I’ve often wondered just what kind of supreme power would exist that creates a human brain and then requires its owner not to use it.  What kind of creator builds a universe full of mystery and demands that it remain unknown?  What kind of creator demands love and at the same time fosters hate and fear. 

My own belief system is the result of years of learning and introspection.  And, by learning I mean the exposure of more questions rather than the search for answers.  So, I’ll write this in the form of inquiry rather than deduction. 

In the beginning there was the word and the word was God.  Does this mean that God was initially a set of laws handed down from generation to generation?  Were these laws nothing more than cognitive constructs designed to keep the masses on the straight and narrow.  If disease is sin then though shalt not?

And God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.  If God the word proved ineffective then did God in flesh naturally follow?  Did the life of Jesus provide exemplar acts of love and faith for humanity to emulate and replicate?  Was the creator asking us to not only think correctly but act correctly?

And finally, Christ is risen and they were sore afraid.  Is the third piece of the trinity the actual emotions felt by humanity?  Is the holy trinity actually a human trinity of thoughts, deeds and feelings.?

Life and faith  provide more questions than answers.  Is an unexamined faith worth our devotion?

Read the article At NYT

By Frank Bruni

I MOVED into my freshman-year dorm at the University of North Carolina after many of the other men on the hall. One had already begun decorating. I spotted the poster above his desk right away. It showed a loaf of bread and a chalice of red wine, with these words: “Jesus invites you to a banquet in his honor.”

This man attended Catholic services every Sunday in a jacket and tie, feeling that church deserved such respect. I kept a certain distance from him. I’d arrived at college determined to be honest about my sexual orientation and steer clear of people who might make that uncomfortable or worse. I figured him for one of them.

About two years ago, out of nowhere, he found me. His life, he wanted me to know, had taken interesting turns. He’d gone into medicine, just as he’d always planned. He’d married and had kids. But he’d also strayed from his onetime script. As a doctor, he has spent a part of his time providing abortions.

For some readers his journey will be proof positive of Rick Santorum’s assertion last month that college is too often godless and corrupting. For others, it will be a resounding affirmation of education’s purpose.

I’m struck more than anything else by how much searching and asking and reflecting he’s done, this man I’d so quickly discounted, who pledged a fraternity when he was still on my radar and then, when he wasn’t, quit in protest over how it had blackballed a Korean pledge candidate and a gay one.

Because we never really talked after freshman year, I didn’t know that, nor did I know that after graduation he ventured to a desperately poor part of Africa to teach for a year. College, he recently told me, had not only given him a glimpse of how large the world was but also shamed him about how little of it he knew.

In his 30s he read all 11 volumes of “The Story of Civilization,” then tackled Erasmus, whose mention in those books intrigued him. When he told me this I was floored: I knew him freshman year as a gym rat more than a bookworm and extrapolated his personality and future from there.

During our recent correspondence, he said he was sorry for any impression he might have given me in college that he wasn’t open to the candid discussions we have now. I corrected him: I owed the apology — for misjudging him.

He grew up in the South, in a setting so homogenous and a family so untroubled that, he said, he had no cause to question his parents’ religious convictions, which became his. He said that college gave him cause, starting with me. Sometime during freshman year, he figured out that I was gay, and yet I didn’t conform to his prior belief that homosexuals were “deserving of pity for their mental illness.” I seemed to him sane and sound.

He said that we talked about this once — I only half recall it — and that the exchange was partly why he remembered me two decades later.

Questioning his church’s position on homosexuality made him question more. He read the Bible “front to back and took notes of everything I liked and didn’t like,” he said.

“There’s a lot of wisdom there,” he added, “but it’s a real mistake not to think about it critically.”

He also read books on church history and, he said, “was appalled at the behavior of the church while it presumed to teach all of us moral behavior.” How often had it pushed back at important science? Vilified important thinkers?

