'Whereas the boy is being trained to be a leader, the girl is being trained to be a follower.'Reverend Jack Hyles, pastor of First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, writer of many books.
"We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God's word for the home and family," said Seminary President Paige Patterson. "If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed." the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas
"Men should be out there doing whatever it takes to insure that mom can spend as much time as possible with her family because she is uniquely equipped by God for the role of managing the household and the kids on a daily basis."

"Even before birth, your baby's little heart was already programmed for sin and selfishness."

A 2005 Pew Research Center poll found that only 31 percent of white evangelicals said that torture is never justified, 41 percent of secular Americans agreed that it is never justified.

Interesting news for readers of this thread:

"Oxford researchers have received a £1.9 million grant for the development of the study of the cognitive science of religion – a scientific approach to why humans believe in God and other issues around the nature and origin of religious belief.

The award has been made by the John Templeton Foudation to the Oxford Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion and the Centre for Anthropology and Mind. It will be used to draw together and promote the latest scientific ideas about the meaning of religion and its origin in the human mind.

The cognitive sciences include all aspects of the study of the mind and intelligence, ranging across fields as diverse as evolutionary biology, neuroscience, linguistics and computer sciences. They offer a complex set of tools for looking at the full range of human behaviour.

Dr Justin Barrett, a psychologist who has been at the forefront of the development of the cognitive science of religion, will be playing a lead role in the new study. He said: ‘Cognitive science can help to explain the origin and nature of human religion. For example, developmental psychology has been instrumental in determining that belief in religion seems to be an integral part of human nature – it is found across all cultures and is something that we grasp from a young age."

More here:

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_releases_for_journalists/080222.html

Note that the Templeton Foundation is the bete noire of Richard Dawkins. It is not an unbiased foundation, it is a religious foundation, and tends to like research that backs up its beliefs.

Still, interesting.

While secular society has gone a long way in establishing values through its legal system this mantle has fallen from the pious whose purpose in life seems to be to want to retract most of these freedoms.

Dear Vanilla,

Thanks for the study you mentioned, it does sound interesting.

Thanks also to everyone who contributed to this thread.

I feel that I have nothing much more to say on the subject.

Except to add,I like Gore Vidal's satirical portrayal of the "sky god," the distant arbiter of our existence for whose attention we have to perform this many-faceted dance.

Why can't we relax and let the God within us flow?

Religiosity is cohesive but it is not necessary to recognise morality. Secular humist do just fine.

The Hindus, Janists, Confucians [essentially secular], Taoists and the Jew Rabbi Hillel all propose forms of The Golden Rule. The Code of Hammurabi precedes the Ten Commandments and probably influenced Moses' formation of the Commendments.

At the bottom of all this our intelligence tells what is right and what is wrong. Think of how few men have been involved fist fights after as adults, then think of how many millions of men [and women] have died fighting religious wars.

O.

There was something about Dawkins recently so I thought this would fit in. (I'm thinking of Dawkins as the opposite extreme to people who believe in demons.)

I came across the most remarkable study that at the very least people should find interesting. The researchers involved are well published and together with Guild they are famed for demonstrating differential responding to forced and consensual sex for rapists and non-rapists. The above finding has been subsequently replicated by a number of researchers.

The study arguably can't be taken to show more than (some?) transgender people can make remarkably quick recoveries in the most unlikely circumstances. However an exorcism is involved and hence Gibo I hope you like this. Adding to the remarkable event I note that prior to the exorcism the patient had signed up for surgery and had undergone hormone therapy and just apparently got dragged into it. That makes it doubly surprising.

Three behavioural scientists Abel, Barlow, and Blanchard were engaging in more standard work with transsexuals undergoing sex-reassignment treatment. The subject, "John", who considered himself female but was biologically male had undergone psychotherapy to adapt to his new gender in conjunction with taking female hormones. He was living as a female and about to undergo surgery. He then suddenly dropped out of the study. Researchers later accidentally encountered him and he informed them about the exorcism. Surprisingly he considered himself cured of transsexualism. Naturally the researchers hauled him in and put him through the standard battery of tests. To their amazement, by all scientific standards, John was a functional male with biological and psychological gender in perfect harmony. According to the authors at p394:

"What cannot be denied, however, is that a patient who was very clearly a transsexual by the most conservative criteria assumed a long-lasting masculine gender identity in a remarkably short period of time following the apparent exorcism."

I'm sure it will come as no surprise that they published. Abel, G., Barlow, D., & Blanchard, E. (1977). Gender identity change in a transsexual; An exorcism. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 6(5), 394.