TruthBook Religious News Blog

August 28, 2009

BY CATHLEEN FALSANI Religion Columnist

"I recognize my own shortcomings -- the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them. I believe that each of us as individuals must not only struggle to make a better world, but to make ourselves better, too."

-- Sen. Edward Kennedy, in a speech at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Oct. 25, 1991

Ted Kennedy was a complicated man with a complicated life. Deeply faithful and deeply faulted, Kennedy was a lion of a man full of contradictions. Fierce and loyal. Dangerous and wise. Strong and yet felled by all-too-human weaknesses.

It is the complexity of his story and his character that made him such a compelling person, a heroic figure in an arena where they are few and far between.

I grew up in an Irish-American family in New England where the Kennedy clan was like royalty. They were icons -- culturally, politically and in some ways spiritually.

My parents were married the year John F. Kennedy was assassinated. As a child, I was aware of the depths of tragedy the Kennedy family endured time and time again, and I was taught to admire the family's resilience in the face of despair. The way they kept picking themselves up and soldiering on. Their commitment to public service. Their devotion to caring for the poor, the weak and those on the fringes of our society.

For all of my life, Sen. Kennedy was the patriarch of the Kennedy clan -- an avuncular, kind and fun-loving Irishman who forged into political issues with dead seriousness, but never took himself too seriously.

Ted Kennedy made many mistakes. The most infamous occurred 40 years ago when he drove his car off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Mass. He was able to swim safely to shore, while his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. He neglected to report the accident until the next morning. A reckless and selfish act of cowardice to be sure.

"I think he was chastened by it," Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Barnard College in New York and author of God in the White House: A History, said, referring to Chappaquiddick. "He did have his period later in life -- this kind of wild period -- but he repented of that as well and then settled down.

"He was a human being," Balmer said. "He had faults. But he was big enough to acknowledge them, and that's fairly uncommon for a politician."

This op-ed piece is interesting, for it gives a good example of an honest (and very public) attempt at Self-Mastery, one of the ideals we learn in the pages of The Urantia Book.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article

Labels: Cathleen Falsani, character, self-control, Ted Kennedy

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Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Does religion provide an evolutionary advantage?

5 January 2009
by Kate Melville

Religious people have more self-control than their less religious counterparts, leading to lower rates of substance abuse, better school achievement, better health behaviors, less depression, and longer lives, says University of Miami professor of Psychology, Michael McCullough.

McCullough's new meta-study, appearing in the journal Psychological Bulletin, posits that self-control is critical for success in life, and religious people have more self-control than do their less religious counterparts. Thus, religious people may be better at pursuing and achieving long-term goals that are important to them.

To arrive at his controversial conclusion, McCullough evaluated eight decades of research that was conducted in diverse samples of people from around the world. He found persuasive evidence from a variety of domains - including neuroscience, economics, psychology and sociology - that religious beliefs and religious behaviors are capable of encouraging people to exercise self-control and to more effectively regulate their emotions and behaviors, so that they can pursue valued goals.

Some of the more intriguing conclusions that McCullough drew were:

* Religious rituals such as prayer and meditation affect the parts of the human brain that are most important for self-regulation and self-control.

* When people view their goals as "sacred," they put more energy and effort into pursuing those goals, and therefore, are probably more effective at attaining them.

* Religious lifestyles may contribute to self-control by providing people with clear standards for their behavior, by causing people to monitor their own behavior more closely, and by giving people the sense that God is watching their behavior.

* The fact that religious people tend to be higher in self-control helps explain why religious people are less likely to misuse drugs and alcohol and experience problems with crime and delinquency.

Labels: Kate Melville, Michael McCullough, Psychological Bulletin, religion, self-control

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Friday, January 02, 2009

Religion may have evolved because of its ability to help people exercise self-control

Public release date: 30-Dec-2008
Marie Guma-Diaz

A study by a University of Miami psychologist reveals that religion facilitates the exercise of self-control and attainment of long-term goals

CORAL GABLES, FL (December 30, 2008)—Self-control is critical for success in life, and a new study by University of Miami professor of Psychology Michael McCullough finds that religious people have more self-control than do their less religious counterparts. These findings imply that religious people may be better at pursuing and achieving long-term goals that are important to them and their religious groups. This, in turn, might help explain why religious people tend to have lower rates of substance abuse, better school achievement, less delinquency, better health behaviors, less depression, and longer lives.

In this research project, McCullough evaluated 8 decades worth of research on religion, which has been conducted in diverse samples of people from around the world. He found persuasive evidence from a variety of domains within the social sciences, including neuroscience, economics, psychology, and sociology, that religious beliefs and religious behaviors are capable of encouraging people to exercise self-control and to more effectively regulate their emotions and behaviors, so that they can pursue valued goals. The research paper, which summarizes the results of their review of the existing science, will be published in the January 2009 issue of Psychological Bulletin.