Even so, he added to his teaching duties in Africa a weekly, extracurricular Bible study for the schoolchildren. But the miseries he witnessed made him second-guess the point of that, partly because they made him second-guess any god who permitted them.

He saw cruelties born of the kind of bigotry that religion and false righteousness sometimes abet. A teenage girl he met was dying of sepsis from a female circumcision performed with a kitchen knife. He asked the male medical worker attending to her why such crude mutilation was condoned, and was told that women otherwise were overly sexual and “prone to prostitution.”

“Isn’t it just possible,” he pushed back, “that women are prone to poverty, and men are prone to prostitution?”

He has thought a lot about how customs, laws and religion do and don’t jibe with women’s actions and autonomy.

“In all centuries, through all history, women have ended pregnancies somehow,” he said. “They feel so strongly about this that they will attempt abortion even when it’s illegal, unsafe and often lethal.”

In decades past, many American women died from botched abortions. But with abortion’s legalization, “those deaths virtually vanished.”

“If doctors and nurses do not step up and provide these services or if so many obstacles and restrictions are put into place that women cannot access the services, then the stream of women seeking abortions tends to flow toward the illegal and dangerous methods,” he said.

He had researched and reflected on much of this by the time he graduated from medical school, and so he decided to devote a bit of each week to helping out in an abortion clinic. Over years to come, in various settings, he continued this work, often braving protesters, sometimes wearing a bulletproof vest.

He knew George Tiller, the Kansas abortion provider shot dead in 2009 by an abortion foe.

THAT happened in a church, he noted. He hasn’t belonged to one since college. “Religion too often demands belief in physical absurdities and anachronistic traditions despite all scientific evidence and moral progress,” he said.

And in too many religious people he sees inconsistencies. They speak of life’s preciousness when railing against abortion but fail to acknowledge how they let other values override that concern when they support war, the death penalty or governments that do nothing for people in perilous need.

He has not raised his young children in any church, or told them that God exists, because he no longer believes that. But he wants them to have the community-minded values and altruism that he indeed credits many religions with fostering. He wants them to be soulful, philosophical.

So he rounded up favorite quotations from Emerson, Thoreau, Confucius, Siddhartha, Gandhi, Marcus Aurelius, Martin Luther King and more. From the New Testament, too. He put each on a strip of paper, then filled a salad bowl with the strips. At dinner he asks his kids to fish one out so they can discuss it.

He takes his kids outside to gaze at stars, which speak to the wonder of creation and the humility he wants them to feel about their place in it.

He’s big on humility, asking, who are we to go to the barricades for human embryos and then treat animals and their habitats with such contempt? Or to make such unforgiving judgments about people who err, including women who get pregnant without meaning to, unequipped for the awesome responsibility of a child?

As a physician, he said, you’re privy to patients’ secrets — to their truths — and understand that few people live up to their own stated ideals. He has treated a philandering pastor, a drug-abusing financier. “I see life as it really is,” he told me, “not how we wish it were.”

He shared a story about one of the loudest abortion foes he ever encountered, a woman who stood year in and year out on a ladder, so that her head would be above other protesters’ as she shouted “murderer” at him and other doctors and “whore” at every woman who walked into the clinic.

One day she was missing. “I thought, ‘I hope she’s O.K.,’ ” he recalled. He walked into an examining room to find her there. She needed an abortion and had come to him because, she explained, he was a familiar face. After the procedure, she assured him she wasn’t like all those other women: loose, unprincipled.

She told him: “I don’t have the money for a baby right now. And my relationship isn’t where it should be.”

“Nothing like life,” he responded, “to teach you a little more.”

A week later, she was back on her ladder.

Jesus loves me. This I know. Cause the bible tells me so.  Little ones to him belong. We are weak but he is strong.  Nuff said.

