While excavating a Stone Age burial site in Germany, archaeologists stumbled upon a mysterious "earth tunnel" that someone made in the Middle Ages, thousands of years after the grave was dug, possibly to hide their furtive ritual practices.

At the end of 2025, the German State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology (LDA) of Saxony-Anhalt was surveying land near the village of Dornberg ahead of a construction project. Archaeologists initially uncovered a trapezoidal ditch from the fourth millennium B.C., several Neolithic burials from the third millennium B.C., and a Bronze Age burial mound from the second millennium B.C., according to a Jan. 29 translated statement.

But during the excavations, the archaeologists spotted a long, oval pit and a large stone slab. The pit, which measured around 6.5 feet (2 meters) long and 2.5 feet (0.75 m) wide, intersected the Neolithic burial ditch at a right angle. Although excavators initially assumed it was yet another grave, the pit kept going and became a tunnel system known in German as an "erdstall," which means "earth tunnel" or "shaft."

According to the LDA, earth tunnels are subterranean systems with chamber-like extensions found in geographical regions with firm but easily workable soil. Hundreds of these systems have been discovered in Bavaria, and all were likely made in the Middle Ages. Archaeologists don't think anyone ever lived in the underground chambers, but they aren't sure what these tunnels were used for. Theories range from hiding places to spaces for cultic activity.

Most earth tunnels lack archaeological artifacts. But the newly discovered one contained a metal horseshoe, a fox skeleton, fragments of a globe-shaped ceramic pot, and a layer of charcoal in one of the narrow, curving passages. The entrance to the earth tunnel had been deliberately sealed at some point by a cluster of large stones, the archaeologists determined, perhaps to hide clandestine activity in the tunnel.

"The question arises as to how to interpret the findings," LDA researchers wrote in the statement. Taken together, the artifacts suggest someone lit a short-lived fire in the tunnel and deposited some of their belongings. And because the Stone Age trapezoidal ditch was likely still recognizable from above ground even thousands of years later, it may have been known as a sacred space to the medieval person who made the tunnels.

"However, perhaps the site, due to its significance as a pagan grave, was generally avoided by the local population and therefore particularly well-suited as a hiding place," LDA officials wrote.

Stone Age quiz: What do you know about the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic?

About 1,500 years ago, early Christian monks and adherents of the Persian religion Zoroastrianism lived together without conflict in northern Iraq, according to a new study.

This wasn't the only place where Zoroastrians mingled with people of other faiths; a 2,000-year-old sanctuary discovered in modern Georgia reveals a mixture of Zoroastrian beliefs and those of other religions, another study reports.

Taken together, the finds are more evidence that Zoroastrianism — the official religion of the royal dynasties that governed the Persian empires for more than 1,000 years — often coexisted peacefully with other religions.

In the Iraq finding, a team led by archaeologists Alexander Tamm, of the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Dirk Wicke, of Goethe University Frankfurt, examined the ruins of a building complex at the Gird-î Kazhaw site in the Kurdistan region of the country, according to a statement from Goethe University Frankfurt.

They found buried stone pillars and other architectural evidence that the building complex had been a church at the center of a Christian monastery, which was originally discovered in 2015. The monastery was built in about A.D. 500 — "a huge surprise" because it was the first Christian structure ever found there, according to the statement.

The team also unearthed buried fragments of a large jug decorated with an early Christian cross. (Crosses were rarely used as Christian symbols until the Roman Empire legalized Christianity in the fourth century.)

And yet the newly investigated Christian monastery lies only a few yards from a Sasanian Persian fortification where Zoroastrianism was practiced. The two structures' proximity indicates that Christians and Zoroastrians were living peacefully side by side at this location, the statement said.

Rival empires

The archaeological team noted that in that era, Christianity was spreading beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, where it had been the official religion since the Edict of Thessalonica by Emperor Theodosius in 380.

The Romans — and, later, the Byzantines — were usually rivals of the Persians, and sometimes allies. The new religion of Christianity, however, was spreading even among the Persians. "The early dating for a church building into the fifth to sixth century AD is not unusual in the region," the statement said. "There are comparable structures in northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia."

"Grandiose" temple in Georgia

The finds in northern Iraq come amid new details of a roughly 2,000-year-old sanctuary within a "grandiose" temple complex at Dedoplis Gora in Georgia, less than 400 miles (600 kilometers) north of Gird-î Kazhaw in Iraq.

Dedoplis Gora was under the independent Kartli kingdom at that time. However, the region was heavily influenced by the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and there is extensive evidence that Zoroastrianism was practiced there.

According to a study in the January 2026 issue of the American Journal of Archaeology by David Gagoshidze, an archaeologist at the University of Georgia in Tbilisi, "the kings of Kartli worshiped Iranian (Zoroastrian) gods merged with local Georgian astral deities." The study looks at three sanctuary rooms in the Dedoplis Gora palace that had different religious traditions.

In one sanctuary, the rites of Zoroastrainism were practiced at an altar where "permanent residents of the palace of Dedoplis Gora offered daily sacrifices and prayed." In another room, it appears the "noble owners of the palace" worshipped the Greek cult of Apollo, "based on the statuettes found there," according to the study.

Finally, in a third room, in what seems to have been a "syncretic" ceremony (that is, a ceremony that combines more than one religious tradition), rituals were likely carried out for a local cult related to "fertility, agriculture and harvest."

History of Zoroastrianism

The studies indicate the official Persian religion of Zoroastrianism was generally tolerant of other beliefs, although there were times during the late Sasanian Persian Empire when followers of rival religions like Christianity or Manicheism (a now-extinct Persian religion centered on the prophet Mani) were persecuted.

Zoroastrianism is named after the Persian prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek), who is thought to have lived about 3,500 years ago, and it is centered on the worship of the "Wise Lord" Ahura Mazda, whose primary symbol is fire. (The phrase "Thus spake Zarathustra" is the title of a book by the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wasn't Zoroastrian but used Zarathustra as a fictional mouthpiece for his ideas.)

Zoroastrianism sharply declined in Persia (now Iran) after the Islamic conquest of the Sasanian Empire in the seventh century, and now there are only about 120,000 practicing Zoroastrians worldwide.

Neanderthals left behind various clues about their enigmatic lives. But less is known about their spiritual sides. Some archaeologists and anthropologists believe these early humans, who disappeared more than 30,000 years ago, may have engaged in what could be deemed ritualistic or sacred activities.

For instance, we know that Neanderthals buried their dead, accumulated animal skulls in caves for seemingly symbolic purposes, created rock art and etched symbolic drawings on bear bones. They also removed feathers from birds, possibly for use as adornments, and likely made use of eagle talons as pendants. At times, they engaged in cannibalism, leading to speculation among scholars as to whether it was done for ritual reasons.

All this and more hints that Neanderthals engaged in ritualistic practices. And it brings about the question: Did Neanderthals have religious beliefs?

Experts have a mix of different opinions, Live Science learned. Part of that depends on how "religion" is defined.

Definitions of "religion" vary, but often include beliefs in supernatural beings, such as deities, and organized practices done to interact with them. But were Neanderthals capable of this?

"If by 'religion' we mean ritual behaviors directed at supernatural agents then yes I believe Neanderthals were religious," Patrick McNamara, a neurology professor at Boston University's School of Medicine who has conducted extensive research into the evolution of the human brain and the neuroscience of religion, told Live Science in an email. "Their religious beliefs and behaviors were very likely close to what we call 'shamanism' — a visionary form of religious experience."

There is now "very good evidence that they practiced ritual cannibalism and that they buried their dead and that made a ritual practice — like Shamans do — of traversing deep cave environments and constructing ritual 'altars' of circular or arranged skulls," McNamara said.

The altar-like formation of arranged skulls is particularly compelling, he noted.

"I also believe that the Neanderthals practiced what we call 'Bear ceremonialism' and worshiped the Bear as a divinity," he said, noting that "there are several Neanderthal-related archaeological sites with Bear skulls arranged in ritual altars in caves etc."

Other scholars said that while Neanderthals may have had religious experiences of some kind, these would have been different from those that Homo sapiens have today. Robin Dunbar, a professor emeritus of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, told Live Science in an email that "I don't think they had religious beliefs in the sense we do."

Dunbar doesn't believe that their ability to mentalize — understand the emotional state of yourself and others — would have been sophisticated enough to develop a religion in the same way that people do today, with different sets of belief systems that have their own theologies.

However, Neanderthals likely had religious experiences on some level, possibly in "experiences of mystery and magic, and a deep sense of engagement," Dunbar said. "You don't need a theology for this, but the experience is very real."

Margaret Boone Rappaport, an anthropologist who co-wrote the book "The Emergence of Religion in Human Evolution" (Routledge, 2020), told Live Science in an email that while Neanderthals "may have engaged in some forms of ritual, they likely did not possess the specific advanced neurocognitive capacity for a complex, modern human-like religion or 'theological thinking.'"

One section of the human brain that is important for religion is the precuneus. It's an area of the brain associated with memory retrieval and how one sees and perceives the outside world, a 2006 paper published in the journal Brain noted. Religious belief also registers a larger signal in the precuneus, among other brain regions, in religious people compared with nonreligious people, a 2019 review noted.

Neanderthal brain architecture was different from that of modern-day Homo sapiens, and "the lack of expansion in the precuneus, suggests that Neanderthals did not have the cognitive abilities for the 'imagined spaces and beings' essential to human theologies," Rappaport said.

Karel Kuipers, an archaeologist and doctoral candidate at Leiden University in the Netherlands whose research focuses on Neanderthals and how we research them, said we don't know if Neanderthals had religious beliefs.

"It's very difficult to see how they viewed the world," Kuipers told Live Science. We have to be careful about assigning a spiritual context to Neanderthal behavior, he said. For instance, while people today might associate the burial of the dead with a funeral and religion, it's possible that for Neanderthals it might have just been a practical way of disposing of a decomposing body.

Editor's note: This article was updated on March 27, 2026 to note that the vast majority of Neanderthals went extinct 40,000 years ago, not 34,000 years ago as was previously stated.

Neanderthal quiz: How much do you know about our closest relatives?

Long before the ancient Greeks imagined Zeus taking the form of a swan to mate with the princess Leda, the Natufian people in southwest Asia were depicting the same thing. Archaeologists recently discovered a 12,000-year-old sculpted piece of fired clay from a prehistoric settlement in Israel that they say represents an early belief system.

"When I took this small block of clay out of its box, I immediately recognized the human figure and then the bird lying on its back," Laurent Davin, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Live Science in an email.

The figurine depicts a woman and a bird — thought to be a goose — and is the earliest known depiction of a woman in southwestern Asia, Davin and colleagues wrote in a study published Monday (Nov. 17) in the journal PNAS.

During an investigation, Davin meticulously examined tens of thousands of small clay fragments that had been collected from several Natufian archaeological sites. The Natufians were a sedentary hunter-gatherer culture found in present-day Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria between 15,000 and 11,500 years ago.

One tiny bit of crafted clay from an archaeological site called Nahal Ein Gev II, located about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) east of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, caught Davin's eye.

"I understood that I held in my hand an exceptional piece, both in terms of the subject depicted and the quality of the modeling created 12,000 years ago," Davin said. "The human depiction is the most complete and detailed representation of a human body that has been identified so far in the Natufian culture."

The "extremely rare" clay figurine may be the earliest representation in the world of human–animal interaction, the researchers detailed in the study.

The figurine was modeled from a single block of clay and found fragmented into three pieces, the researchers wrote in the study. It measures just 1.5 inches (3.7 centimeters) tall and was heated in a fireplace before being covered with a red mineral pigment.

At the top of the figurine is a bird resting on the back of a human, its wings spread out and backward to partially envelop the person. An incised triangular area on the lower part of the figurine likely represents a female pubis, and symmetrical oval imprints near the face suggest breasts. The bird is likely a goose, the researchers wrote, as animal bones discovered at the site suggest the Natufians used geese for both food and decoration.

