1 thought on “Believers go on rack to prove God relieves pain”

  1. It’s hard to list the odditie
    It’s hard to list the oddities, there are so many of them:

    1. Is this really happening? It sounds more like a hoax. Last time I looked at the Times, probably 10-15 years ago, it struck me that they were basically in the business of reprinting press releases without much in the way of editing. Maybe one of the press releases turned out to be fraudulent?

    2. How could you possibly have ethical torture? Presumably ethics would require that you stop if the guy says “stop,” but then it’s not really torture, at least not torture for which it makes sense to call on a presence or power beyond oneself.

    3. I have to say that this sounds a bit alarming:

    A better understanding of the physiology of belief, the conditions that entrench it in the mind and its usefulness in mitigating pain could be crucial to developing counter-terrorist strategies for the future.

    4. The project is supposedly funded, to the tune of $2 million, by the Templeton Foundation. They’re pro-religious. So why the interest in finding better ways to torture fundies, and why the bit about

    Scientists have long been baffled at the persistence of [religious] beliefs in the face of seemingly irrefutable logic. Professor Lewis Wolpert, the biologist, has speculated in the past that a belief in how the world was created and what happens after death may have conferred an evolutionary advantage.

    5. No sign it’s a hoax, just of jounalistic incompetence: the business at the end about “past torture” that presumes a special connection between torture and religion.

    Rem tene, verba sequentur.

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