Hokay. It's Sunday, and I slept at 3am this morning. I probably owe that to the large amount of cola I had yesterday. One Big Gulp, one medium coke, and a huge cup of it.

Today, I vow to replace coke with regular soda, if drinking in the p.m. hours. Unless of course I'm intending on staying up.

I was surfing a rather... Questionable... Forum today, and I stumbled upon a thread discussing a certain study going on at the University of Oxford. To put it briefly, they are doing a study on human behaviours and psychologies to find out why people believe in God.

Yeah, they're blowing two million Euros on that. Eek.

Much of the discussion included whether or not it was really necessary to hold such a study. And a few idiots who misinterpreted it and thought it was another debate on the existence of god. People, just to clear it up, this is not a debate on the existence of any deity.

Thought experiments indicate that the idea of religion may have been an evolutionary by-product and an advantage to humankind. It could be, because it's undeniable that religion brings people together. Think of a society of primitive humans, wanting to understand the world, but without means to do so. If someone comes up with something, anything, that can answer their questions, you have a belief system there.

I'm sure this study will produce a lot of very interesting articles that I will enjoy reading very much. But other than deepening my understanding of human psychology, I'm not really sure how else this study will be beneficial. I mean, I think at the end of it all, they'll all reach the same conclusion: Someone got rather creative 10,000 years ago and everyone believed him.

But I'm also expecting it to answer a few questions. Is it inevitable for the idea of a higher power to come to a being with a high cognitive ability? After all, if you leave a guy alone for a while, he'll start coming up with all sorts of random stuff. Give a guy a problem, and he'll also come up with a lot of random stuff to try to solve it(assuming he gives a shit in the first place). Or he might die, because the problem is how to escape three velociraptors without moving your legs.

For some reason, "velociraptor" is considered a spelling error by the Firefox dictionary. How else can you spell it?

Also, in the discussion , someone linked to this presentation:


Synthetic happiness. It basically says that our brains have the ability to make us happy, even in situations that would normally be considered less preferable. Watch the video. It's about 20 minutes long, but it's really quite informative.

Woot it's raining! I love the rain.

-Joe