This is, not surprisingly, depressing stuff (not surprisingly because of the subject matter and the source). It’s depressing not just because of the substance but also because of the patronizing stupidity of the writing – the cuddly babytalk, the low (the almost non-existent) expectations.

Nine in 10 (91 percent) of American adults say they believe in God and almost as many (87 percent) say they identify with a specific religion. Christians far outnumber members of any other faith in the country, with 82 percent of the poll’s respondents identifying themselves as such. Another 5 percent say they follow a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism or Islam.

Note the lightning-fast shift from ‘a specific religion’ to the now more usual familiar … Read the rest

I didn’t know this – Zimbardo discovered that he’d become a subject of his own experiment. Read the whole thing; it’s fascinating.

Missing from the body of social-science research at the time was the direct confrontation of good versus evil, of good people pitted against the forces inherent in bad situations…Thus in 1971 was born the Stanford prison experiment, more akin to Greek drama than to university psychology study. I wanted to know who wins — good people or an evil situation — when they were brought into direct confrontation…Suddenly the guards perceived the prisoners as “dangerous”; they had to be dealt with harshly to demonstrate who was boss and who was powerless. At first, guard abuses were retaliation for

More on the Vatican jefe.

Hell is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful, the Pope has said. Addressing a parish gathering in a northern suburb of Rome, Benedict XVI said that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed to “admit blame and promise to sin no more”, they risked “eternal damnation – the inferno”…God had given men and women free will to choose whether “spontaneously to accept salvation … the Christian faith is not imposed on anyone, it is a gift, an offer to mankind”.

Sorry, jefe, that won’t wash. You can’t call it a … Read the rest

So Louis Theroux goes to visit the Phelps family – you know, the ‘God hates fags’ crowd, the people who go to funerals to shout about ‘fags’. Hell’s angels have started policing military funerals to help keep them at a distance – just in case people who have lost someone they love to a violent death in a war don’t much feel like hearing from Fred Phelps and his descendants at the funeral.

What we did, I think, was try to understand how a group like this operates; its group psychology, the way the beliefs are passed down the family…We’re exploring what is cruelty, trying to explain how something that really does very often just amount to cruelty could be