Among the most interesting conclusions that the research team drew were the following:

* Religious rituals such as prayer and meditation affect the parts of the human brain that are most important for self-regulation and self-control;
* When people view their goals as "sacred," they put more energy and effort into pursuing those goals, and therefore, are probably more effective at attaining them;
* Religious lifestyles may contribute to self-control by providing people with clear standards for their behavior, by causing people to monitor their own behavior more closely, and by giving people the sense that God is watching their behavior;
* The fact that religious people tend to be higher in self-control helps explain why religious people are less likely to misuse drugs and alcohol and experience problems with crime and delinquency.

Among the study's more practical implications is that religious people may have at their disposal a set of unique psychological resources for adhering to their New Year's Resolutions in the year to come.

Labels: Marie Guma-Diaz, Michael McCullough, religion, religious evolution, self-control, success

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Thursday, June 14, 2007

The real roots of crime

The Daily News

A new Ipsos Reid survey commissioned by CanWest News Service and Global National finds that half of Canadians think schools are more dangerous today than five years ago. They blame bad parenting, society's disintegrating moral fabric and violence in the media as the prime culprits. One-third of respondents identified absent, lax or poor parenting as the root cause of school violence, and about one-quarter citing a perceived "lack of morals, conscience and respect" as being to blame.

Only 15 per cent thought "gangs" are the primary cause of escalating violence in Canadian schools, and just 11 per cent blamed the availability of guns - notwithstanding the histrionics of anti-gun lobbyists and some fellow-travelling politicians such as Toronto Mayor David Miller.

Convenient scapegoats

The public gut differs from many politicians, the media and various special-pleading activists who continue to blame rising adolescent depravity on the Internet, guns, video games and Hollywood violence. These are convenient scapegoats for much deeper distempers afflicting our culture - ones the left/liberal, self-styled elites don't want to acknowledge or address.

The root of the problem is that an ideology of moral relativism has been uncritically assimilated by three or four successive generations, rendering many people incapable of judging right from wrong.

Interestingly, science tends to corroborate grassroots perception more than leftist social theorizing. In criminological literature, "bad" parenting is frequently portrayed as a risk factor for unhealthy social development and, in turn, antisocial behaviour.

For instance, a study by M.R. Gottfredson and T. Hirschi, A General Theory of Crime, (Stanford University Press, 1990) finds that a propensity to engage in crime is the prime cause of involvement in crime and deviant behaviours. It argues that ineffective parenting is the reason children fail to develop self-control - lack of which is a characteristic that persists across the lifespan, predisposing individuals afflicted to lifetimes of criminal behaviour.

Gottfredson and Hirschi contend that children raised in unstructured environments fail to develop the ability to control their behaviour, and are therefore prone to engage in risky behaviours that give them either a short-term reward or relief from momentary irritations. It is failure of parents to make the effort to instil internal control that leads to childhood, and later adult, misconduct.

The baby-boomer and boomer-shadow parents of today's crop of adolescents and pre-teens are arguably the most disastrously ineffectual cohort of parents in history. Steeped in the post-1960s cult of permissiveness and a constellation of other half-baked leftist notions, they have, in the main, failed miserably at executing their parental duty of nurturing ethics of civility, duty, self-control, and responsibility in their offspring.

Reflexive contempt for self-sacrificial virtue and rejection of real religion in favour of facile, feel-good "spirituality" have robbed these postmodern parents of the tools needed to combat the malignancies today's depraved popular culture inflicts on their children. Too many parents are themselves afflicted with "perpetual adolescence syndrome," identifying with their loutish kids against teachers and other authorities as agents of oppression to be opposed at every turn.

Christina Hoff Sommers, a philosophy professor at Clark University, says many of her students are "incapable of making one single confident moral judgment."There is really no such thing as right or wrong, they tell her. Each person has to work it out for himself.

"The trouble is," laments Hoff Sommers, "that this kind of answer, which is so common as to be typical, is no better than the moral philosophy of a sociopath."Today's kids have been deceived by aggressive advocacy of bad philosophical values - the sort that are big on "rights," and "self-esteem," very light on things like responsibility, respect, duty, honour, self-control, self-sacrifice and other quaint qualities that used to be revered as unquestioned virtues in our society.

Moral naivete

This increasing moral naivete combines catastrophically with a popular culture of violent, sex-saturated entertainment, dysfunctional family life, abdication of parental authority; social science quackery in the educational system and in the social work and judicial arenas; an aggressive consumer/materialist ethos; and the pervasiveness of drugs, booze, violent entertainment, and promiscuous sex in youth culture.

Under these circumstances, it's no mystery why some kids turn predatory. Until the parenting problem is addressed, there is no hope of turning the tide of youthful anarchy, anomie and alienation.

At least the new survey reveals that public perception is finally clueing in to the actual causes and nature of the distemper. Getting people to implement the remedy will be another matter.

cwmoore@gmx.net

Charles W. Moore is a Nova Scotian freelance writer and editor whose articles, features, and commentaries have appeared in more than 40 magazines and newspapers in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.

Labels: Canada, morality, parents, relativism, self-control, violence