A Guy in the Pew

Well this is interesting.  A new paper in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology presents evidence that prayer can increase a person's ability to resists temptation--and offers a non-supernatural explanation for the phenomenon: The authors made use of two experimental paradigms to test the efficacy of prayer in preventing cognitive depletion. The first, called an emotion-suppression task, simply asked participants to watch a funny video but stifle all emotional responses, verbal and non-verbal, to the content. This requires a good amount of cognitive energy to pull off successfully. The second, called a stroop task, asked participants to indicate the ink color of various words flashed to them on a computer screen. The trick is that the words spell the names of various colors that are either consistent or inconsistent with the ink they are to identify. Check it out here . You’ll find that the inconsistent word/ink items are harder to respond to than...

I don't agree with everything that Theo Hobson writes today in the Guardian 's Comment is Free group blog--in particular, I think that we need to stop talking about "militant atheists", and listen with respect to what they have to say. Nonetheless, he captures well, my view of prayer--one that many atheist may not appreciate: Prayer is a bit like masturbation. It is more widely practised than public discourse acknowledges. Apparently, 42% of us sometimes pray, according to a survey published last week. To the atheist, it's evidence that there's no room for complacency in the war on dangerous superstition. But is prayer either dangerous or superstitious? To the atheist it's like this. A person acquires the delusion that God exists, and so starts talking to this imagined being, in the hope of influencing its will. He persists in this, despite having no firm evidence that prayer works. Probably the believer is so pathetically lonely that he can't bear to ...

If we needed any reminder of how America-centric our news has become, the following report from Pharyngula (an outstanding science/atheism blog by Professor P.Z. Myers) is sobering: Try checking the major American news sites: CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the New York Times, you can even try the BBC. There's a major news story missing. You'll have to read Chris Mooney's blog to find it. There's a potential Category 5 cyclone , Cyclone Sidr, on its way to smash Bangladesh . It's going to hit sometime tomorrow. While Sonny Perdue prays for a little rain, maybe we should be urging our news networks to pay attention to the important news, our government should be getting ready for emergency assistance, and we should all be preparing to loosen those checkbooks and possibly offer what aid we can. Read it here . Here is more coverage: Tropical Cyclone Sidr's winds strengthened to 241 kilometers (150 miles) per hour as it moved across the Bay of Bengal toward Kolkata in India and th...