Flatus The Elder

Passion vs puritanism as America is gripped by a war over sexuality

read the article at: The Guardian

By Paul Harris

Sandra Fluke’s testimony to Congress on contraception brought a vitriolic response from radio shock jock Ross Limbaugh. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

THE LAWMAKERS’ BATTLEGROUND

There have been numerous clashes in the US over reproductive rights that many liberals have called a “war on women”:

■ The “Blunt amendment” was a failed attempt by Republicans to allow firms with moral objections to opt out of providing healthcare covering birth control.

■ The state senate in Virginia has passed a law requiring a woman to have an ultrasound before having an abortion. Originally the law had also mandated a vaginal probe aimed at detecting a heartbeat in the fetus.

■ In Utah politicians have passed a local law that bans sex education that mentions homosexuality, birth control techniques and any discussion of sex outside marriage. Instead schools will be required to give sex education on the grounds of “abstinence only” or they can not mention the subject at all.

■ In Texas, governor Rick Perry has cut planned parenthood out of the state’s women’s health program. The move could trigger the federal government to axe 90% of funds, threatening a service which provides breast cancer screenings and birth control advice.

The constitution guarantees the right of and from religion.  Christianist zealots forcing their will on any part of the American public is not Patriotic.  It is treasonous.

Flatus The Elder

US judge says sorry over racist Obama email

Read the article at Yahoo News

A senior US judge has apologized after sending an email containing a racist joke about President Barack Obama that equated African Americans with dogs, a newspaper reported.

Ghastly Outdated Party

Read the article at NYT

By Maureen Dowd

Theocracy and Its Discontents

Read the article at: NYT

By Timothy Egan

Ah, the founders, those starch-collared English souls planting liberty in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century. For those who didn’t follow rules handed down by God through man, these New World authorities could cut out your tongue, slice off your ears or execute you. O.K., Puritans, wrong role-model founders.

Then let’s look west, beyond the Wasatch Mountains in the 19th century, where Brigham Young built a Mormon empire in which church rule and civil law were one and the same — the press, a military brigade and the courts all controlled by the Seer and Revelator of a homegrown religion. Oops, wrong founders again.

American political bedrock — God’s house and the people’s government guiding separate worlds — wasn’t always in place. Reason ultimately won out. But theocracy certainly had its colonies and its advocates; it might have prevailed but for a few outstanding voices.

One of those voices was Roger Williams’s. Banished by the Puritans, he established what became Rhode Island and created in 1636 “the first government in the world which broke church and state apart,” as John M. Barry writes in “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul,” a new book on this founding episode.

The idea that civil law and religious law are separate has coursed through American society ever since. It was a radical thought in 1636. It’s written in the Constitution now. And yet, with Rick Santorum riding high in the Republican primaries, it looks as if this issue will get another go-round.

Santorum, who makes Mitt Romney look blandly secular by comparison, has a well-known animus against accepted sexual practices that he believes defy “God’s law” — his words, not mine. He opposes sex for reasons other than producing babies, sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, prenatal testing, and on and on. Contraception, he has said, gives people “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Erik S. Lesser/European Pressphoto AgencyRick Santorum and his family prayed with a pastor at a campaign rally in a Cumming, Ga. church on Feb. 19.

Most Americans won’t begrudge him his beliefs; he’s free to practice them, and imbue his children with them, as he did by home-schooling his family. But most Americans also will part ways with him when he advocates that civil code should adhere to his religious beliefs.

“God gave us laws that we must abide by,” he said early on the campaign. Notably, Santorum, a far-right Catholic, has taken issue with President John F. Kennedy, a moderate Catholic, for having said that his presidency would not be dictated by his faith. This view, Santorum said in 2010, has caused “great harm to America.”

So, bring on the argument, once again, with history as the guide. Williams was a Puritan convert who left Britain to escape religious persecution by a king who was head of state and head of the Church of England. After initially being welcomed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he was persecuted for his more enlightened views and put on trial. He faced the possibility of torture, or execution. Ultimately, he was banished.

In founding Providence as a place of religious tolerance, Williams drew Jews, Quakers and nonbelievers to his new colony, and gave up trying to convert the Indians. “Forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils,” he said.