One potential interpretation of the figurine is that it shows a hunter transporting a slain bird back to camp, according to the study. But because the woman is leaning forward and because the goose appears to be alive, the researchers favor a more mythological explanation: a male goose mating with the squatting female by mounting her.

"Imaginary mating between human and animal spirits is known in many myths of historical periods across the world," Davin said. "This emerging desire to represent female imagery might be related to the growing importance of women in managing the spiritual practices of these communities."

Davin also noticed a partial fingerprint on the figurine. Based on the fingerprint's ridge density in comparison with modern fingerprints made by people of known sex, this may indicate the piece was sculpted by a woman.

The figurine was discovered in an area of the site that had been used for burial, along with other unique deposits, including a child burial and a cache of human teeth, the researchers noted in the study.

Taken together, the features of the rare figurine suggest the Natufians were creating complex imagery and potentially expressing animistic beliefs prior to the "Neolithic revolution" in southwest Asia, when people permanently settled down, grew crops and domesticated animals.

The woman and a goose figurine therefore "bridges the world of mobile hunter-gatherers and that of the first settled communities, showing how imagination and symbolic thinking began to shape human culture," study co-author Leore Grosman, an archaeologist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in a statement.

A recently analyzed medieval codex covered in furry sealskin may be the oldest surviving book from Norway. The small Christian songbook was likely made around A.D. 1200 and passed down through several generations of a Norwegian farming family.

Known as the Hagenes codex after the family who owned it, the book consists of two double leaves of parchment bound in sealskin with visible traces of fur still attached, according to a statement from the National Library of Norway.

The text inside the book is written in Latin and contains eight medieval liturgical chants with musical notation; one is a song for Mary, and another celebrates All Saints' Day, a feast day that honors saints who don't have their own remembrance day. Several pages appear to be missing. According to the Hagenes family, the book likely originally belonged to a church or monastery.

The handwritten script is "unusually rustic," according to the National Library. "Its irregular execution and the simple, home-made binding point towards a Norwegian craftsman working with local materials," Chiara Palandri, a conservator at the National Library of Norway, said in the statement. Additionally, Palandri told Science Norway that the leather strap that was wrapped around the book may have been made from reindeer skin.

"This book feels incredibly authentic," Åslaug Ommundsen, a medieval Latin professor at the University of Bergen, told Science Norway. "It's the kind of thing a priest or cantor would carry to use in church."

Sealskin binding — complete with tiny hairs still sticking out — is unique in medieval Norway, according to the National Library, but it has been seen on rare occasions in other parts of Scandinavia.

For example, a recent DNA study of dozens of medieval book bindings from the 12th and 13th centuries revealed that several "hairy books" produced by Cistercian monks in France were bound in sealskin. That study also showed that the skins were from harbor, harp and bearded seals from a diverse geographic area that included Scandinavia, Denmark, Scotland, and either Greenland or Iceland. These sealskins traveled along 13th-century trading routes and ended up in England and Belgium, possibly as tithes from the Norse after the Viking Age had ended.

But the Hagenes codex looks different from these continental examples, according to Palandri, which suggests it was made locally.

While microscopic examination of the Hagenes codex revealed the book binding to be sealskin, additional analysis is planned to explore the origin of the leather and parchment and to narrow down the date the book was made, according to the National Library. These analyses will confirm whether the codex is indeed the oldest surviving book from Norway.

"If the manuscript truly was made here, it would be the only known medieval Norwegian book bound in sealskin," Palandri said. "It looks very simple, but that's exactly what makes it extraordinary — it preserves traces of early bookmaking practices that have vanished elsewhere."

Archaeologists have uncovered a complete plaster cross dating to 1,400 years ago during an excavation in the United Arab Emirates. The Christian symbol finally proves that a series of houses discovered decades ago were part of a monastery.

"This is a very exciting time for us," Maria Gajewska, an archaeologist at the Department of Culture and Tourism — Abu Dhabi, said in a video. "We never had concrete proof [the houses] were inhabited by Christians."

Nine small courtyard houses were excavated in 1992 on Sir Bani Yas, an island 110 miles (170 kilometers) southwest of Abu Dhabi. Nearby, archaeologists found a church and monastery dating to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. But it was unclear whether the houses were related to the monastic settlement.

This year, archaeologists returned to Sir Bani Yas for further excavation. In the courtyard of one house, they found a stucco plaque in the shape of a Christian cross measuring nearly 1 foot (30 centimeters) long.

With that cross, "we have now proved these houses were part of a Christian settlement," Gajewska said. Senior monks probably lived in the houses, secluding themselves and praying, before reconvening at the monastery with their brethren, she said.

Related: 1,800-year-old silver amulet could rewrite history of Christianity in the early Roman Empire

Sir Bani Yas was just one location of Christian worship in the region during this time period, according to a translated statement from the Abu Dhabi Media Office. Christianity spread around the Arabian Gulf between the fourth and sixth centuries before the rise of Islam starting in the seventh century. Muslims and Christians lived on Sir Bani Yas until the monastery was abandoned in the eighth century.

The new excavation "helps us better understand the nature of life and the relationships that connected the inhabitants of the island with the surrounding regions," Hager Hasan Almenhali, an archaeologist at the Department of Culture and Tourism — Abu Dhabi, said in the video.

Archaeologists plan to continue their work on the courtyard houses. The Sir Bani Yas church and monastery site is open to the public.

What do you know about Jesus Christ, the man? Test your knowledge of biblical archaeology

The Shroud of Turin, famously claimed to be Jesus' original burial covering, could not have been created on a three-dimensional human body, a new study finds. It is much more likely that the image is an imprint of a low-relief sculpture, according to a graphics expert.

In a study published Monday (July 28) in the journal Archaeometry, Brazilian 3D digital designer Cicero Moraes, who specializes in historical facial reconstructions, used modeling software to compare how cloth drapes over a human body versus how it drapes over a low-relief sculpture of one.

"The image on the Shroud of Turin is more consistent with a low-relief matrix," Moraes told Live Science in an email. "Such a matrix could have been made of wood, stone or metal and pigmented (or even heated) only in the areas of contact, producing the observed pattern," he said.

The shroud was first recorded in the late 14th century, and controversy over whether it was an authentic relic from the crucifixion and death of Jesus kicked off immediately. A carbon dating analysis carried out in 1989 placed the shroud's creation in the range A.D. 1260 to 1390, solidifying its interpretation as a medieval artifact.

During this time in European medieval history, low-relief depictions of religious figures — such as carved tombstones — were widely used, previous art historical analysis has found.

To investigate how the Shroud of Turin might have been made, Moraes created and analyzed two digital models. The first model represented a three-dimensional human body, and the second model was a low-relief representation of a human body.

Using 3D simulation tools, Moraes then virtually draped fabric onto the two different body models. When he compared the virtual fabric to photographs of the shroud taken in 1931, Moraes found that the fabric from the low-relief model almost exactly matched the photographs.

Related: Is it a fake? DNA testing deepens mystery of Shroud of Turin

In the simulation with the three-dimensional body, Moraes wrote in the study, the fabric deformed around the volume of the body, resulting in a swollen and distorted image. This distortion is sometimes called the "Agamemnon Mask effect," he wrote, after the unnaturally wide gold death mask found in a tomb at Mycenae in Greece.

Moraes demonstrated in a video how the Agamemnon Mask effect works by painting his face and pressing a paper towel to it. The resulting image is much wider than a front view of his face due to the distortion caused by imprinting a 3D object onto a 2D piece of fabric.

But a low-relief sculpture wouldn't cause the image to deform and would look more like a photocopy, similar to the Shroud of Turin, Moraes said, because it shows only the regions of potential direct contact, without any real volume or depth.

Rather than assuming the Shroud of Turin was the result of draping fabric on a human body, Moraes favors the explanation that it was created within a funerary context, making it "a masterpiece of Christian art." Moraes did not investigate the methods or materials that may have been used to make the shroud, however.

Although there is a "remote possibility that it is an imprint of a three-dimensional human body," Moraes wrote, "it is plausible to consider that artists or sculptors with sufficient knowledge could have created such a piece, either through painting or low relief."

One expert thinks that Moraes is right but that his study is not particularly groundbreaking.

"For at least four centuries, we have known that the body image on the Shroud is comparable to an orthogonal projection onto a plane, which certainly could not have been created through contact with a three-dimensional body," Andrea Nicolotti, a professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Turin, wrote at Skeptic.

"Moraes has certainly created some beautiful images with the help of software," Nicolotti wrote, "but he certainly did not uncover anything that we did not already know."

Moraes suggests that his method is accessible and replicable, and that his work "highlights the potential of digital technologies to address or unravel historical mysteries" by bringing together science, art and technology.

What do you know about Jesus Christ, the man? Test your knowledge of biblical archaeology

One hundred years after a Tennessee teacher named John Scopes started a legal battle over what the state's schools can teach children, Americans are still divided over evolution.

Scopes was charged with violating Tennessee law by teaching evolution, in a highly publicized July 1925 trial that led to national debate over evolution and education. The trial tested whether a law introduced that year really could punish teachers over evolution lessons. It could and did: Scopes was fined US$100 (£74).

But here's the weird part: while Americans remain deeply divided about whether humans evolved from earlier species, across the Atlantic British people had largely settled this question decades before the Scopes trial.

According to thinktank Pew Research Center data from 2020, only 64% of Americans accept that "humans and other living things have evolved over time". Meanwhile, 73% of Britons are fine with the idea that they share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. That nine-percentage-point gap might not sound like much, but it represents millions of people who think Darwin was peddling fake news.

From 1985 to 2010, Americans were in what researchers call a statistical dead heat between acceptance and rejection of evolution — which is academic speak for people couldn't decide if we were descended from apes or Adam and Eve.

Here's where things get psychologically fascinating. Research into misinformation and cognitive biases suggests that fundamentalism operates on a principle known as motivated reasoning. This means selectively interpreting evidence to reach predetermined conclusions. And a 2018 review of social and computer science research also found that fake news seems to spread because it confirms what people already want to believe.

Related: Evolution: Facts about the processes that shape the diversity of life on Earth

Evolution denial may work the same way. Religious fundamentalism is what researchers call "the strongest predictor" for rejection of evolution. A 2019 study of 900 participants found that belief in fake news headlines was associated with delusionality, dogmatism, religious fundamentalism and reduced analytic thinking.

High personal religiosity, as seen in the US, reinforced by communities of like-minded believers, can create resistance to evolutionary science. This pattern is pronounced among Southern Baptists — the largest Protestant denomination in the US — where 61% believe the Bible is the literal word of God, compared to 31% of Americans overall. The persistence of this conflict is fueled by organized creationist movements that reinforce religious skepticism.

Brain imaging studies show that people with fundamentalist beliefs seem to have reduced activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — the brain region responsible for cognitive flexibility and analytical thinking. When this area is damaged or less active, people become more prone to accepting claims without sufficient evidence and show increased resistance to changing their beliefs when presented with contradictory information. Studies of brain-injured patients show damage to prefrontal networks that normally help us question information may lead to increased fundamentalist beliefs and reduced skepticism.

Fundamentalist psychology helps explain the US position in international evolution acceptance surveys. In a 2006 study, of over 33,00 people from 34 countries, only Turkey ranked lower than the US, with about 27% accepting evolution compared to America's 40% at the time. Among the developed nations surveyed, the US consistently ranks near the bottom — a pattern that persists in more recent international comparisons.

Research shows that political polarization on evolution has historically been much stronger in the US than in Europe or Japan, where the issue rarely becomes a campaign talking point. In the US, anti-evolution bills are still being introduced in state legislatures.

In the UK, belief in evolution became accepted among respectable clergymen around 1896, according to church historian Owen Chadwick's analysis of Victorian christianity. But why did British religious institutions embrace science while American ones declared war?

The answer lies in different approaches to intellectual challenges. British Anglicanism has a centuries-old tradition of seeking a "via media" — a middle way between extremes — that allowed church leaders to accommodate new ideas without abandoning core beliefs. Historian Peter documented how British religious leaders actively worked to reconcile science and religion, developing theological frameworks that embraced scientific discoveries as revealing God's methods rather than contradicting divine authority.

