Skepticum

According to a New Scientist article, “religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out – perhaps because they are impressed by their devotion.”

James Dow, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, US, wrote a software program called Evogod that predicts religion will flourish. The program is centered on the evolutionary benefits people receive from their interactions with one another.

“If a person is willing to sacrifice for an abstract god then people feel like they are willing to sacrifice for the community,” says Dow. Thus he concludes non-believers will help believers out because of admiration for the believers’ devotion.

Along the same lines, Richard Sosis, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs (whose main area of research is “the relationship between religion, trust, and intra-group cooperation”) previously wrote on the support believers received in ancient societies, when humans were more reliant in general on the support of the community. He found that in some populations such as the kibbutzim in Israel, more religious people receive more assistance from others in the community than the less religious.

“[Today] you can be a Lutheran one week and decide the following week you are going to become a Buddhist,”  Sosis says.

Tags: anthropology, History, Religion

I was surprised by 3 things today while reading the news about Jenna Bush’s wedding:

1. The W. Bush protesters outside the wedding

2. The wedding memorabilia

3. The gas station signs congratulating the newlyweds. I’m also surprised there’s no Jesus line in that picture, next to the “Dine-in and Take-out,” “Pay and Pump” and “President George W. Bush”…

Tags: Bush, gas, newlyweds, wedding

I’ve been gone for a while, and I thought I may not write again, until I read about the Wisconsin woman who let a 90 year-old woman die and rot atop the toilet in her home.

 Although she was reportedly still breathing, instead of calling an ambulance Lewis called her spiritual superior in a religious sect called Queen of the Holy Rosary Shrine. Alan Bushey, a self-proclaimed bishop who is also now behind bars, told her to leave the woman on the lavatory, where Lewis had propped the body, and pray for her to wake up. The mother and her children prayed for four days, but when nothing changed, they left her there. (The Telegraph, May 12, 2008)

I have no comment for this except to say it never ceseas to amaze me how much energy such deluded folk can place in acts of madness.