In Barry’s book, Williams is charismatic and heroic, but also far ahead of his time. “The Bay leaders, both lay and clergy, firmly believed that the state must enforce all of God’s laws,” Barry writes. Williams “believed that humans, being imperfect, would inevitably err in applying God’s laws.” And certainly, those heretics who were hanged in New England paid the ultimate price for such errors.

The Mormons, for all the cheery optimism of their present state, were birthed in brutal theocracy, first in Nauvoo, Ill., and later in the State of Deseret, as their settlement in present-day Utah was called. The Constitution, separating church from state, press from government, had no place in either stronghold. And it took a threat to march the United States Army out to the rogue settlement around the Great Salt Lake to persuade Mormon leaders that their control did not extend beyond matters of the soul.

Santorum is itching to add another chapter to this book. Last weekend, he seemed to question President Obama’s faith, alluding to a “phony theology” that supposedly guides his presidency. Who knew there was a religious test through the gates of the White House?

He also used his Biblical beliefs to deny climate change, saying, “We are put on this earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the earth.” You may think he’s running for chief deacon, and should swap his sweater vest for a clerical collar.

But his followers know exactly what he’s talking about. In Wednesday night’s debate in Arizona, Santorum defended his religious-themed campaign: “Just because I talk about it doesn’t mean I want a government program to fix it.” But in fact, he does. Santorum has long tried to get his Biblical principles taught to children in public schools — insisting that “creationism” should be in every American classroom, and trying to enforce that through riders to education bills when he was a senator. Better yet, the kids should read about Roger Williams, a man of faith, and of reason — the American model that will prevail long after Santorum has left the pulpit.

Putting one’s god before ones country is the very definition of anti-american.  This is a nation of many cultures and many faiths.  To exhalt one faith over another and call it patriotism is nothing more than a blatant lie.  Christianity is the faith based on the life of Jesus.  In its most vile form, christianism, it is a faith of self righteous superiority.  Christian theocracy is the exact opposite of patriotism.

Flatus The Elder

An Open Letter to the Republican National Committee: I am your demographic and you’ve lost my vote

I am your demographic.

I am a white, middle-class, male, 40-something. white collar, family man, a son of immigrants, former military, patriot, and raised Catholic. I have voted Republican in almost every primary and election since I turned 18. That means I voted for Reagan, Bush, Dole, and Bush. Last election I was so disillusioned with you, I voted for Obama. This year neither one of the main candidates will get my vote, and let me tell you why.

I am a middle-class, white collar businessman and have been for 20 years. I watched through the latest crisis how the people that bankroll you and you pass laws for have absolutely destroyed the economy in this country. Offshoring, outsourcing, downsizing, rightsizing, securitization; all doctrines used in the name of “shareholder value” that have eviscerated the middle class and eliminated entire industries. I have seen friends’ careers destroyed, neighborhoods laid waste, and whole communities suffer all for a little more EPS. These people you take your orders from are criminal and traitors and should all be behind bars, some of you included.

I am a technophile. Oil is a dead-end technology. Stop trying to squeeze a drop of blood from that stone and come up with a strategic approach to energy independence. Electric, solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear are all methods of generating DOMESTIC energy. They will create investment and jobs. Stop whipping up the uneducated against electric cars and high-speed trains. These are mature technologies that can immediately stop sending our money to overseas despots that absolutely hate us. A portion of every dollar you send overseas makes dead American soldiers. Which leads me to…

I am former military, the son of immigrants, and member of the NRA. My family came to this country for freedom and opportunity because America was the land where you could do anything you dreamed. You have corrupted that. I have been to too many military funerals and memorial ceremonies for good young men who died overseas, and for what? Why are we over there, anywhere? No one wants us there anymore, including our hosts. Bring the boys home, close the bases, DEFEND America instead of these militaristic junkets you support so rabidly. We have a military that is larger exponentially than our nearest enemy. It is unnecessary and wasteful. Stop giving money to our adversaries in foreign aid and focus on rebuilding this country.