Anglican bishops and scholars tended to treat evolution as God's method of creation rather than a threat to faith itself. The Church of England's hierarchical structure meant that when educated clergy accepted evolution, the institutional framework often followed suit. A 2024 paper argued that many UK church leaders still view science and religion as complementary rather than conflicting.

A different approach

The British experience proves it's possible to reconcile science and faith. But changing American minds requires understanding that evolution acceptance isn't really about biology — it's about identity, belonging, and the fundamental question of who gets to define truth. People don't reject evolution because they've carefully studied the evidence. They reject it because it threatens their identity. This creates a context where education alone can't overcome deeply held convictions.

Misinformation intervention research suggests that inoculation strategies, such as highlighting the scientific consensus on climate change, work better than debunking individual articles. But evolution education needs to be sensitive. Consensus messaging helps, but only when it doesn't threaten people's core identities. For example, framing evolution as a function of "how" life develops, rather than "why it exists, allows for people to maintain religious belief while accepting the scientific evidence for natural selection.

People's views can change. A review published in 2024, analyzed data which followed the same Gen X people in the US over 33 years. It found that, as they grew up, people developed more acceptance of evolution, though typically because of factors such as education and obtaining university degrees. But people who were taught at a private school seem less likely to become more accepting of evolution as they aged.

As we face new waves of scientific misinformation, the century since the Scopes trial teaches us that evidence alone won't necessarily change people's minds. Understanding the psychology of belief might be our best hope for evolving past our own cognitive limitations.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Roman dodecahedrons have baffled archaeologists since 1739, when the first example of the 12-sided bronze object was discovered in the English Midlands. For nearly three centuries, experts and hobbyists have put forth dozens of theories as to why people treasured these items — but their purpose has never been confirmed.

At least 120 examples of dodecahedrons have been discovered across the northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire. All date to the late second to late fourth centuries, and their general appearance is the same, according to classical archaeologist Michael Guggenberger, who has published several studies on the objects.

In a 2000 study, Guggenberger wrote that the basic shape is a regular or pentagonal dodecahedron: 12 pentagons form the faces of the hollow shape, and they meet at 20 corners. Each corner of a Roman dodecahedron is topped with a small sphere, and each pentagonal face has a hole of varying diameter. The dodecahedrons range from 1.6 to 3.9 inches (4 to 10 centimeters) tall and weigh 1 to 20 ounces (30 to 580 grams), with exceptionally thin walls. No writing has been found on any dodecahedron.

Because these dodecahedrons have been found in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland — but not in Italy — Guggenberger views them as "Gallo-Roman products" with a possible origin in the Celtic tribes of the Roman Empire. But there are no historical records or depictions of them in ancient art, so the origin and purpose of the dodecahedrons have been lost.

Archaeologists have recovered dodecahedrons from the graves of men and women, in coin hoards and even in refuse heaps, so a blanket explanation for their use has not been found. But many researchers have attempted to solve the puzzle, suggesting that dodecahedrons may have been used as weapons, decorations, candlestick holders, range finders, measurement devices, children's toys, dice, craftsman's samples or spools for knitting gloves.

Of the 50 or more theories, Guggenberger wrote, most can now be ruled out or considered highly improbable. The primary explanation he favors is symbolic, with a connection to the philosophy of ancient Greek thinkers Plato and Pythagoras.

Related: Penguin Vessel: 1,600-year-old Nazca depiction of a cold-water Humboldt penguin that lives in tropical Peru

In Platonic-Pythagorean symbolism, four solid shapes were associated with four elements — tetrahedrons with fire, octahedrons with air, icosahedrons with water, and hexahedrons with earth. And, as the fifth regular solid, "the dodecahedron served as an all-encompassing symbol representing the universe," Guggenberger wrote in a 2013 study.

In the second century A.D., thinkers like Plutarch resurrected the earlier idea of the dodecahedron as a symbolic connection to the heavens and the universe, Guggenberger wrote, and that may have influenced Celtic peoples in the Roman Empire.

But one particular grave with a dodecahedron may hold a key clue to its use, Guggenberger noted in the 2000 study. Discovered in a woman's grave in Germany in 1966, the Gellep dodecahedron was located directly next to a rod-shaped bone artifact, suggesting it may have been a staff for mounting the mysterious object to create a symbolic scepter. And given the Celtic background for the object, this may link it to Druidic traditions.

"For the time being, the most likely interpretation of the dodecahedron is as a cosmic, all-encompassing symbol," Guggenberger wrote, with "a function comparable to an amulet."

A 1,800-year-old silver amulet discovered beneath the chin of a skeleton in a cemetery in Germany is the oldest evidence of Christianity north of the Alps, according to a new study.

Researchers made the discovery by digitally unrolling a tiny scroll inside the amulet using CT scanning technology; this revealed an unusual Latin inscription. The finding may upend historians' understanding of how Christianity was practiced in the early Roman Empire.

Measuring just 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters) long, the amulet contains a wafer-thin sheet of silver foil that's rolled up tightly. Archaeologists discovered it in the grave of a man who died between A.D. 230 and 270. The man likely wore the amulet on a cord around his neck, as it was found just below his jaw.

Magical amulet warded off evil

The purpose of these amulets, also known as phylacteries, "was to protect or heal their owners from a range of misfortunes, such as illnesses, bodily aches, infertility, or even demonic forces," Tine Rassalle, an independent biblical archaeologist who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "In an era without advanced medical knowledge, such items were vital sources of comfort and security for you and your loved ones."

The location of the artifact's discovery is rare, she added.

"These amulets were widely used in Late Antiquity, especially in the eastern Mediterranean world," Rassalle said, but "they are much rarer in the western Roman world. The discovery of this amulet in Germany suggests that Christian ideas had already begun to penetrate areas far from Christianity's early centers of growth."

Related: 1,500-year-old Anglo-Saxon burial holds a 'unique' mystery — a Roman goblet once filled with pig fat

One man took his Christian faith to the grave

The object was discovered in 2018 during excavation of a Roman-era cemetery outside of Frankfurt. In the grave, archaeologists also found an incense bowl and a pottery jug. But the silver amulet caught the archaeologists' attention.

Experts at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology (LEIZA) in Mainz spent several years conserving, restoring and analyzing the amulet before announcing their findings in a statement Wednesday (Dec. 11).

"The challenge in the analysis was that the silver sheet was rolled, but after around 1800 years, it was of course also creased and pressed," Ivan Calandra, head of the imaging platform at LEIZA, said in the statement. "Using CT, we were able to scan it at a very high resolution and create a 3D model."

The virtual 3D model enabled scientists to digitally unroll and analyze the inscription. The 18-line inscription was deciphered by Markus Scholz, a professor at the Goethe University Institute of Archaeological Sciences in Frankfurt. He said it's unusual that the writing is in Latin. "Normally, such inscriptions on amulets were written in Greek or Hebrew," Scholz said in the statement.

Frankfurt inscription finally translated

The "Frankfurt inscription" reads as follows (the question marks signify areas of uncertainty):

(In the name?) of Saint Titus. Holy, holy, holy! In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of God! The Lord of the world resists with [strengths?] all attacks(?)/setbacks(?). The God(?) grants entry to well-being. May this means of salvation(?) protect the man who surrenders himself to the will of the Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, since before Jesus Christ every knee bows: those in heaven, those on earth and those under the earth, and every tongue confesses (Jesus Christ).

In the early days of the Roman Empire, practicing Christianity could be risky. The Roman emperor Nero persecuted Christians in the first century A.D.; some were crucified, and some were forced to fight in the Colosseum. This created an atmosphere of fear among early Christians, which forced them to practice in secret, in places like the catacombs in Rome. The fact that this man in third-century Germany was buried with his amulet meant his faith was very important to him, according to the researchers.

Amulet is rare in Western Europe

A similar silver amulet was discovered in 2023 in Bulgaria. Dated to roughly the same time, the Bulgarian amulet was also found in a grave near the person's skull. The inscription mentioned the archangels Michael and Gabriel and referenced the "guardian" Christ. Experts studying the Bulgarian amulet suggested this language as well as the placement of the amulet in a grave stemmed from the need for early Christians to conceal and guard their faith.

Other early metal amulets that have been found in the early Christian world often mix different faiths, including elements of Judaism and paganism alongside Christianity. According to the researchers, the Frankfurt amulet does not mention any other faith; it is purely Christian.

"What makes this particular example remarkable is that it is written entirely in Latin and exclusively invokes Jesus Christ and the Christian god," Rassalle said, which is unusual because most amulets "also appeal to angels, demons, or other supernatural entities."

Inscription may rewrite history of Christianity in Germany

The text of the Frankfurt amulet is therefore incredibly important for scholars of early Christianity, the researchers noted, particularly because it contains the earliest example of certain phrases, including "Holy, holy, holy!" — which is not known in Christianity until the fourth century — and an early quotation from Paul's Letter to the Philippians.

"This takes our understanding of Western Christianization and Christian monotheism to a whole new level!" Rassalle said.

"The 'Frankfurt Inscription' is a scientific sensation," Frankfurt Mayor Mike Josef said in the statement. "Thanks to it, the history of Christianity in Frankfurt and far beyond will have to be turned back by around 50 to 100 years. The first Christian find north of the Alps comes from our city: we can be proud of this, especially now, so close to Christmas."

Editor's Note: This story was originally published on Dec. 15 and updated on Dec. 20 to include new images and information about the excavation.

A granite boulder carved more than 35,000 years ago deep in a cave in Israel may be the oldest evidence of ritual practices in the Holy Land, a new study suggests.

The grooves carved into the boulder look strikingly similar to the pattern of a tortoise shell. While it's unknown what this design means, it's possible that this was an ancient symbol of unification, according to study co-author Israel Hershkovitz, a physical anthropologist at Tel Aviv University.

In that case, it may be that the sections of the shell, known as "scutes," may have represented distinctive groups of people who had been integrated into the ancient society, Hershkovitz told Live Science.

The ritual boulder was discovered deep within Manot Cave, in the Galilee region of northern Israel, where Hershkovitz has led excavations since 2010.

The cave was discovered by construction workers in 2008 and the archaeological work initially involved areas near the cave's entrance where prehistoric people lived, carrying out activities such as shaping stone tools, butchering animals and eating, Hershkovitz said. But the team didn't discover the ritual boulder deep in the cave until 2013, he said.

"It was quite a surprise, because we were concentrating close to the entrance, where there was more light and people were living," he said. But "it was so dark and deep there, we rarely visited that part."

Related: Evidence of Assyrians' conquest of Holy Land discovered in Jerusalem

Turtle rock

According to the study, the chamber containing the carved boulder was separated from the living areas behind a gallery of large stalagmites and stalactites.

The granite boulder weighs more than 60 pounds (28 kilograms) and is a little less than a foot (30 centimeters) across. It was discovered in a niche in the back wall of the chamber and was the only artifact found nearby.

The rock's upper surface is carved with deep grooves; the authors noted that the carving was made at roughly the same time as some of the oldest known cave paintings in France.

Although there may be some earlier evidence of ritual practices by modern humans, such as the 40,000-year-old "lion man" stone figurine from a cave in Germany, the study noted that the boulder in the Manot Cave is the earliest evidence of ritual practices in the eastern Mediterranean region.

Ancient cave

Examinations of the ritual boulder suggest the grooves were deliberately carved with flint tools, while analysis of the calcite crusts in some of the grooves date it to between 35,000 and 37,000 years ago, according to the study, published Dec. 9 in the journal PNAS.

The dating places the carved boulder within the Early Upper Paleolithic period, from about 33,000 to 48,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers were adding new stone tool technologies to much older ones.

According to the study, particles of wood ash found in the outer layers of the stalactites and stalagmites within the boulder chamber indicate that it was illuminated by fire, possibly during ritual gatherings. Acoustic tests also revealed that the chamber was "well-suited for communal gatherings," by facilitating conversations, speeches and hearing, the researchers found.

