Skepticum

With the upcoming release of Jesus Camp in theaters many of us skeptics have been discussing the video.

My friend Johnny jokingly said:

“You know it really sucks that the rest of the world is outpacing us in everything, even fanatacism. america should be #1! We should have the craziest jesus freaks of all time! ”
Watch the Maher discussion to see what others think about the jesus camp idea:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGceAojHR6o]

I got myself in a number of new activities this fall, so I’ve been slow at keeping up with the blog. Here’s a review:

• I’m been trying to get a fund-raising campaign going for Making Strides Against Breast Cancer. It’s slow-going, and the corporate politics related to donation-worthy causes at my workplace don’t help. More to come on that in a future blog. In the meanwhile I put up a blog to help with our campaign at pinkhouse.wordpress.com.

• I found a great open-source image editor, and I’m ready to give it high grades. It installed fast, it opens fast, edits fast and it’s very user-friendly. So far it can do all photoshop can do, in my humble opinion. Give it a try–the name is GIMP.

• While I was playing with GIMP I needed some images and I found some nice free picks at morguefile.com. In fact I downloaded some images and edited them in GIMP to put up pinkhouse.wordpress.com.

• During the spare time between work and the above project I found a great interview with Chomsky. He talks about groupthink, deceit, and other. I loved the following passage: “Dick Cheney was recently somewhere in Central Asia—Kazakhstan, I believe. He was getting them to make sure to direct their pipelines to the West, so the US can control them. And he said, control over pipelines is a means—these are tools for intimidation and blackmail. He was talking about if somebody else controlled them. Like if China controlled the pipelines, it’s a tool of intimidation and blackmail. But if the US controls the pipelines, it’s just benevolent and free and wonderful.”

• One of my bigger desires right now is to find a macro plug-in for Lotus Notes. I have become tired of typing “Please let me know if you have any questions” X100 per day. I’d love to macro it, and be able to just press a button and insert the text in my emails. Any ideas?

An article at MSNBC.com today presents the claims of scientists at Northwestern University in Chicago that “purifying the body helped people absolve their consciences.”

In case you’re thinking this is a “duh!” statement, the scietists are talking about the psychological effect of washing and cleanliness. Almost as a sequel to my previous post, which indirectly dealt with how the Christian-right expects religious guilt to trigger ethical behavior, scientists studied how sin cleansing rituals can have the psychological effects of absolving one of guilt.

The scientists associate this “MacBeth effect” (the urge to cleanse after commiting sin) with “overlaps in the brain in the regions stimulated by moral disgust and physical disgust.” In other words, biologically we can confuse moral disgust with physical disgust and thus get the urge to wash.

For details on how the scientists conducted the study read the article while it’s still available on the MSNBC website.
Of course this study is just the begining, and opens new questions:

• So would then a clean society be more or less moral? (Do they keep clean because they’re sinful or are they sin-free because they’re clean?)
• What came first, the psychological effects of cleansing, or the religious rituals?
• How would one’s religiosity impact the “MacBeth effect”?

Moreover I find this study interesting because of the attempt to give a biological interpretation to something that appears to be deeply cultural. Is Utah so clean because of the “MacBeth effect”? And would cultures that don’t have cleansing rituals have other avenues to absolve one of guilt? I’d love to know what they are….

A recent article from the Journal of Religion and Society sheds light on the myth of religiosity as a predictor of societal “moral health.” The study was given a nice overview in an article in the Skeptic.

The study authors use data to show that while the US Society gives itself high grades on religiosity the rest of the prosperous nations passed it in the race for “moral health.”

The conservative Christian United States has been leading a public campaign against science, in particular evolution. One of their major arguments has been the Dostoevskyan concept that if there is no god everything will be permissible. This translates into distrust and fear of the moral consequences of science. The study paraphrases Tom DeLay–“The current House majority leader T. DeLay contends that high crime rates and tragedies like the Columbine assault will continue as long schools teach children ‘that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup of mud’”

Despite the strong public discourse that favors religiosity in America, our nation still falls behind other prosperous countries when it comes to societal “moral health.” To the risk of spoiling your reading and discovery pleasure, the authors conclude that, “the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion.”

The writers do not claim at any point that religiosity is to blame for the higher rates of moral troubles in the United States. The main conclusion of the writers is that science proves there is no correlation between religiosity and societal “moral health.” In other words, religiosity does not lead to higher levels of moral health in one’s society. However, countries where evolution is being taught and where science is promoted have higher levels of “moral health.”

I encourage you to read both the study and the Skeptic article for some fascinating quotes from American presidents on the importance of god in Americans’ lives, to the conclusion of the Skeptic writer.