Finals, debates, new years...

So, apparently, I'm the last person at the Seminary still working on my finals. But, that doesn't mean I'm not doing interesting work. In truth, I only have one paper left and it is on the interplay between our scientific and technological advances and our beliefs. It's pretty fertile ground- hints of which can be seen in previous postings - and I hope to share some of it with you in the new year.

However, all this school work, does make it more difficult to follow the presidential election which is rapidly approaching! In fact, we are going to have our first debate party on January 31st (details to come) which is just 5 days before New Yorkers go to the polls on Feb. 5th.

With Christmas next Tuesday, and the campaigns pulling out their 'holiday' ads, I wanted to share with you an editorial in the Times (from last Friday), by Eduardo Porter, about the dilemma of an atheist during the election season titled "Campaigns Like These Make it Hard to Believe"

Here are some highlights:

As I watched Mitt Romney tie himself into a constitutional knot as he argued that religion should provide a guide for public policy but not be used to choose a president, it made me suspect that all the candidates in the race — Republican and Democratic — must believe that I lack some essential virtue.

I’m an atheist. When people trot out the well-worn John Adams quote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” I can’t help feeling squeezed out of the polity. Mr. Romney was trying to sound ecumenical. But speeches like his confirm the impossibility for an atheist to be elected to national office in this country. Any atheist with political ambitions would have to drop the atheism first.

There's more, the full article can be found here. And, don't hesitate to click on "comments" below and join in on some of the interesting conversations that have broken out.

I'll be away next week - or whenever I get this paper finished - so I wanted to take the time now to send out my best wishes for a happy and healthy new year from both me and Alana. It has been a real thrill for us to be able to join this community during the past year, and with a wedding (and a Rabbinic Ordination) upcoming in '08, we look forward to sharing more simchas with all of you.

L'shana tova! :)
Dan

The God Effect

Last Sunday, the NY Times Magazine had their annual "Year in Ideas" edition. This is an issue that I look forward to each year (this was only the 7th year they've been doing it) because it is filled with interesting products, ideas, studies and concepts that arrived on the scene during the past 12 months.

In case you missed it, you can read all of them here.

There was one, in particular, that I thought might stir up a conversation here and it is called "The God Effect". Here's some of it:

In a pair of studies published in Psychological Science, Norenzayan and his student Azim F. Shariff had participants play the so-called “dictator game,” a common way of measuring generosity toward strangers. The game is simple: you’re 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 “dictators” play selfishly, leaving little or nothing for the other player.

In the control group of Norenzayan’s study, the vast majority of participants kept everything or nearly everything — whether or not they said they were religious. “Religious leaders always complain that people don’t internalize religion, and they’re right,” Norenzayan observes.

But is there a way to induce generosity? In the experimental condition, the researchers prompted thoughts of God using a well-established “priming” 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 “God prime” 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.

Here is a graph included in the article (click on it):


There's more.... Click here for the whole story.

What do you think?

- Dan

Rabbi's Corner

A FESTIVAL OF LIGHT

By Rabbi Niles E. Goldstein

Happy Day 6 of Chanukah, the Festival of Lights. We had a wonderful communal celebration on Friday night, and I am sure that many or most of you have been enjoying these lights of Jewish pride and joy in the privacy of your own homes, too. My message today is simple: Let's try to bring that same feeling of joy and celebration into the rest of the year. Let's treat Chanukah as a metaphor for our Jewish religion as a whole.

Wouldn't THAT be a miracle?

Our religion is ancient, beautiful, rich, profound, meaningful, and life-transforming. What we need to do is give it a genuine chance to affect us, not just on the "fun" family holidays, but every day. That was the goal of our forbears. I ask you to move beyond Judaism in its more pediatric forms--stretch yourself, study, practice. You'll have more fun than you probably think you will.....