BadMormon

Apparently you don’t need God to be good, just a bunch of people watching to judge you about your behavior

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.

… cut a few paragraphs…

In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don’t go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don’t believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they’re nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

Denmark and Sweden aren’t exceptions. A 2005 study by Gregory Paul looking at 18 democracies found that the more atheist societies tended to have relatively low murder and suicide rates and relatively low incidence of abortion and teen pregnancy.

So, this is a puzzle. If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well—better, in many ways, than devout ones.

The latest research on the correlation between religion and niceness. – By Paul Bloom – Slate Magazine.

Time to Save the Economy

Juan Enriquez is a debt crisis expert. He has dealt with economic collapse in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, and Korea. And now he’s seriously concerned about the U.S.

In his presentation at Pop!Tech 2008, Enriquez stirred the crowd to help craft a prescription to avert the oncoming crisis, stating that the best chance we have to change course is during the first sixty days of the new presidency. His 10 Commandments are open to editing and debate, because as Enriquez says, “This is too important a topic to get wrong.”

10 Commandments for the President Elect to Save the US Economy | Services | frog design

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there’s a slideshow if you hit the link.  I’m not sure if it’s right or not (probably is) but it is another piece to think about.

Feelings ain’t to be trusted

Our intuition is part of our natural cognitive apparatus, our brains viewed at an abstract level as our minds. It is the result of our past, biologically and socially evolved ways of thinking about the world, which worked under the circumstances our ancestors lived in to solve the problems that affected their survival and reproduction.

We can have some confidence in the reliability of an intuition, but only under the circumstances under which the intuition evolved and for which the intuition was subjected to selected pressure. Whenever we extend our intuition past those circumstances, we can have no confidence whatsoever that our intuition actually applies reliably to the expanded, non-historical circumstances.

The Barefoot Bum: Intuition and scientific thought

Why Science is so much Cooler than Religion. Facts, baby, are strange.

Then, in 1998, two independent teams of astronomers and physicists found out that not only is the Universe not slowing its bloating, but in fact is bloating ever-faster. This turned physics on its head and even now, on this 10th anniversary of the discovery, we’re still trying to figure out the basics of the phenomenon. We don’t know what’s causing the acceleration, we don’t know what this energy is, what form it takes, nothing. All we can do is observe its effects and speculate.

Dark energy site open for business! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine.

Farmer in Chief

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy – 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do – as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis – a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

Farmer in Chief | CommonDreams.org

Kontent News Rasipedia 14 The final edition

Infinite Fiat

That’s right. Infinite Fiat will now be employed by TPTB to attempt to revive the moribund credit system.

The Federal Reserve, acting in concert with virtually all other central banks worldwide, announced this morning that they will lend–without limit–to the failed financial gamblers, literally infinite fiat.

The world’s governments have simultaneously announced that they will be nationalizing all banks and financial institutions.

Period.

Kontent News: Rasipedia #14: The final edition

Why would we think evolution ever stopped?

…since the turn of the millennium, genomics has undergone a revolution. With the completion of such landmark studies as the Human Genome Project and the publication of HapMap, scientists finally have access to the particles of evolution. They can inspect vast stretches of DNA from people of all ethnicities, and the colossal amount of information suddenly available has spurred a revision of the old static picture that will render it unrecognizable. Harpending and a host of researchers have discovered in our DNA evidence that culture, far from halting evolution, appears to accelerate it.

Seed: How We Evolve.

 
I have thought for the last few years that the rates of Autistic Spectrum Disorder wasn’t something in the water or the diet or the immunizations.  That it wasn’t a disease but a by-product of evolution, evolution of brainiacs with atypical connections.  Whether it works out over the long haul or not, we’ll apparently we’ll see faster than I ever thought.

Like It Is

“Like It Is” was born amidst the nation’s racial turmoil of the 1960s. President Lyndon Johnson’s “National Commission on Civil Disorders” issued a (Kerner Commission) report…part of which recommended that African-Americans be hired in major market TV News, so that Americans could have access to a broader perspective of post and present-day issues. 

7online.com: Like It Is on WABC-TV

Walden Bello, “A Primer on Wall Street Meltdown”

Over $5 trillion in total market capitalization has been wiped out since October of last year, with over a trillion of this accounted for by the unraveling of Wall Street’s financial titans.

The usual explanations no longer suffice.  Extraordinary events demand extraordinary explanations.  But first. . .

Walden Bello, “A Primer on Wall Street Meltdown”

Divorce In the U.S.

U.S. divorce rates: for various faith groups, age groups and geographical areas     Divorce rates among Christian groups:

The slogan: “The family that prays together, stays together” is well known. There has been much anecdotal evidence that has led to “unsubstantiated claims that the divorce rate for Christians who attended church regularly, pray together or who meet other conditions is only 1 or 2 percent”. 8Emphasis ours]. Dr. Tom Ellis, chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Council on the Familysaid that for “…born-again Christian couples who marry…in the church after having received premarital counseling…and attend church regularly and pray daily together…” experience only 1 divorce out of nearly 39,000 marriages — or 0.00256 percent. 9

A recent study by the Barna Research Group throws extreme doubt on these estimates.