On that same note, I am a patriot, and the TSA and “Homeland Security” are an abomination. I could quote Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Washington, or Hamilton here but it’s pointless. You know them, but you either ignore them or twist them for your own ends. The founding fathers would be rising up themselves today if they could see how the Constitution has been indefinitely detained itself. The PATRIOT Act, NDAA, and all of the bastard children of those laws need to stop. It actually turns my stomach now when the word “security” comes on any news report, which is about a dozen times an hour. You are making Americans fearful which will be our downfall.

Additionally, the War on Drugs is lost. Legalize, tax, regulate, and provide treatment. Every country who has done this is light years ahead of us in terms of bringing this under control. Then again without a militarized police force you are unable to keep the populace in line as easily.

I am white. I have no fear of other races, cultures, creeds, or nationalities. I do business with muslims, Pakistanis, Israelis, Chinese, Mexicans, Germans, English, Japanese, and of course Americans. They are all people just like me. I have served with many of those people, had relationships with all races and cultures, and am friends with anyone who is a good person. Holding any ethnic group responsible for the actions of a few is reprehensible and anytime I hear about “the muslims” in a general negative light, you shift me further away.

I am Catholic. And I don’t CARE about abortion, contraception, or gay marriage as political issues. Abortion is a lost issue (see Roe v. Wade). If you get it back in front of the Supreme Court, then talk about it. It’s polarizing and no good comes from talking about it. Contraception as a political issue? Are you kidding me? And gay marriage? What’s the value in even discussing that? Who cares what people do in their own homes? Whatever happened to the separation of church and state?. Education costs are out of control. Healthcare is unattainable for many. Unemployment is sky-high. These are the issues you should be addressing. Bill Clinton, whom I detest, had one thing right for certain: “It’s the economy, stupid”.

Your field of candidates is functionally insane in my opinion. I voted Obama last time because the idea McCain/Palin in office scared the shit out of me. Romney? Santorum? Gingrich? This is the best you can put forward? Until you take a rational position on any of the above and start focusing on what’s good for the country as a whole, you have lost my vote. My only hope is that enough of my fellow citizens, both Democrat and Republican take the same stance.

EDIT: Fixed typo. Wow, main page. I didn’t expect my frustrated rant to generate such a response. Thank you all for your kind comments.

EDIT 2: I was deliberately trying to avoid discussing Congressman Paul, although many people have posted and messaged me about my position on him, for two reasons:

One, for better or worse, he will likely not be the offered candidate. No matter the reasons, it appears highly unlikely he will receive the nomination. As a result…

Two, he is a lightning rod. Although I agree with some of his positions and disagree with some of his positions, I didn’t want those debates to detract from my main points above because that would not have been productive. Congressman Paul is obviously a libertarian candidate running as a Republican. He does not fit into the same category as those listed above, in my opinion.

No comment necessary.

Flatus The Elder

Santorum says Obama agenda not “based on Bible”

Read the article at: Yahoo News

By Samuel P. Jacobs

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) – Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum challenged President Barack Obama’s Christian beliefs on Saturday, saying White House policies were motivated by a “different theology.”

A devout Roman Catholic who has risen to the top of Republican polls in recent days, Santorum said the Obama administration had failed to prevent gas prices rising and was using “political science” in the debate about climate change.

Obama’s agenda is “not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,” Santorum told supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement at a Columbus hotel.

When asked about the statement at a news conference later, Santorum said, “If the president says he’s a Christian, he’s a Christian.”

But Santorum did not back down from the assertion that Obama’s values run against those of Christianity.

“He is imposing his values on the Christian church. He can categorize those values anyway he wants. I’m not going to,” Santorum told reporters.

A social conservative, Santorum is increasingly seen as a champion for evangelical Christians in fights with Democrats over contraception and gay marriage.