"Our data from Manot Cave testified to the existence of some initial forms of collective ritual practices already in the Early Upper Paleolithic," the authors wrote. "The existence of a ritual compound at Manot Cave is not surprising … [It was] a successful adaptive strategy to cope with the large demographic and economic challenges human society faced in the Upper Paleolithic."

Archaeologists have discovered ancient altars and inscribed marble slabs submerged along the Italian coast near Naples. The finds are likely the remains of a 2,000-year-old temple built by immigrants from Nabataea, an ancient kingdom on the Arabian Peninsula whose rock-carved "Treasury" featured in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."

However, the elaborate temple was later buried with a mix of concrete and broken pottery, possibly due to foreign traders leaving the area, according to a study published Sept. 12 in the journal Antiquity.

"For me this was one of the most unexpected discoveries," study first author Michele Stefanile, a maritime archaeologist at the Southern Graduate School (Scuola Superiore Meridionale), an education institute in Naples, told Live Science in an email.

The temple sits off the coast of Pozzuoli, a town in the volcanic Campi Flegrei, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) east of Naples. In Roman times, the city was known as Puteoli and was a large harbor where ships from all over the Roman world docked to bring in trade goods like grain.

Volcanic activity over the centuries has significantly changed the coastline at Pozzuoli, submerging and preserving around 1.2 miles (2 km) of Roman-era warehouses and other buildings associated with the ancient port district. Artifacts recovered from the sea as far back as the 18th century suggested that there was a buried temple, but no one knew exactly where.

Related: 2,000-year-old tomb holding 12 skeletons found at Petra where 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade' was filmed

In 2023, researchers mapping the region's seafloor discovered two submerged rooms with Roman-style walls. These walls, which measured about 32 feet by 16 feet (10 by 5 meters), made up two large rooms. Two altars of white marble were leaning against the wall of one room. Both altars included several rectangular recesses, which probably once housed sacred stones. Each of the rooms also contained a marble slab with the Latin inscription "Dusari sacrum," meaning "consecrated to Dushara," the main god in the ancient Nabataean religion.

"It seems that we have a building dedicated to the Nabataean gods, but with Roman architecture and Latin inscription," Stefanile said.

The Nabataean Kingdom reached from northern Arabia to the eastern Mediterranean. In the fourth to second centuries B.C., the Nabataeans controlled a growing trade network of luxury goods such as incense, gold, ivory and perfumes, accumulating huge wealth by the late first century A.D. The enormous tomb often called The Treasury at the Nabataean capital of Petra was built around that time.

"It makes perfect sense that the Nabataeans would be in Puteoli as a community of traders," Steven Tuck, a Roman historian at Miami University in Ohio who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. Puteoli was the second-largest city and the main harbor of Roman Italy at the time, Tuck said, and the "Nabataeans would have been drawn there and brought their religious practices with them."

Laurent Tholbecq, an archaeologist at Université libre de Bruxelles, told Live Science in an email that "it is not surprising to find a temple to Dushara/Dusares, their main divinity," at Puteoli. "It is widely understood that the Nabataeans benefitted from the Roman advance in the Near East until the creation of the Arabian province under Trajan," a Roman emperor who ruled from A.D. 98 to 117, said Tholbecq, who was not involved in the study.

After Nabataea was annexed into the Roman Empire in A.D. 106, the culture's control over the inland caravan trade in Arabia collapsed. The destruction of the temple at Puteoli may reflect that turbulent time.

Stefanile and his team discovered that the temple was purposefully buried in the second century A.D. with a mix of concrete and broken pottery.

"Possibly after Trajan's conquest of Arabia in 106 A.D., the Nabataeans had no more possibility of free trading in Puteoli, and they possibly abandoned the harbor," Stefanile said.

A metal detectorist discovered a 1,000-year-old gold coin depicting Jesus Christ while exploring the mountains in Vestre Slidre, a municipality in southern Norway.

Known as a "histamenon nomisma," this type of small coin was first introduced around A.D. 960. It shows Jesus holding a Bible on one side and the images of Basil II and Constantine VII, two brothers who both ruled the Byzantine Empire, on the other, according to a translated statement.

The western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in 476, while the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman Empire, continued on for another millennium. 

Related: 7,000-year-old coin depicting Jesus and medieval king discovered in Bulgaria

Archaeologists think the coin was minted sometime between 977 and 1025, during the brothers' reign, based on three dotted lines that circle the coin's border — a design element commonly used during that time period. The artifact also contains two inscriptions. The first, written in Latin, reads, "Jesus Christ, King of those who reign," and the second, in Greek, says "Basil and Constantine, emperors of the Romans," according to the statement.

However, researchers don't know how the coin wound up on the mountainside. They speculated that it may have belonged to Harald Hardrada, also known as Harald III, who ruled Norway from 1045 to 1066. Before becoming king, Harald III served as a guard for the Byzantine emperor; it was common practice for guards to get permission to "loot the palace after an emperor's death," according to the Miami Herald.

It's possible that the coin eventually was used as part of a dowry for Harald III to marry the daughter of Prince Yaroslav (also known as Yaroslav the Wise) of Kyiv, in what is now Ukraine. It also may have been used as a form of trade, according to the statement.

Archaeologists plan to return to the mountain site in 2024 to conduct further excavations.

While surveying the remnants of a medieval knight's residence in Poland, archaeologists unearthed a plethora of artifacts, including a cross-shaped reliquary.

Archaeologists originally discovered the knight's manor in June on the outskirts of Widów, a village in southern Poland. An initial survey of the site revealed the remnants of a wooden tower that was destroyed but once sat on top of a hill sometime between the 13th and 15th centuries, according to Science in Poland, a news site that is a collaboration between reporters and the Polish government.

Further investigation of the archaeological site revealed the cross-shaped medallion, which is known as an enkolpion (also spelled encolpion and engolpion), which translates to "on breast" in ancient Greek. Made of copper alloy, the religious piece was an important symbol worn by Christians on their chests during medieval times and often contained quotations or illustrations from the Christian Bible, according to Science in Poland.

Related: Vast Goth cemetery brimming with grave goods and ornate silver jewelry discovered in Poland

While researchers aren't sure of the knight's identity, they do know that enkolpia were part of the vestments, or garments and articles worn by Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic bishops, according to Science in Poland. 

In addition to the cross, archaeologists found other military-related items, such as three iron stirrups, part of a horseshoe, crossbow arrows and remnants of cordage, or ropes. They also unearthed a number of artifacts, some made of clay and some made of iron, that were part of the former residence, including a stove, door fixtures, a padlock and key, nails, hooks and staples. Several silver coins and the remains of a belt were also found.

The former residence is part of a larger settlement that also contains the remains of a wooden church and a cemetery. Archaeologists have been exploring the site since the mid-19th century, but much of the outpost has been "destroyed by agricultural activity," according to Science in Poland.

An old Einstein letter, in which the famous physicist tells a religious studies teacher and her students that science "supersedes" religious creation and that God can be thought of as "analogous to humans," has been put up for sale for $125,000. 

The typed letter, from April 11,1950, was sent by Einstein to Martha Munk — a rabbi's wife and religious studies teacher at an unnamed school or college in New York City. Munk, like Einstein, was forced to flee Nazi-occupied Germany during the Holocaust, according to The Raab Collection, the company facilitating the letter's sale. (The letter is written in German and has been translated to English.)

Munk had previously written to Einstein to ask him questions posed by her pupils. "On behalf of the students of a series of lectures on religion, I would like to ask you whether you think that it is possible for a modern scientist to reconcile the idea of the creation of the world by God, a higher power, with his scientific knowledge," Munk wrote in her initial letter sent earlier that year.

In response, Einstein wrote: "The person who is more or less trained in scientific thinking is alien to the religious creation (in the original sense) of the cosmos, because he applies the standard of causal conditionality to everything. This does not refute the religious attitude but, in a certain sense, replaces and supersedes it."

Related: 10 discoveries that prove Einstein was right about the universe — and 1 that proves him wrong

In the letter, Einstein also addressed his thoughts on how God might be interpreted: "As long as the stories in the Bible had been taken literally, it was obvious what kind of faith was expected from the readers. If you are however to interpret the Bible symbolically (metaphorically), it is not clear anymore whether God is in fact to be thought of as a person (and therefore not a monotheistic deity), which is somehow analogous to humans," Einstein wrote. "In that case, it is difficult to assess what remains of the faith in its original sense."

Einstein's views on religion are well known. The physicist was raised Jewish and maintained his association with Jewish people, despite not believing in the God depicted in the Torah. Einstein spent his life trying to explain how the universe was formed without divine influence. 

In 2018, a lengthy missive penned by the German scientist in 1954, known as "Einstein's God letter," was auctioned for $2.9 million. In this document, the physicist detailed how he had not believed biblical stories in his youth and how this had freed him to a "fanatic orgy of free-thinking." Einstein also noted that he instead believed in Spinoza's God — an amorphous, impersonal god responsible for the orderliness of the universe that was first proposed by the 17th-century Jewish Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, according to Christie's, which facilitated the auction. In the letter he also wrote: "The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weakness."

Other letters from Einstein have also fetched a high price. In May 2022, one of his handwritten letters containing his famous E=mc2 equation sold for $1.2 million. 

The new letter adds further insight into Einstein's views on religion.

"Not only was the letter written by Albert Einstein, one of the great figures and scientists of all time, it speaks to the ongoing, powerful debate between science and religion," Nathan Raab, principal of The Raab Collection, told Live Science in an email. "It's beyond exciting to get a glimpse of his personal thoughts on such an important issue."

A newly released image shows what Saint Anthony of Padua, a Portuguese priest who lived and died in the 13th century, may have looked like.

Using CT (computed tomography) scans of the priest's skull, an international team of researchers created a lifelike facial approximation of St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost and stolen articles. The final image includes a man with a cap of thinning brown hair crowning his head. The man wears a brown robe, just as Franciscan friars did in the Middle Ages.

However, this wouldn't be the first time that a facial reconstruction was made of the religious figure. In 1981, Italian sculptor Roberto Cremesini created a replica of St. Anthony's skull using plaster. The piece was the result of an exhumation of the saint, which Pope John Paul II authorized, according to the new study, which will be published in the March 2023 issue of the journal Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage. 

More than 30 years later, in 2014, researchers from the University of St. Anthony of Padua's Anthropology Museum, along with a team of international forensic researchers, made another facial reconstruction using only a digital copy of the exhumed skull, according to a Catholic News Agency article.

Related: Look into the eyes of a Stone Age woman in this incredibly lifelike facial reconstruction

That image features a man, his face angled to the viewer, also with a balding head of dark hair, dressed in a robe to make him appear more lifelike.

"Today's work is an update on the technique and shows a clear evolution from the 2014 face," Cícero Moraes, the study's lead author and a Brazilian graphics expert who also worked on the 2014 reconstruction, told Live Science in an email. "The present approximation has greatly improved anatomical coherence…and is more compatible with a real face." 

In addition to the facial approximation, Moraes and his co-authors, Luca Bezzi, an Italian archaeologist and Nichola Carrara, with the University of St. Anthony of Padua, also made a reconstruction of the endocranium, the skull's base, which was exceedingly large compared to the average human skull.

In other words, St. Anthony had a very large head. "The fact is that this volume is large even compared to modern individuals," Moraes said.

St. Anthony died in 1231 in Padua at age 36; he was canonized a year later.

Race and ethnicity are both terms that describe human identity, but in different — if related — ways. Identity might bring to mind questions of skin color, nationality, language, religion, cultural traditions or family ancestry. Both race and ethnicity encompass many of these descriptors. 

"'Race' and 'ethnicity' have been and continue to be used as ways to describe human diversity," said Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist and paleobiologist at The Pennsylvania State University, who is known for her research into the evolution of human skin color. "Race is understood by most people as a mixture of physical, behavioral and cultural attributes. Ethnicity recognizes differences between people mostly on the basis of language and shared culture." 

Related: Why did some people become white?

In other words, race is often perceived as something that's inherent in our biology, and therefore inherited across generations. Ethnicity, on the other hand, is typically understood as something we acquire, or self-ascribe, based on factors like where we live or the culture we share with others. 

