologist has questioned the popular idea that religion developed and spread because it encouraged social bonding, by arguing that faith and belief is nothing but a figment of human imagination.

Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics argues that humans are the only species to practice religion because they're the sole creatures to have evolved imagination. According to Bloch"s theory, initially humans had to develop the essential brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't subsist physically, and the likelihood that people somehow survive on after their death.

Once this was done, they had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Exclusively, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unite with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead.

He explained that the transcendental social also permits humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct linked with religion. "What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination," New Scientist magazine quoted him, as saying.

"One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it. Moreover, the composition of such groups, whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead," he added.

He argues that no animals, not even our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, can do this. Instead, he says, they're restricted to the routine and Machiavellian social interactions of everyday life. The reason for this, he says, is that they can't imagine beyond this immediate social circle, or backwards and forwards in time, in the same way that humans can.

Bloch believes our ancestors evolved the essential neural architecture to imagine before or around 40-50,000 years ago, at a time called the Upper Palaeological Revolution, the final sub-division of the Stone Age. "The transcendental network can, with no problem, include the dead, ancestors and gods, as well as living role holders and members of essentialised groups," he said.

"Ancestors and gods are compatible with living elders or members of nations because all are equally mysterious invisible, in other words transcendental," he added. But Bloch argues that religion is only one expression of this exceptional ability to form bonds with non-existent or distant people or value-systems.

"Religious-like phenomena in general are an inseparable part of a key adaptation unique to modern humans, and this is the capacity to imagine other worlds, an adaptation that I argue is the very foundation of the sociality of modern human society," he said.

"Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion," he added. Bloch has detailed his findings in the journal of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.""A leading anthropologist has questioned the popular idea that religion developed and spread because it encouraged social... more