Opinion

"Prayer helped Defoe bounce back" from the BBC today. An article about a guy who used prayer to cheer himself up after being dropped from the world cup squad. This article really annoys me. Didn't Defoe remember that when he prayed to be a part of the world cup in the first place, and how his prayer wasn't answered. Didn't he get a clue that talking to yourself doesn't actually influence anything? How can people be so simple? It almost dismays me as much as people who are "miraculously" spared from a natural disaster believe it is God's work that they are saved. So God willed everyone else to die? In other news, I wonder why God would put all of those fossils into the ground in order to make scientists believe the earth is more than 10000 years old. So God is deliberately deceiving us? Why make out that he isn't there? He is deliberately deceiving us in order to test our faith? So a perfect God is deceitful??? Why make us defectiv

Another funny video from whywontgodhealamputees.com: The delusion of Christianity

I have always wondered what the evolutionary benefits are of any kind of ritual. I could imagine that building social relationships, and identifying with a group, are beneficial for survival. I could also guess that a ritualistic killing of genes other than your own could reduce competition for resources. In nature, animals often have complex rituals, particularly mating rituals. What is most fascinating is that human rituals are learned rather than instinctive. I have always supposed that the rituals we see today are detrimental to society. I guess it can't always be so clear cut, since occasionally religious people do act altrustically, even outside their clique, and our ancestors MUST have derived some benefit from this kind of behaviour otherwise the behaviour would not have been selected. Ultimately, it only matters to our genes THAT we behave in a certain way, not WHY we do it. Since we are intelligent, our genes must manipulate us via our beliefs rather than our instinct