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Despite differences in rituals and beliefs among the world’s major religions, spirituality often enhances health regardless of a person’s faith, according to University of Missouri researchers.

The MU study used the results of three surveys to determine if correlations existed among participants’ self-reported mental and physical health, personality factors, and spirituality in Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Catholics and Protestants. Across all five faiths, a greater degree of spirituality was related to better mental health, specifically lower levels of neuroticism and greater extraversion. Forgiveness was the only spiritual trait predictive of mental health after personality variables were considered.

“Spiritual beliefs may be a coping device to help individuals deal emotionally with stress.”

Cohen believes spirituality may help people’s mental health by reducing their self-centeredness and developing their sense of belonging to a larger whole. Many different faith traditions encourage spirituality though they use different names for the process.

“Health workers may also benefit from learning how to minimize the negative side of a patient’s spirituality, which may manifest itself in the tendency to view misfortune as a divine curse.” As the authors note, spiritual interventions such as religious-based counseling, meditation, and forgiveness protocols may enhance spiritually-based beliefs, practices, and coping strategies in positive ways.

The benefits of a more spiritual personality may go beyond an individual’s mental health. Cohen believes that the selflessness that comes with spirituality enhances characteristics that are important for fostering a global society based on the virtues of peace and cooperation.

IMHO, this research makes the dogmatic agenda of New Atheism seem just as dangerous as anti-intellectualism and religious fundamentalism. Diminishing or denying people’s religious and spiritual freedom could actually compromise their mental and general wellbeing. Perhaps New Atheists need to show some compassion when they make statements such as: “religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises”.

People use science fiction to illustrate philosophy all the time. From ethical quandaries to the very nature of existence, science fiction’s most famous texts are tailor-made for exploring philosophical ideas. In fact, many college campuses now offer courses in the philosophy of science fiction.

But science fiction doesn’t just illuminate philosophy — in fact, the genre grew out of philosophy, and the earliest works of science fiction were philosophical texts. Here’s why science fiction has its roots in philosophy, and why it’s the genre of thought experiments about the universe.

So it’s not just that science fiction happens somehow to be an ideal literature for exploring ideas about the nature of reality, ethics and humanity — these ideas are built into the core of the genre, because they’re where science fiction came from. We first needed stories about artificial life and going to the Moon to explore questions about who we are and how to lead a good life, going back to the earliest myths and fables. And without these questions, we wouldn’t have science fiction, as we know it.

An interesting look at the role and evolution of science fiction ideas in literature and philosophy.  If you can’t get past the label “science fiction”, just call it “speculative fiction” instead.

Meditation is far from sitting and doing nothing. Meditating regularly can actually have numerous health benefits, from reducing stress to assisting memory and learning.

Research shows that meditation: 

* Relaxes the fear centre

* Allows us to have more positive emotions and less anxiety

* Increases our ability to deal with stress

* Slows brain waves

* Assists in memory and learning

* Builds meta-awareness

* Helps to sustain attention

* Builds selective attention

* Helps aid physical recovery

* Boosts immune function

The top ten:

1. Middlemarch by George Eliot

2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

4. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

5. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

6. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

8. Disgrace by JM Coetzee

9. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

10. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

I’ve read numbers 2, 3, 5, and 10.

Of the rest of the 100 books listed, I’ve read the following:

1. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells

2. 1984 by George Orwell

3. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

4. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

5. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

6. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

7. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

8. The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse

9. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

11. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

12. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

13. The Trial by Franz Kafka

14. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

15. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

16. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

17. The Stranger by Albert Camus

18. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

19. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

20. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Have you ever wondered why you can remember things from long ago as if they happened yesterday, yet sometimes can’t recall what you ate for dinner last night? According to a new study led by psychologists at the University of Toronto, it’s because how much something means to you actually influences how you see it as well as how vividly you can recall it later.

The experiments focussed on short term memories — that is, they evaluated the subject’s memories within the same day.  If dreaming is also influenced by the level of emotion experienced, it may reinforce the consolidation of short term memories into longer term ones.

We’re of the firm belief that J.R.R. Tolkien’s much-beloved fantasy epic couldn’t have been written by anyone else — but, well, what if it had been? This week, Metafilter pointed us towards Alison Brooks’s Alternative Authors’ Versions of Lord of the Rings, wherein Brooks rewrites sections of Tolkien’s classic as it might have come out in the hands of other famous writers. But can you guess which ones? Click through to read five of Brooks’s passages and see if you can detect which writer she is embodying, and then head on over to Changing the Times to see the entire set.