But just as soon as we've outlined these definitions, we're going to dismantle the very foundations on which they're built. That's because the question of race versus ethnicity actually exposes major and persistent flaws in how we define these two traits, flaws that — especially when it comes to race — have given them an outsized social impact on human history. 

What is race?

The idea of "race" originated from anthropologists and philosophers in the 18th century, who used geographic regions and phenotypic traits like skin color to place people into different racial groupings, according to Britannica. That not only cemented the notion that there are separate racial "types" but also fueled the idea that these differences had a biological basis. 

That flawed principle laid the groundwork for the belief that some races were superior to others — which white Europeans used to justify the slave trade and colonialism, entrenching global power imbalances, as reported by University of Cape Town emeritus professor Tim Crowe at The Conversation. 

"We can't understand race and racism outside of the context of history, and more importantly economics. Because the driver of the triangular trade [which included slavery] was capitalism, and the accumulation of wealth," said Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, a medical anthropologist at the Center on Genomics, Race, Identity, Difference (GRID) at the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), Duke University. She is also the associate director of engagement for the Center on Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) at Duke. The center is part of a movement across the United States whose members lead events and discussions with the public to challenge historic and present-day racism.

The effects of this history prevail today — even in current definitions of race, where there's still an underlying assumption that physical characteristics like skin color or hair texture have biological, genetic underpinnings that are completely unique to different racial groups, according to Stanford. Yet, the scientific basis for that premise simply isn't there. 

"If you take a group of 1,000 people from the recognized 'races' of modern people, you will find a lot of variation within each group," Jablonski told Live Science. But, she explained, "the amount of genetic variation within any of these groups is greater than the average difference between any two [racial] groups." What's more, "there are no genes that are unique to any particular 'race,'" she said. 

Related: What are genes?

In other words, if you compare the genomes of people from different parts of the world, there are no genetic variants that occur in all members of one racial group but not in another. This conclusion has been reached in many different studies. Europeans and Asians, for instance, share almost the same set of genetic variations. As Jablonski described earlier, the racial groupings we have invented are actually genetically more similar to each other than they are different — meaning there's no way to definitively separate people into races according to their biology. 

Jablonski's own work on skin color, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010, demonstrates this. "Our research has revealed that the same or similar skin colors — both light and dark — have evolved multiple times under similar solar conditions in our history," she said. "A classification of people based on skin color would yield an interesting grouping of people based on the exposure of their ancestors to similar levels of solar radiation. In other words, it would be nonsense." What she means is that as a tool for putting people into distinct racial categories, skin color — which evolved along a spectrum — encompasses so much variation within different skin color "groupings" that it's basically useless, she said during a TED Talk in 2009. 

We do routinely identify each other's race as "Black," "white" or "Asian," based on visual cues. But crucially, those are values that humans have chosen to ascribe to each other or themselves. The problem occurs when we conflate this social habit with scientific truth — because there is nothing in individuals' genomes that could be used to separate them along such clear racial lines. 

In short, variations in human appearance don't equate to genetic difference. "Races were created by naturalists and philosophers of the 18th century. They are not naturally occurring groups," Jablonski emphasized. 

What is ethnicity?

This also exposes the major distinction between race and ethnicity: While race is ascribed to individuals on the basis of physical traits, ethnicity is more frequently chosen by the individual. And, because it encompasses everything from language to nationality, culture and religion, it can enable people to take on several identities. Someone might choose to identify themselves as Asian American, British Somali or an Ashkenazi Jew, for instance, drawing on different aspects of their ascribed racial identity, culture, ancestry and religion. 

Ethnicity has been used to oppress different groups, as occurred during the Holocaust, or within interethnic conflict of the Rwandan genocide, where ethnicity was used to justify mass killings. Yet, ethnicity and ethnic groups can also be a boon for people who feel like they're siloed into one racial group or another, because it offers a degree of agency, Ifekwunigwe said. 

"That's where this ethnicity question becomes really interesting, because it does provide people with access to multiplicity," she said. (That said, those multiple identities can also be difficult for people to claim, such as in the case of multiraciality, which is often not officially recognized.)

Ethnicity and race are also irrevocably intertwined — not only because someone's ascribed race can be part of their chosen ethnicity but also because of other social factors. 

"If you have a minority position [in society], more often than not, you're racialized before you’re allowed access to your ethnic identity," Ifekwunigwe said. "That's what happens when a lot of African immigrants come to the United States and suddenly realize that while in their home countries, they were Senegalese or Kenyan or Nigerian, they come to the U.S. — and they're Black." Even with a chosen ethnicity, "race is always lurking in the background," she said.

These kinds of problems explain why there's a growing push to recognize race, like ethnicity, as a cultural and social construct, according to the RACE Project. 

Yet in reality, it's not quite so simple. 

Impact of race and ethnicity

Race and ethnicity may be largely abstract concepts, but that doesn't override their very genuine, real-world influence. These constructs wield "immense power in terms of how societies work," said Ifekwunigwe. Defining people by race, especially, is ingrained in the way that societies are structured, how they function and how they understand their citizens: Consider the fact that the U.S. Census Bureau officially recognizes five distinct racial groups, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

The legacy of racial categories has also shaped society in ways that have resulted in vastly different socioeconomic realities for different groups. That's reflected, for instance, in higher levels of poverty for minority groups, poorer access to education and health care, and greater exposure to crime, environmental injustices and other social ills. What's more, race is still used by some as the motivation for continued discrimination against other groups that are deemed to be "inferior," the Southern Poverty Law Center explained.

"It's not just that we have constructed these [racial] categories; we have constructed these categories hierarchically," Ifekwunigwe said. "Understanding that race is a social construct is just the beginning. It continues to determine people's access to opportunity, privilege and also livelihood in many instances, if we look at health outcomes," she said. One tangible example of health disparity comes from the United States, where data shows that African American women are more than twice as likely to die in childbirth compared with white women, the Census Bureau reported.

Perceptions of race even inform the way we construct our own identities — though this isn't always a negative thing. A sense of racial identity in minority groups can foster pride, mutual support and awareness. Even politically, using race to gauge levels of inequality across a population can be informative, helping to determine which groups need more support, because of the socioeconomic situation they’re in. As the U.S. Census Bureau website explains, having data about people's self-reported race "is critical in making policy decisions, particularly for civil rights." 

All this paints a complex picture, which might leave us pondering how we should view the idea of race and ethnicity. There are no easy answers, but one thing is clear: While both are portrayed as a way to understand human diversity, in reality they also wield power as agents of division that don't reflect any scientific truths. 

Science does show us that across all the categories that humans construct for ourselves, we share more in common than we don't. The real challenge for the future will be to see that instead of our "differences" alone.

Additional resources

For a deeper understanding of how the U.S. government categorizes race and ethnicity, read "Research to Improve Data on Race and Ethnicity," which traces how the Census bureau is working to keep up with individuals' understanding of their own identities. (Hint: It's usually complex.) The nonpartisan Pew Research Center has a landing page for its research and survey data related to race and ethnicity, which touches on topics as diverse as immigration, health, and education. 

As is easy to imagine for such a hot topic, mountains of books have been written about issues around race and ethnicity. "Superior: The Return of Race Science" (Beacon Press, 2019) by Angela Saini Beacon tracks the history of scientific racism and the ways discredited ideas still influence scientific fields today. "Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision Between DNA, Race, and History" (Rutgers University Press, 2013), is a scholarly look at how the field of genetics has complicated how we talk about genetics and history. Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origins of our Discontents" (Random House, 2020) explores how race and ethnicity are used to divide people into hierarchies. 

Bibliography

Bibliography

"About the topic of race." U.S. Census Bureau. Dec. 3, 2021.

"Racism and Health." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. November 24, 2021.

"What Racism Costs Us All." Finance & Development, International Monetary Fund. Fall 2020.

(2014, July 31). A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance. Smithsonian. https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/new-african-american-identity-harlem-renaissance 

Roberts, Frank Leon. (2018, July 13). How Black Lives Matter Changed the Way Americans Fight for Freedom. ACLU. https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/race-and-criminal-justice/how-black-lives-matter-changed-way-americans-fight 

White Nationalist. Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/white-nationalist 

Newkirk II, Vann R. (2018, Feb. 28). Trump’s EPA Concludes Environmental Racism Is Real. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/the-trump-administration-finds-that-environmental-racism-is-real/554315/

American Psychological Association. Ethnic and Racial Minorities & Socioeconomic Status. https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/minorities 

(2019, June 10). Ethnic Cleansing. The History Channel. https://www.history.com/topics/holocaust/ethnic-cleansing 

Smedley, Audrey, The history of the idea of race. Britannica. Accessed April 9, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human/Scientific-classifications-of-race

Jablonski, Nina and Chaplin, George. (2010, May 5). Human skin pigmentation as an adaptation to UV radiation. PNAS. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0914628107

Originally published on Live Science on Feb. 8, 2020 and updated on April 9, 2022.

Watch a yoga class and chances are by the end of the session you’ll have seen students bow their heads, hold their hands in a prayer position and quietly whisper ‘Namaste’. So is yoga a religion? It’s a reasonable question to ask, especially as they may have also knelt on their mat with closed eyes and chanted ‘OM’  in front of a statue of a Buddha or Indian god. 

While these rituals are not uncommon in yoga, most classes today focus on physical postures. However, it wasn’t always that way; early yoga practitioners had an entirely different agenda. Here we speak to world-renowned yoga expert and co-author of Roots of Yoga, James Mallinson, about the origins of the practice. Then UK author and yoga teacher Eve Boggenpoel explains how to get started with yoga so you can enjoy its many benefits. 

• Read more: Best yoga mats

Is yoga a religion?

Dating back over two thousand years, yoga drew on a range of traditions including Hinduism and Buddhism, but it wasn’t until Medieval times that physical postures were introduced, explained Dr. James Mallinson, senior lecturer in Sanskrit and Classical and Indian studies at SOAS, University of London. Nevertheless, it was still very much concerned with spiritual matters at this time. "The first text to teach physical yoga practices [known as hatha yoga] was written by Buddhists in the 11th century and called the Amṛtasiddhi,” he told Live Science, "and, certainly, through these practices they were aiming for some kind of salvation or liberation.”

Modern-day yoga has echoes of these religious beliefs - natarajasana, or dance pose, for example, is a representation of Hindu god Shiva, and sun salutations may also reflect earlier beliefs. "In the Vedas [ancient Indian texts], the sun is a god, so you could argue that sun salutations are religious to some extent,” suggested Mallinson. Today, however, many practitioners simply enjoy yoga as a physical practice that increases feelings of calm and gives them the opportunity to carve out some space for themselves in an otherwise busy week.

How to start doing yoga

Ideally, try to learn yoga in the physical presence of a teacher who can tailor postures specifically to you, offer personalized advice based on what they see, and provide hands-on adjustments to enable you to experience the best alignment your body can achieve. If that’s not possible, the pandemic has meant teachers are increasingly teaching over Zoom, while online streaming sites, such Yoga International or Ekhart Yoga in Europe, offer a wide range of teachers and yoga styles. Classes can vary from 10 to 90 minutes and you can usually search by teacher, yoga style, level of proficiency, and other parameters, such as energizing, relaxing, or women’s health. Initially, try out a variety of classes to find something you resonate with, then build a base from there. 

What you need to start

You don’t need to invest in expensive clothing when you’re just starting out, as long as what you wear is comfortable and allows you to move freely. If you do hot yoga, though, you might like to invest in workout clothes with wicking qualities, as these will transfer moisture from your body to the outer side of the fabric where it evaporates. Avoid baggy t-shirts, as they may ride up when you’re in poses where your head is lower than your hips.

Yoga studios will provide you with the equipment you need, but if you’re planning to practice at home, you’ll need a good mat. Often referred to as a sticky mat, specialist yoga mats provide cushioning for your knees and prevent your hands and feet from slipping in poses such as downward dog. Depending on the style of yoga you practice, there are a few other props that can be really useful, especially for beginners. Yoga blocks and straps can act as extensions of your arms, helping you to get the full benefits of the pose before you reach full flexibility. Bolsters are super useful, too. They help you maintain good posture in seated positions when you have tight hips, and can be used to gently open your joints or reduce tension in other parts of the body - placed beneath your knees when lying in relaxation pose, for example, they take the pressure off your lower back.

