{"id":1532,"date":"2007-12-10T11:17:21","date_gmt":"2007-12-10T11:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/idolchatter\/2007\/12\/the-year-in-religious-ideas.html"},"modified":"2007-12-10T11:17:21","modified_gmt":"2007-12-10T11:17:21","slug":"the-year-in-religious-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/idolchatter\/2007\/12\/the-year-in-religious-ideas.html","title":{"rendered":"The Year in (Religious) Ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"nytideas2.jpg\"Each December the New York Times Sunday Magazine does a special issue that I always look forward to: their “Annual Year In Ideas” edition. It goes from A to Z with entries about a mind-boggling range–from the interesting to the utterly and truly wacky– of new discoveries, patents, theories, commodities that sprang into being over the course of the previous year.
\nThe 2007 issue<\/a> had not only a few eccentric and odd entries (see “The ‘Cat Lady’ Conundrum<\/a>“), but also a few interesting and funky religious ones.<\/p>\n


\nTake a look at “The God Effect<\/a>” for example, which asks “does thinking of an omniscient God actually promote altruism?”:<\/p>\n

In a pair of studies published in Psychological Science, Norenzayan and his student Azim F. Shariff had participants play the so-called \u201cdictator game,\u201d a common way of measuring generosity toward strangers. The game is simple: you\u2019re offered 10 $1 coins and told to take as many as you want and leave the rest for the player in the other room (who is, unbeknown to you, a research confederate). The fair split, of course, is 50-50, but most anonymous \u201cdictators\u201d play selfishly, leaving little or nothing for the other player. In the control group of Norenzayan\u2019s study, the vast majority of participants kept everything or nearly everything \u2014 whether or not they said they were religious. \u201cReligious leaders always complain that people don\u2019t internalize religion, and they\u2019re right,\u201d Norenzayan observes. But is there a way to induce generosity? In the experimental condition, the researchers prompted thoughts of God using a well-established \u201cpriming\u201d technique: participants, who again included both theists and atheists, first had to unscramble sentences containing words such as God, divine and sacred. That way, going into the dictator game, players had God on their minds without being consciously aware of it. Sure enough, the \u201cGod prime\u201d worked like a charm, leading to fairer splits. Without the God prime, only 12 percent of the participants split the money evenly, but when primed with the religious words, 52 percent did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then there is something called “Interstellar Ramadan<\/a>” for the practicing Muslim who also happens to be an astronaut:<\/p>\n

“Astronauts align their daily prayer times with those at their points of departure, but if they can\u2019t pray toward Mecca, the guidelines say, they can pray toward Earth itself. If they can\u2019t find Earth, they can pray in any direction. (Chances are, if an astronaut can\u2019t find Earth, he\u2019s got other problems.) If it\u2019s impossible to bow or lie down, they can gesture with their eyelids \u201cfor each prayer movement.\u201d They are permitted to strike their hands against a wall or mirror instead of the ritual hand- and foot-washing but can eat nonhalal food \u201cto alleviate hunger only.\u201d The clerics also ruled that female Muslim astronauts should cover everything but their faces and the palms of their hands.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How’s that for out there?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each December the New York Times Sunday Magazine does a special issue that I always look forward to: their “Annual Year In Ideas” edition. It goes from A to Z with entries about a mind-boggling range–from the interesting to the utterly and truly wacky– of new discoveries, patents, theories, commodities that sprang into being over…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trends"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Year in (Religious) Ideas<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/idolchatter\/2007\/12\/the-year-in-religious-ideas.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Year in (Religious) Ideas\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Each December the New York Times Sunday Magazine does a special issue that I always look forward to: their “Annual Year In Ideas” edition. 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