Belief in God is part of human nature - Oxford study

Humans are naturally predisposed to believe in gods and life after death, according to a major three-year international study.

By Tim Ross, Religious Affairs Editor 8:17PM BST 12 May 2011

Led by two academics at Oxford University, the £1.9 million study found that human thought processes were “rooted” to religious concepts. But people living in cities in highly developed countries were less likely to hold religious beliefs than those living a more rural way of life, the researchers found.

The project involved 57 academics in 20 countries around the world, and spanned disciplines including anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. It set out to establish whether belief in divine beings and an afterlife were ideas simply learned from society or integral to human nature.

One of the studies, from Oxford, concluded that children below the age of five found it easier to believe in some “superhuman” properties than to understand human limitations. Children were asked whether their mother would know the contents of a closed box. Three-year-olds believed that their mother and God would always know the contents, but by the age of four, children start to understand that their mothers were not omniscient.

Separate research from China suggested that people across different cultures instinctively believed that some part of their mind, soul or spirit lived on after death. The co-director of the project, Professor Roger Trigg, from the University of Oxford, said the research showed that religion was “not just something for a peculiar few to do on Sundays instead of playing golf. We have gathered a body of evidence that suggests that religion is a common fact of human nature across different societies. This suggests that attempts to suppress religion are likely to be short-lived as human thought seems to be rooted to religious concepts, such as the existence of supernatural agents or gods, and the possibility of an afterlife or pre-life.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8510711/Belief-in-God-is-part-of-human-nature-Oxford-study.html

Scientist says evil can be treated

 

Sat May 7, 2011 3:2PM

A Cambridge University scientist says evil is a lack of empathy which can be measured and monitored and is susceptible to education and treatment.

"I'm not satisfied with the term 'evil'," Reuters quoted Cambridge University psychology and psychiatry professor Simon Baron-Cohen as saying.

"We've inherited this word... and we use it to express our abhorrence when people do awful things, usually acts of cruelty, but I don't think it's anything more than another word for doing something bad,” he added, saying that “we need a new theory of human cruelty.”

In his recent book Zero Degrees of Empathy, Baron-Cohen suggests a rebranding of evil and defining it in terms of lack of empathy.

Director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge defines empathy in two parts; as the drive to identify other people's thoughts and feelings, and the drive to respond appropriately to those thoughts and feelings.

According to Baron-Cohen, if people fully use their capability to empathize many conflicts in families and society will be resolved.

"If you think about conflict resolution at the moment, usually we are dependent on diplomatic channels, legal frameworks, or military methods,” he said.

“But all those things operate at a very abstract level and they don't seem to get us very far.

"Empathy is about two people -- two people meeting, getting to know each other and tuning in to what the other person is thinking and feeling."

One of the world's top experts in autism and developmental psychopathology, Baron-Cohen cites at least ten brain regions which make up what he calls the "empathy circuit."

When people hurt others, parts of that circuit are malfunctioning. He also sets out an "empathy spectrum" ranging from zero to six degrees of empathy, and an "empathy quotient" test, which ranks people along that spectrum.

Baron-Cohen says people are in the middle of the spectrum, with a few particularly attuned and highly empathetic people at the top end.

He says those who fall at the bottom end of the scale should not be labeled evil, but should rather be seen as sick or "disabled," who need to be helped with their empathy deficiency.

"I try to keep an open mind. I would never want to say a person is beyond help," he says. "Empathy is a skill like any other human skill -- and if you get a chance to practice, you can get better at it."

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/178720.html