Setting goals

Yoga is unlike other forms of exercise, in that progress isn’t necessarily measured by external gains. It’s what you feel like inside that matters. In the book, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Edwin Bryant (North Point Press, 2009), the author translates the father of modern yoga, Patanjali’s, famous definition of yoga as: "Yoga is the stilling of the changing states of the mind”, so while you may not be able to do a headstand or place your palms flat on the floor in a forward bend, if you are learning to connect to a place of inner calm and finding it easier to contact stillness both on and off the mat, you will definitely be making good progress.

That said, it helps to have a roadmap when starting yoga, and one approach is to first work with your breath, followed by your ‘foundation’ and then your spine. Learning to control your breath helps you be more present in your body, and will be very useful when you progress onto yogic breathing techniques that support more complex poses and sequences. Your ‘foundation’ refers to the area of your body that touches the ground and, as with a building, the stronger the foundation, the more stable your postures will be. Finally, as the central axis of your body, your spine plays a key role in yoga poses, providing stability, facilitating flexibility and absorbing shock. A healthy spinal alignment will enable you to develop good form in the postures, and maximize the benefits of your practice.

Are there different types of yoga?

There are now many styles of hatha yoga, each with a different emphasis, so when you’re starting a practice it's worth thinking about what you want to achieve. If your main aim is to improve your posture, Iyengar yoga might be a good place to start as it focuses on good alignment. Or Paulie Zink’s Yin yoga, which holds poses for up to five minutes or more to open joints and stretch fascia, is a good option for those looking to work deeply on their flexibility. 

If it’s a strong workout you’re after, ashtanga yoga, developed by K. Pattabhi Jois, will take you through a series of challenging sequences, while other students or those with health issues might prefer restorative yoga, where poses are floor-based, use bolsters and blocks to support the body and are held for up to 20 minutes to deeply relax you. Of course, you can also try a varied range of yoga styles for a balanced exercise plan that works on a number of levels. For more on this, take a look at our feature on how to improve your flexibility or yoga for back pain: what you need to know. 

Followers of Jesus span the globe. But the global body of more than 2 billion Christians is separated into thousands of denominations. Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist, Apostolic, Methodist — the list goes on. Estimations show there are more than 200 Christian denominations in the U.S. and a staggering 45,000 globally, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. So why does Christianity have so many branches? 

A cursory look shows that differences in belief, power grabs and corruption all had a part to play. 

But on some level, differentiation and variety have been markers of Christianity since the very beginning, according to Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor emeritus of church history at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. "There's never been a united Christianity," he told Live Science. 

Related: Was Jesus a magician?

Early splits

The early church, which spans from the start of Jesus' ministry, in A.D. 27, to A.D. 325, was divided primarily based on geography. Worship styles and interpretations of Jesus' teachings varied based on regional cultures and customs, according to Bruce Gordon, a professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale Divinity School.

But there were also major breaks, or schisms, over Christian theology during this time. One of the most notable early schisms, the Arian controversy in the early fourth century, divided the church on Jesus' relationship with God. Arius, a priest from Alexandria, Egypt, claimed that because Jesus was "begotten," or brought about by God, he was a lesser divinity than God. But Athanasius, an Alexandrian theologian, claimed that Jesus was God incarnate. 

"This caused major upheaval in the Roman Empire," said Christopher West, a doctoral student of ancient Christianity and medieval studies at Yale University. "It split Christians in the Roman Empire in half." The Council of Nicea — a group of theologians and scholars gathered by Emperor Constantine I in A.D. 325 — ultimately sided against Arius. But despite the church's official view, Christians continued to be divided on the subject for more than a century. 

Then, in 1054, the Eastern Orthodox Christians split from the Western Roman Catholics in what's known as the Great Schism. The two groups disagreed on the taking of the sacraments — religious symbols believed to transmit divine grace to the believer. Furthermore, the Eastern Orthodox Christians disagreed with the Roman beliefs that priests should remain celibate and that the Roman pope had authority over the head of the Eastern church, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.

There was even a temporary schism, known as the Western Schism, within the Catholic Church itself in 1378, when two men, and eventually a third, claimed to be the true papal heir. The division lasted almost 40 years, and by the time it was resolved in 1417, the rivaling popes had significantly damaged the reputation of the papal office. 

Despite this handful of schisms, the Catholic Church successfully suppressed other potential Christian offshoots "partly by sustained persecution [including] actual military expeditions against some labelled heretics, but then also a new system of enquiries into people's beliefs, called inquisitions. With the backing of secular rulers, heretics might be burned at the stake or forced into denying their beliefs," MacCulloch told Live Science via email.

Related: What led to the emergence of monotheism?

Denominations explode

But after the Protestant Reformation in 1517, the number of denominations really began to multiply. 

The Reformation — instigated by a number of events, most notably Martin Luther's 95 Theses — emphasized a personal faith. This movement was in reaction to the fact that interpretations of the Bible, grace (spontaneously given love and mercy from God), the absolution of sins and entry into heaven were all mediated through priests in Catholicism. Luther and his followers claimed that the Bible, not a church hierarchy, was the ultimate authority over all people, including priests and the pope, and that several ecclesiastical practices, such as granting indulgences (paying the church money to be absolved of sins), were corrupt.

Initially, there were just a few major Protestant groups, but ultimately, the Reformation ushered in more Christian offshoots.

By the 17th century, the contemporary word "denomination" began to be used to describe religious offshoots, Michelle Sanchez, an associate professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School, told Live Science via email. Protestants had used scripture to critique the Roman Catholic Church, claiming that any believer could read scripture and have a personal relationship with God. But then, "the obvious problem emerged: Whose interpretation of scripture was the right one?" Sanchez said in an interview. As believers debated the scriptures and sacraments, churches formed and split based on myriad biblical interpretations, ways of worship and organizational structures. From these debates, denominations such as the Presbyterians, Mennonites, Baptists and Quakers, among others, took root. 

Other Protestant denominations were formed out of a play for power, such as when Henry VIII started the Church of England in 1534. "He wanted to establish the political autonomy of England, and one way to do that was religious autonomy from Rome," West told Live Science. (He also famously wanted a divorce that the church refused to grant.)

Although schisms may be seen as divisive or even lead to violent conflicts between rival denominations, these splits do have an upside. "There's kind of an anti-corruption mechanism in the fragmentation," as these splits can offer agency to people in lower social positions, Sanchez said. For instance, after the Reformation challenged papal authority, townspeople could begin to question religious authorities about corrupt or questionable practices. 

There's likely more denominational splitting and forming to come. On judging the differences between them, MacCulloch offered advice from Jesus himself: "Ye shall know them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:16). That is, you can learn about them "in terms of what they do, their behavior," MacCulloch explained. "That's a pretty good test."

Originally published on Live Science.

The moral compasses of atheists and believers are different in a few key ways, a new study finds.

In some aspects, the moral compass was incredibly alike between the two groups; they both highly rated fairness and protecting the well-being of vulnerable people, for instance, and both highly endorsed liberty but not oppression. However, the groups diverged when it came to matters of group cohesion, such as valuing loyalty and respecting authority, the study found.

This research shows that, contrary to public perception, atheists do have a moral compass, but compared with believers, "their compass is differently calibrated," possibly due to factors such as how they were raised and whether they are highly analytical thinkers, the study's researcher Tomas Ståhl, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told Live Science.

Related: Saint or spiritual slacker? Test your religious knowledge

It's a common question, including among fellow atheists, whether disbelievers even have a moral compass. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 44% of Americans (compared with 26% of Canadians) think that a belief in God is needed to be moral. A 2011 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology even found "that the distrust of atheists was comparable to the distrust of rapists," he said. 

To investigate whether atheists have a moral compass, and to see how it compares with the compass of believers, Ståhl did four surveys: The first two included a total of 429 Americans on Amazon's online Mechanical Turk platform, while the second two surveys included a total of 4,193 people from the U.S. (a relatively religious country) and Sweden (a largely irreligious country).

The participants answered myriad questions about their personal histories, religious beliefs, political orientations and moral views. One part of the survey called the Moral Foundations Questionnaire was especially useful, as it asks about five central moral values. Questions on two of the values — caring and fairness — rated people's attitudes toward protecting vulnerable individuals and treating people fairly. 

"Virtually everyone," atheists and believers alike, scored high on these two values, showing that they valued protecting the vulnerable and being fair toward others; and they saw these values as moral issues, Ståhl said. However, he found differences between believers and disbelievers on the other three values: authority (respecting authority figures, such as police, parents and teachers), loyalty (being loyal to one's group, such as a country — not burning a country's flag, for instance) and sanctity (not doing anything perceived as degrading, usually in a sexual sense, such as being promiscuous).

"Those three values are thought to be serving group cohesion, keeping the group together," Ståhl explained. "When it comes to the binding values, there's a dramatic difference [between the groups]. Religious people score much higher on those — they view [them] as much more relevant for being moral compared to the disbelievers." 

In contrast, "atheists don't really think of [these three values] as relevant for morality to the same degree," he said.

The finding held even when Ståhl controlled for political orientation, he noted. 

These findings are consistent with prior research, said Kimberly Rios, an associate professor of psychology at Ohio University, who was not involved in the study. The new and earlier research, some of which was carried about by Rios, shows that the stereotypes that atheists don't have a moral compass are overgeneralizations; however, it also showed these stereotypes "are not substantiated by the actual differences between religious believers and non-believers," Rios told Live Science in an email. "Although non-believers place less importance on group-based moral values than do believers, there is no evidence based on the measures used in these studies that non-believers are more amoral than believers."

Related: 8 ways religion impacts your life

For instance, the two groups scored low on amorality, disagreeing with statements such as "I am willing to be unethical if I believe it will help me succeed." (The survey didn't address whether these groups actually differed in their unethical behaviors.) 

Alike and different

Believers' and disbelievers' moral compasses were alike and different in a few other ways, the new surveys showed. For example, both groups highly endorsed liberty over oppression, agreeing with statements such as "Society works best when it lets individuals take responsibility for their own lives without telling them what to do." Both groups said they saw rational thinking — believing in evidence-based claims and being skeptical of claims lacking evidence — as a moral issue, Ståhl said.

This finding is "intriguing," Rios said. There's a notion in many Western societies that religious belief and rational, scientific thought are incompatible, she said. "Yet, the finding that religious believers don't see rational thinking as any less of a moral issue than do non-believers suggests this notion of conflict may be overstated," Rios said. 

Of note, some religions encourage aspects of rational thinking. For example, the Catholic church has argued that logic and rationality can be useful, for instance when Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote proofs, known as The Five Ways, that argued for God's existence; in the Middle Ages, Jewish thinkers began embracing the rational thought process of Greek's classical philosophers, and they applied it when analyzing religious texts.

In a difference, Ståhl found that atheists were more likely than believers to base their judgments about what is or isn't moral based on the consequences of their actions. For example, in the hypothetical trolley problem, a person has to decide whether to let a runaway trolley kill five people stuck on the track ahead of it, or whether to pull a switch to divert the train, but kill one person stuck on the alternate track.

"In that situation, the disbelievers are more inclined to say 'flip [the] switch and kill the one person rather than five,' because they are assessing the relative harm," Ståhl told Live Science. "Whereas believers are more icky about that because they feel like they're actively killing someone, and they shouldn't kill. So, they are less comfortable with those calculations."

Why the differences?

Studies have yet to sufficiently show why atheists and theists have differently calibrated moral compasses, but Ståhl found a few correlations (although correlation does not equal causation). In the survey, he asked participants whether they were raised religiously and observed important people in their community engage in religious activities (meaning that it would be costly to their lives to think that their religious beliefs were false); whether they viewed the world as a dangerous place (and likely found God to be a protective force); and whether they were analytical thinkers, a trait found more often in atheists than believers.