“This is just the latest low in a Republican primary campaign that has been fueled by distortions, ugliness, and searing pessimism and negativity – a stark contrast with the President who is focused everyday on creating jobs and restoring economic security for the middle class,” said Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt.

The campaign’s response signaled a new respect for Santorum. Until this week, the Obama campaign appeared exclusively focused on Mitt Romney. Republicans are waging a state-by-state contest to pick a candidate to challenge Obama in November’s election.

At a campaign appearance in Florida last month, Santorum declined to correct a voter who called Obama, a Christian, an “avowed Muslim.”

Santorum told CNN after that incident, “I don’t feel it’s my obligation every time someone says something I don’t agree with to contradict them, and the president’s a big boy, he can defend himself.”

QUESTIONS ROMNEY RECORD ON OLYMPICS

On Saturday, Santorum also took aim at Romney, his main Republican rival, on one of the central accomplishments of his resume, saying the former Massachusetts governor’s rescue of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics required millions of dollars in handouts from the federal government.

The attack was a response to the Romney camp trying to portray Santorum as a proponent of big government because of his use of earmarks while he served in the U.S. Senate.

“He heroically bailed out the Salt Lake City Olympic Games by heroically going to Congress and asking them for tens of millions of dollars to bail out the Salt Lake Olympic Games – in an earmark,” Santorum said.

“One of his strongest supporters, John McCain called it potentially the worst boondoggle in earmark history. And now Governor Romney is suggesting, ‘Oh, Rick Santorum earmarked,’ as he requested almost half a billion dollars of earmarks as governor of Massachusetts to his federal congressmen and senators. Does the word hypocrisy come to mind?” Santorum said.

Romney often talks of how he turned around the struggling Olympics organization and is appearing in Utah on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the Olympics.

In a statement, the Romney campaign said Santorum was in a weak position to challenge its candidate on big spending.

“Sometimes when you shoot from the hip, you end up shooting yourself in the foot. There is a pretty wide gulf between seeking money for post-9/11 security at the Olympics and seeking earmarks for polar bear exhibits at the Pittsburgh Zoo. Mitt Romney wants to ban earmarks, Senator Santorum wants more ‘Bridges to Nowhere,’” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul.

A while back I predicted that the 2012 election would be about race and religion.

It would appear that my prediction is coming true.  While it is sad that the Republican party has sunk to a new low level of radical right wing christianism, the prospect for a new birth of liberalism is on the horizon.

Flatus The Elder

Read the article at Yahoo News

By Stephanie Pappas

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.

Controversy ahead

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics,” said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. “When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it’s bound to upset somebody.”

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]

“The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this,” Nosek said, referring to the new study. “It’s not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists.”

Brains and bias

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured. [Life's Extremes: Democrat vs. Republican]

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as “Family life suffers if mum is working full-time,” and “Schools should teach children to obey authority.” Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as “I wouldn’t mind working with people from other races.” (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson’s work can’t speak to this “underground” racism.)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

A study of averages

Hodson was quick to note that the despite the link found between low intelligence and social conservatism, the researchers aren’t implying that all liberals are brilliant and all conservatives stupid. The research is a study of averages over large groups, he said.

“There are multiple examples of very bright conservatives and not-so-bright liberals, and many examples of very principled conservatives and very intolerant liberals,” Hodson said.

Nosek gave another example to illustrate the dangers of taking the findings too literally.

“We can say definitively men are taller than women on average,” he said. “But you can’t say if you take a random man and you take a random woman that the man is going to be taller. There’s plenty of overlap.”

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

“Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order,” Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. “Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice.”

In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link. [5 Myths About Gay People Debunked]

Simple viewpoints

Hodson and Busseri’s explanation of their findings is reasonable, Nosek said, but it is correlational. That means the researchers didn’t conclusively prove that the low intelligence caused the later prejudice. To do that, you’d have to somehow randomly assign otherwise identical people to be smart or dumb, liberal or conservative. Those sorts of studies obviously aren’t possible.

