I’m puzzled by the first sentence in this news report:
SEATTLE (CBS Seattle) — Believing if you are on a “highway to hell” could impact whether or not if you commit a crime.
Putting aside the highway to hell issue, what does “whether or not if” mean? We need to define our terms.
Reading the paragraph that followed was not much more illuminating:
A study published in the scientific journal PLoS One by University of Oregon’s Azim Shariff and University of Kansas’s Mijke Rhemtulla finds that people who believe in hell are less likely to commit a crime while people who believe in heaven more likely are to get in trouble with the law.
How about people who believe in both? What category are they in? Does everything have to be a dichotomy?
Even more puzzling was the idea that money is implicated. The authors claim that people who believe in a forgiving God give themselves more money:
They also found that a recent social psychological experiment found that Christian participants who believe in a forgiving God gave themselves more money for the study.
“Participants in the punishing God and both human conditions overpaid themselves less than 50 cents more than what they deserved for their anagrams, and did not statistically differ from the neutral condition, those who wrote about a forgiving God overpaid themselves significantly more-nearly two dollars,” the study found.
Shariff and Rhemtulla believe that the study raises “important questions about the potential impact of religious beliefs on global crime.”
And what about the impact on global warming?
This reminds me of a song which is probably copyrighted…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrl3n2ZtK2E&feature=related
They’ll probably take it down.
Because © is hell.
Comments
4 responses to “Damned whether or not if I do, and damned whether or not if I don’t!”
That video is one ugly….
And the “snake” ? Well it reminded me of something else.
TO: Eric, et al.
RE: Damned Or Not….
….DOES impact on what you do.
It all depends on whether or not you want to run-riot in this limited venue….at everyone elses’ expense….or you want to be better than yourself and ‘have it all’ at the end of this ‘rat race’ you’ve found yourself thrown into.
Criminals who believe there IS a God and a final Judgment, but don’t give a damn, will run-riot.
On the other hand, Christians—even those who used to be ‘criminals’—repent and try their best to do better than they had.
Hope that helps….
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[The REAL challenge is not to be better than other people. It’s to be better than yourself.]
P.S. Those ‘damned’ criminals are sort of like that character in Highlander, the Kurgan: willfully selfish at the expense of everyone else.
Selfish, adj., Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of anyone else.
“people who believe in heaven more likely are to get in trouble with the law”
Who wrote that, Yoda?