Happy Birthday
It's my step-dad's birthday today, so a digital howdy-ho to him. Wifey and I shall give him the dutiful phone call tonight. He's impossible to buy for, so we sent him a card.
Today's Word: Smudge
He stood there, watching her cry in the rain. She screamed at him for minutes, rage and water and tears scattering in different directions. Her face was ruined, her make-up in terrible, broken smears.
Faith-based suffering for science
Story here
LONDON - Karl Marx famously pronounced that religion was "the opiate of the people" — but can one's belief in God really ease pain? Or is a placebo just as effective?
Researchers at Oxford University are taking these questions seriously, announcing plans Wednesday for an ambitious, multidisciplinary study to test the "faith factor" in coping with pain.
Volunteers will undergo brain scans while being subjected to painful experiments in laboratory conditions. The human guinea pigs also will be asked about their belief systems and what affect they have on their suffering.
“People frequently report that their beliefs do reduce their pain and we’d like to find what the psychological basis of that is," said Toby Collins, of Oxford's Department of Pharmacology.
The experiment is one of the first projects to be conducted at the Oxford Center for Science of the Mind (OXCSOM).
The pilot project, funded by a grant from the U.S.-based John Templeton Foundation, will examine all types of beliefs, "from those that make children think their stockings are filled by Santa Claus to the faith that drives fundamentalist terrorism," according to the university's Web site.
3 comments:
whatever it is, it is good to believe in a god specially at a time when you know that the worsening pain is an indication of how close you are getting to death.
my sister, who was a born-again Christian, made struggle with the thought of impending death but was able to make the smooth transition, eventually, with the calm of knowing where she was going after. she died smiling. i have also seen my father-in-law who passed away of cancer, at 58, who had this air of fear and desperation and struggle till the last breath. God did not figure largely in his life.
I'm sure the belief of a kind and loving God helps anyone in times of great pain and suffering. I just have this problem with medically harming someone (in controlled conditions) to test the boundaries of pain and faith. Something about it just sticks to me in a sickly, vile way.
That said, I don't know where I come down on the question of God or faith. It changes day to day. Mostly, I get baffled about all the terrible things done in God's name, and the Almighty's apparent indifference to the proceedings. Sometimes, I'm a little too urban-cynical for my own good.
i agree. sometimes i cannot believe what people go through for the sake of science. i do not know if anyone of those to be tested on will have their belief system come into play when they are really reacting to manufactured pain. and i do not think that the presence of God will serve as an opiate in this situation.
as for the suicide bombers, they probably believe deep in their hearts that to kill in the name of their god, will actually send them over to paradise and in to the waiting arms of 70 black eyed virgins. the God that i know of does not promise that sort of thing. the same way that i cannot advocate the thinking that we can all be worshipping different deities but really in essence be worshipping only one God. in the bible it is very clear. Jesus said ' I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me '. and that is what i believe in.
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