"We find that, as expected, those things are related to whether you're a believer or not," Ståhl said. "We also find that these variables predict your moral values." So, for instance, if you don't grow up surrounded by religious people and related activities, you're less likely to endorse matters of group cohesion. Similarly, perceiving the world to be less dangerous and being an analytical thinker also predict atheism. 

The findings were replicated in all four surveys, both in the United States and Sweden. Going forward, both Ståhl and Rios said future research should examine whether these patterns hold up in non-Western countries, for example in China, a largely irreligious but very group-oriented country, and in predominantly Muslim countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, where atheism is officially forbidden.

The study was published online Wednesday (Feb. 24) in the journal PLOS One.

Originally published on Live Science.

As the pandemic raged in April, churchgoers in Ohio defied warnings not to congregate. Some argued that their religion conferred them immunity from COVID-19. In one memorable CNN clip, a woman insisted she would not catch the virus because she was “covered in Jesus’ blood”.

Some weeks later, the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker commented on the dangers of evangelical religious belief in the coronavirus era. Writing on Facebook, he said: “Belief in an afterlife is a malignant delusion, since it devalues actual lives and discourages action that would make them longer, safer, and happier.”

Pinker, of course, is not the first to connect – or equate – religion with delusion. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is probably the most famous contemporary proponent of this view, which has intellectual roots dating back at least to political theorist Karl Marx and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins argued that religious faith is “persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence”, and thus delusional.

Was Dawkins right? Many have critiqued his arguments on philosophical and theological grounds. But the relationship between his thesis and the dominant psychiatric conception of delusion is less often considered:

This definition is from the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” – often referred to as the “bible” of psychiatry. The definition is well known but controversial, and those who think belief in God is delusional may take issue with the final clause. Dawkins, for his part, approvingly quoted the writer Robert M Pirsig’s observation that “when one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion”.

So, is the distinction between insanity and religion a mere semantic quibble? In a new paper, we review research that examines relationships – and distinctions – between religion and delusion.

Penis theft and pathology

The APA’s definition of delusion excludes beliefs that are widely accepted. This drives a seemingly arbitrary wedge between isolated cases of obviously pathological belief and cases where beliefs with the same content have cultural support.

Consider the case of an Australian man who believed his penis had been stolen and replaced with someone else’s. The man had cut his penis and poured boiling water on it, and was surprised that these acts were painful. This is a clear case of delusion, as the belief is false, and this kind of belief is virtually unheard of in Australia.

But beliefs in genital theft do have some cultural acceptance in other parts of the world. Indeed, epidemics of such beliefs – so-called “penis panics” – have been documented in various countries. Should a belief cease to be a delusion once widely adopted? That’s what the APA’s definition of delusion seems to imply.

And this focus on shared belief appears to have other surprising implications. For example, while the APA’s definition of delusion may exclude followers of popular religions, the founders of those same religions may not get a pass until they attract a community of followers, at which point the subculture exemption comes into effect.

Culture and clinical judgment

So there are certainly controversial consequences of judging a belief by its popularity. But we argue that the APA’s clause about culture is clinically valuable. After all, a definition of delusion that pathologizes most of the world’s people would be clinically worthless.

Careful attention to cultural judgements can help clinicians distinguish beliefs that require psychiatric treatment from those that do not. Consider a young Bengali woman’s belief that her husband had been possessed by an invisible spiritual creature called a jinn. Beliefs about jinn possession are widespread in some Muslim communities. In this case, the treating psychiatrists (in Australia) were aided by a Muslim Bengali caseworker who advised about cultural factors impacting the patient’s presentation.

In addition, the APA’s emphasis on cultural acceptance is consistent with a growing awareness of the social function of beliefs. Through our beliefs we do not just model the world around us – we mould it to our purposes. Our beliefs mark us out as members of certain social groups, helping us to secure trust and cooperation.

Indeed, steadfast endorsement of some clearly false propositions – such as the claim that the crowd which attended the 2017 presidential inauguration of Donald Trump was the largest in US history – may be equivalent to ritual body piercing or firewalking: a signal of group commitment that is credible to others precisely because it is hard to sustain.

Community and continuity

In the case of religious beliefs, there is typically a social payoff to these mental contortions – a range of evidence supports the role of religion in social bonding. But the prevailing psychiatric view is that delusions are idiosyncratic, alienating and stigmatising, representing a dysfunction in the ability to negotiate social alliances.

So what distinguishes healthy religious beliefs – and perhaps beliefs in conspiracy theories – from delusions may be partly a matter of whether or not the belief strengthens community bonds. If sustaining a belief impairs your daily functioning and disrupts your social relationships, then your belief is more likely to count as a delusion.

Nevertheless, distinctions between healthy and pathological religious beliefs are unlikely to be sharp. Instead, the emerging picture is of continuity between religious cognition and cognition associated with mental disorders.

Our aim here is neither to demonize, nor to defend, religious belief. While religion is a source of solace and comfort for millions, particular religious beliefs can be “malignant” in Pinker’s sense – devaluing and damaging mortal lives. And, unfortunately, malignant beliefs that are shared by the many are far more dangerous than those shared by the few.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. 

Where did the spiritual concept of evil originate? One possible explanation might be people's attempts to understand and cope with infectious diseases.

Linking diseases and their symptoms to mysterious evil forces is a practice that emerged in traditional belief systems prior to the mid-19th century, when germ theory was introduced, scientists wrote in a new study. Germ theory revealed that microscopic pathogens, rather than malevolent spirits, were the cause of illness. 

However, the connection between religious convictions about good and evil and the presence of infectious disease lingers today, the researchers discovered. They found that, in geographic regions with high incidences of disease, people also demonstrated stronger convictions about agents of evil, such as demons and witches.

Related: Black Magic: 6 Infamous Witch Trials in History

Historically, many cultures in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America have used supernatural forces to explain and guide their responses to disease. One notable example was the surge in witch hunts in medieval Europe when the continent was ravaged by the Black Death, the researchers reported.    

This approach had a practical side: Sick people — those showing signs of a so-called evil influence — would be isolated, shunned or even killed, thereby protecting others from the spread of pathogens, according to the study. In turn, environments where infectious diseases were common would reinforce conservative ideologies that followed a strict practice of shared rituals and avoidance of strangers. 

If spiritual beliefs in evil were more common in regions that carried a higher load of pathogens, "it suggests that historically these beliefs may have evolved to explain the effects of pathogens," lead study author Brock Bastian, an associate professor with the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne in Australia, told Live Science in an email. 

"It opens up new insights into the emergence of religion as a belief system that developed to explain natural threats or events," Bastian said.

Witches, the devil and the evil eye

To test that hypothesis, the researchers conducted surveys and consulted archival data to assess levels of belief in evil. They surveyed more than 3,000 university students in 28 countries, investigating whether the participants believed strongly in the evil eye (a person's ability to cast a curse "through a malevolent glare"), witchcraft, the devil and unspecified evil forces. Archival data from around 58,000 people across 50 countries, collected between 1995 and 1998, addressed the question of the subjects' belief in the devil. In their evaluations, the scientists noted individuals' social class, level of education, political orientation and strength of religious practice.

The researchers also examined global historical data of infectious diseases, comparing those patterns with geographic trends in spiritual beliefs about evil. 

Related: Spooky! Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena

They learned that, in places where infectious diseases were historically widespread, "people were more likely to believe in the devil, the malevolent power of the evil eye and in witches who channel evil," according to the study, which was published online Oct. 30 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 

"We uncovered consistent evidence that historical pathogen prevalence is related to an increased tendency to believe that there are forces of evil at work in the world," the researchers reported. Correlations between belief in the devil and historic, widespread disease were the strongest in Nigeria, Bangladesh and the Philippines; those correlations were the weakest in the Czech Republic, Germany and Sweden, the scientists found. 

Viewing disease as evil would have promoted behavior that contained infection and limited outbreaks, benefiting the overall health of a community, the researchers said. Belief systems with a strong sense of good and evil as active forces thereby could have provided an advantage to groups of people living in areas of the world where the risk of contracting contagious diseases was high, the scientists added. 

Once such convictions become embedded in a culture, their influence can linger for generations. Even today, when scientific explanations for disease are readily available, "such thinking remains evident in many modern societies, wherein health complaints are sometimes attributed to the will of God or the work of the devil and spiritual remedies persist," the authors wrote.

• In Photos: 'Demon Burials' Discovered in Poland Cemetery
• Photos: Scottish Church Once Imprisoned Accused Witches
• Witches & Wiccans: 6 Common Misconceptions

Originally published on Live Science.

Jesus was the Messiah (Christ), the Son of God who was crucified for the sins of humanity before rising from the dead, according to Christian Gospels and early Christian writings.

According to the Gospels, Jesus, who was born around 4 B.C., was able to perform supernatural feats such as healing a wide range of diseases by simply touching people or speaking to them. He supposedly also had the ability to walk on water, instantly create vast amounts of fish and bread, resurrect the dead, rise from the dead himself, calm storms and exorcise demons from people.

The stories told about him have led many scholars to explore these questions: What was Jesus really like? Did he really exist? Today, many of the supernatural feats Jesus is reported to have performed are regarded by scientists as impossible to do — certainly by someone who lived 2,000 years ago.

Trying to understand what Jesus was really like is complicated by the fact that the earliest surviving texts that discuss Jesus date to the second century A.D., about 100 years after the life of Jesus — although, presumably they were copied from documents that date to the first century. In 2015, there were claims that a copy of the Gospel of Mark dating to the first century had been found, although it now appears that this copy dates to the second or third century A.D.

Despite many challenges, recent archaeological and historical research has allowed scholars to shed light on several aspects of Jesus' life, such as what he looked like and what life was like in his hometown of Nazareth. 

Jesus's birth and early life

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke claim that Jesus was born in Bethlehem to Mary, who was a virgin. The year of Jesus' birth is debated by scholars, who generally place it sometime between 7 B.C. and 1 B.C. The tradition of Jesus being born on Dec. 25 did not come about until centuries later, and scholars generally agree that he was not born on that day. 

Related: Pagan roots? 5 surprising facts about Christmas

The Gospel of Matthew talks about how magi (a word sometimes translated as "wise men") came from the east, following the star of Bethlehem (which some scientists have speculated could be a comet or the planet Venus) and gave baby Jesus presents of gold, frankincense and myrrh. The Gospel also claims that King Herod was enraged when he heard of Jesus' birth and ordered him to be found and executed, at one point ordering every boy in Bethlehem who was two years or younger to be killed. Jesus and his family escaped by fleeing to Egypt and not returning until after Herod's death, the Gospel says. Today, scholars are doubtful that Herod tried to kill Jesus, noting that there is no evidence, outside of the Bible, that Herod was aware of Jesus.

The Gospels tell of how Jesus grew up in Nazareth with his mother, Mary, her husband, Joseph, and Jesus' brothers and sisters. Gospel stories tell how a man named John the Baptist foretold the coming of Jesus and baptized people who were seeking forgiveness for their sins.

The Gospel of Mark claims that Jesus worked as a carpenter when he was old enough, and that there was something of a rift between Jesus and his family.

This Gospel also claims that when Jesus returned to Nazareth after he was away, he was not well received. "A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home," Jesus said in Mark 6:4. 

Related: 8 archaeological sites that Jesus may have visited

Recent archaeological work carried out at Nazareth has identified two houses that date to the first century A.D. One of these houses was later venerated as the house that Jesus grew up in. Archaeological remains suggest that people in first century Nazareth were Jewish and less likely to embrace Greco-Roman culture than people who lived in the nearby town of Sepphoris.

Jesus' ministry

Scholars generally agree that Jesus didn't devote himself to his ministry until he was about 30 years old. This is based on the sequence of events told in the Bible which suggest that Jesus had not been ministering for long before he was crucified.

The Gospel accounts suggest that Jesus spent much of his ministry in the area around Galilee. They tell how Jesus generally avoided luxury, was happy to talk with "tax collectors" and "sinners," favored the poor and frequently clashed with Jewish religious leaders, who doubted his claim that he was the Messiah. Large crowds sometimes followed him, hoping that he would cure sick people, the Gospels say.