The researchers controlled for factors such as education and socioeconomic status, making their case stronger, Nosek said. But there are other possible explanations that fit the data. For example, Nosek said, a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve views like “every kid is a genius in his or her own way,” might find that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to stupidity, but extremist views in general.

“My speculation is that it’s not as simple as their model presents it,” Nosek said. “I think that lower cognitive capacity can lead to multiple simple ways to represent the world, and one of those can be embodied in a right-wing ideology where ‘People I don’t know are threats’ and ‘The world is a dangerous place‘. … Another simple way would be to just assume everybody is wonderful.”

Prejudice is of particular interest because understanding the roots of racism and bias could help eliminate them, Hodson said. For example, he said, many anti-prejudice programs encourage participants to see things from another group’s point of view. That mental exercise may be too taxing for people of low IQ.

“There may be cognitive limits in the ability to take the perspective of others, particularly foreigners,” Hodson said. “Much of the present research literature suggests that our prejudices are primarily emotional in origin rather than cognitive. These two pieces of information suggest that it might be particularly fruitful for researchers to consider strategies to change feelings toward outgroups,” rather than thoughts.

Ever wonder why poverty stricken uneducated folks tend to vote Republican?  Ever wonder why conservatives are against funding public education?  The right wing ideology depends on supporting a populous that is too stupid to know what’s good for them.  Poor white folks living on welfare, unemployment, and food stamps in the south don’t believe that they are taking government support.  They believe it’s them blacks that are sucking the life out of their beloved country.  How come?  Cause the Republicans told their preachers that Jesus said so.

Flatus The Elder

Read the article at: Philadelphia Inquirer

By Mary Elizabeth Dallas

WEDNESDAY, May 25 (HealthDay News) — Older adults who say they’ve had a life-changing religious experience are more likely to have a greater decrease in size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain critical to learning and memory, new research finds.

According to the study, people who said they were a “born-again” Protestant or Catholic, or conversely, those who had no religious affiliation, had more hippocampal shrinkage (or “atrophy”) compared to people who identified themselves as Protestants, but not born-again.

The study is published online in PLoS ONE.

As people age, a certain amount of brain atrophy is expected. Shrinkage of the hippocampus is also associated with depression, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

In the study, researchers asked 268 people aged 58 to 84 about their religious affiliation, spiritual practices and life-changing religious experiences. Over the course of two to eight years, changes to the hippocampus were monitored using MRI scans.

The researchers suggested that stress over holding religious beliefs that fall outside of the mainstream may help explain the findings.

“One interpretation of our finding — that members of majority religious groups seem to have less atrophy compared with minority religious groups — is that when you feel your beliefs and values are somewhat at odds with those of society as a whole, it may contribute to long-term stress that could have implications for the brain,” Amy Owen, lead author of the study and a research associate at Duke University Medical Center, said in a Duke news release.

The study authors also suggested that life-changing religious experiences could challenge a person’s established religious beliefs, triggering stress.

“Other studies have led us to think that whether a new experience you consider spiritual is interpreted as comforting or stressful may depend on whether or not it fits in with your existing religious beliefs and those of the people around you,” David Hayward, research associate at Duke University Medical Center, added. “Especially for older adults, these unexpected new experiences may lead to doubts about long-held religious beliefs, or to disagreements with friends and family.”

The researchers noted other factors related to hippocampal atrophy, such as age, depression or brain size, as well as other religious factors such as prayer or meditation, could not explain the study’s findings.

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke provides details on brain atrophy.

– Mary Elizabeth Dallas

If faith is belief in something that is unbelievable then being born again amounts to the choice of fiction over fact.  That belief system apparently affords the true believers a superior position over those who don’t believe.  Heaven forbid.  The problem with this construct is that the creator has given mankind brains but demands that they go unused. 

Flatus The Elder