He sometimes clashed with his 12 disciples, scolding them when they showed a lack of faith or endurance. At one point he gave his disciples the ability to perform miracles in his name. When they were unable to exorcise an "impure spirit" from a boy, Jesus was furious. "'You unbelieving generation,' Jesus replied, 'how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you?'" Mark 9:19.

Jesus spoke about the end times, saying that the skies will be darkened and "nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines ..." Mark 13:8.

The Gospels claim that one of Jesus' disciples, Judas Iscariot, betrayed Jesus by making a deal with a group of Jewish religious leaders to help them arrest Jesus in exchange for money. The leaders then took Jesus before Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect (governor) of Judea, where he was put on trial. The stories told in the Gospels claim that Pilate was reluctant to find Jesus guilty but was pushed toward the verdict by a mob who wanted Jesus to be crucified. The stories claim that after Jesus was crucified and placed in a tomb, he came back to life.

It's uncertain exactly when Jesus was crucified. Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea between A.D. 26 to 37 and his crucifixion would have occurred at some point within that time. The stories told in the Gospels indicate that Jesus' trial and crucifixion took place around Passover, a Jewish holiday that occurs in spring.

What did Jesus look like?

Recent research led by Joan Taylor, professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King's College London, gives us an idea of what Jesus may have looked like.

Her research suggests that Jesus was likely around 5 feet 5 inches tall, had olive-brown skin with black hair, and likely kept his beard and hair short and well trimmed to keep out lice, which was a major problem at the time. Jesus' work as a carpenter and the fact that he traveled on foot, combined with the fact that Jesus likely wasn't able to eat regular meals, means that he was likely thin but somewhat muscular, wrote Taylor in her book "What Did Jesus Look Like?" (T&T Clark, 2018).

"Jesus was a man who was physical in terms of the labor that he came from," Taylor told Live Science. "He shouldn't be presented as [in] any way someone who was living a soft life, and sometimes that's the kind of image we get."

Additional resources

Read more about Jesus' life, according to the Biblical Archaeology Society. You can also learn about recent archaeological finds that shed light on the mystery of Jesus, from Smithsonian Magazine. And don't forget to watch a video on When Was the Tomb of Christ Discovered? from National Geographic.

In a Catholic parish in Hobbs, New Mexico, a statue of the Virgin Mary has been "weeping."

Onlookers have gathered out of curiosity, and also for prayer and healing. The liquid on the statue has been found to be olive oil and balsam – the same mixture that is used for certain Catholic rituals after being blessed by a bishop.

Claims about supernatural phenomena, including weeping statues, have historically been common in Catholicism. A well-known example is the Madonna of Syracuse, Sicily, a plaster statue that has shed tears since 1953. Last year, in fact, weeping statues were reported in Hungary, Argentina and Macedonia, just to name a few.

To understand why a weeping statue would be religiously meaningful, it's first important to appreciate the connection between miracles and the Virgin Mary.

Miracles and Mary

Catholics believe Mary is the mother of Jesus Christ and, therefore, the mother of God.

Throughout Catholic history, supernatural events have been attributed to Mary's power. When France's Chartres cathedral burned, only Mary's relic – called "The Veil of the Virgin"– survived after being safeguarded by three priests who were miraculously preserved from the heat and flames.

Mary's intercession is also believed to have ensured victory at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, when an Ottoman fleet was repulsed by the forces of Genoa, Venice and the papacy.

Mary's tears have special significance for Catholics: She cries not only over the sins of the world, but also over the pain she endured in her earthly life, referred to as "the seven sorrows of Mary." These sorrows, which include the crucifixion and death of Jesus, are depicted by seven swords piercing Mary's flaming heart.

Even the flowery scent of olive oil and balsam evokes Mary since she is called "the rose without thorns."

It's not surprising for a weeping statue of Mary to become an object of prayer and devotion.

And when this happens, the local bishop sometimes steps in to investigate.

The possibility of trickery

In examining claims of the supernatural, bishops are guided by standards set by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which oversees Catholic doctrine. These standards primarily concern reports of "apparitions" of the Virgin Mary. But the framework also applies to other supernatural occurences, including weeping statues. Perhaps because they address controversial issues, the standards were only made public in 2012 – nearly 35 years after they were first implemented.

The bishop, or a committee appointed by him, evaluates the supernatural phenonmenon's impact on the community. Positive aspects can be healings and conversions, or even a more general deepening of faith among Catholics. Negative aspects would include sinful acts such as selling oil from a weeping statue or making claims contrary to Catholic doctrine.

One of the primary questions is whether the event has been staged. For example, in two cases of statues that wept blood – one in Canada in 1986 and another in Italy in 2006 – the blood turned out be that of the statue's owner.

Liquids can be injected into the porous material of statues and later seep out as "tears." Oil that is mixed with fat can be applied to a statue's eyes, which will "weep" when ambient temperatures rise in the chapel.

In the case of the bronze statue of Mary in Hobbs, New Mexico, the investigation has uncovered no such trickery. But the fact that no cause has yet been found does not mean that a miracle has taken place.

The Catholic Church rarely endorses weeping statues and similar phenomena. Usually, a bishop or the Vatican will only go as far as saying that faith and devotion are more important than tales of supernatural happenings.

Searching for meaning

While understanding the phenomenon, it's also important to appreciate the stories and individual motivations that people bring when they pray or worship in the presence of a statue that seems to weep.

In my hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, statues and pictures have wept oil and blood at the home of the late Audrey Santo, who died in 2007 at the age of 23. As a child, "Little Audrey," as she is still called, was left mute and paralyzed after a swimming pool accident. In spite of her physical condition, she was believed to pray for those who made pilgrimages to see her. After her death, a foundation was established to promote her cause for sainthood. The statues and pictures weeping in her home were seen as signs that God had specially blessed Little Audrey's life of suffering.

In my writings about the case of Audrey Santo, I was tempted to focus on the stories of supernatural wonders. And the claims surrounding Little Audrey are still hotly debated. In the end, I thought it would be more interesting to study how people find meaning in phenomena like weeping statues.

At the Santo home, the people I talked to shared moving personal stories of pain and sadness, hope and healing. The sense of togetherness in and through suffering was far more important than talk of miracles.

In Worcester – as well as in Hobbs, New Mexico – I expect what is going on is much more than superstition.

Mathew Schmalz, Associate Professor of Religion, College of the Holy Cross

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Being religious may come with a longevity boost, a new study suggests.

The study, which analyzed the obituaries of more than 1,000 people across the United States, found that people with a religious affiliation lived nearly 4 years longer, on average, than those without a religious affiliation.

The findings held even after the researchers took into account each person's biological sex and marital status, two factors that are known influence life span. Indeed, women live about 4.8 years longer than men, on average, but the effect of religion on life span came close to matching this, the researchers said.

"Religious affiliation had nearly as strong an effect on longevity as gender does, which is a matter of years of life," study lead author Laura Wallace, a doctoral student in psychology at The Ohio State University, said in a statement.

The study agrees with previous research linking religion with health benefits. For example, existing research has found that attending religious services is tied to a longer life span. However, these earlier studies often used people's self-reports of service attendance, and it's unclear how accurate those reports are. In contrast, in the new study, religious affiliation was reported by the obituary writer. [8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life]

Still, the researchers noted that their study found only an association and did not determine whether being religious causes a boost in longevity or whether healthier people tend to be more religious.

The study was published online today (June 13) in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Religion and life span

For the study, the researchers analyzed about 1,100 obituaries from 42 major U.S. cities published online between 2010 and 2011. A person was determined to have a religious affiliation if the obituary mentioned religious activities. The researchers also noted the person's age, sex and marital status, as well as the number of social and volunteer activities listed.

The researchers found that, after taking into account sex and marital status, people with a religious affiliation lived 3.8 years longer, on average, than those without a religious affiliation.

Further analysis revealed that volunteering and involvement with social organizations explained part but not all of the link between religion and longevity.

Lifestyle factors could also help explain the link. Many religions have rules that restrict unhealthy practices, such as alcohol and drug use, which may play a role in longevity, the researchers said. In addition, "many religions promote stress-reducing practices that may improve health, such as gratitude, prayer or meditation," said study co-author Baldwin Way, an associate professor of psychology at Ohio State.

However, the study was not able to assess lifestyle factors or stress-reducing practices based on the obituary reports. So, more research is needed to look at the role those factors play in the relationship between religion and longevity, the researchers said.

Interestingly, the study also suggested that the overall level of religiosity in a city, and how much residents in the city value conformity to social norms, may also affect the link.

In highly religious cities where conformity to social norms was important, religious people tended to live longer than nonreligious people. But in highly religious cities where conforming to social norms wasn't very important, nonreligious people tended to live just as long as religious people did, Wallace said.

The researchers called this a "spillover" effect, in which the positive health benefits of religion spill over into the nonreligious population. In other words, in these situations, nonreligious people may be positivity influenced by being in a religious environment, without being religious themselves, possibly due to effects of religion on mental and physical health in the community.

Still, these findings are preliminary and need to be replicated in other studies, the researchers said.

Original article on Live Science.

This might make your head spin — officials of the Roman Catholic Church are offering a week-long course in exorcism, and dozens of Catholic priests have flocked to Rome to partake of the Holy See's demon-banishing tips and strategies.

Titled Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation, the course is now in its 13th year, and is presented at The Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, a Catholic educational institution in Rome, in collaboration with the Group for Socio-religious Research and Information (GRIS), according to the course's website. An estimated 200 people — lay Catholics as well as priests — attended, Reuters reported.

From April 16 to 21, the would-be exorcists learn about issues they might encounter, including recognizing the devil, differentiating between possession and mental disorders, and legal protections for exorcists, according to a course outline. [Exorcism: Facts and Fiction About Demonic Possession]

Alongside the traditional exorcism techniques that you might already expect, such as sprinkling holy water or chanting Bible passages in Latin, this year's course offered a nod to the modern age by introducing a technical element for the exorcist's tool kit: a cellphone. Reuters noted that in one of the course's first sessions, Cardinal Ernest Simoni of Albania described assisting in exorcisms by reciting the Latin prayers over a cellphone.

"They call me and we speak, and that's how I do it," Simoni said.

Now available in English

This technical upgrade to demon banishment followed another recent concession to the 21st century, which took place last year. With the Vatican's permission, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) created the first-ever English translation of the Roman Catholic Church's Latin rituals for exorcism, making it easier for a bishop exorcist to find a priest who could assist him, the religious news service the Catholic Herald announced in October 2017.

"Given that there's less facility in Latin than there used to be, even among priests, it opens the door to more priests to do this," Father Andrew Menke, executive director of the USCCB's Secretariat of Divine Worship, told the Catholic Herald.

Other sessions in the course included: The Auxiliary Exorcist: Requirements and Tasks; Symbolism in Magical-Occultist and Satanic Rituals; and Discerning the Extraordinary Actions of the Devil; and the week winds down with a Ministry of Exorcism roundtable, according to the outline.

An estimated half a million people seek exorcisms each year in Italy alone, and the demand for exorcisms worldwide is growing, BBC News reported. However, mental disorders and physical conditions such as epilepsy are the more likely explanations for accounts of so-called demonic possession — medieval and modern — according to a study published in 2014 in the journal Early Science and Medicine.

Completing the weeklong exorcism course currently underway in Italy provides attendees with a certificate, but that doesn't mean they're qualified to perform exorcisms for the Catholic church — only priests who have received a license or special permission from their bishop are permitted to officially raise a cross against the powers of darkness, course organizer and GRIS leader Giuseppe Ferrari told Reuters.

And, Simoni added, exorcism should be attempted only if medical doctors are unable to find a psychological or physical explanation for the "possessed" person's distress.  

Original article on Live Science.

Billions of people across the world believe in a higher power, be it God, gods or something else spiritual. Live Science breaks down the history of that belief, from the origins of religion to the many modern denominations of Christianity, along with the psychology of faith, such as whether belief in God is a delusion or how religion is good (and bad) for mental health. 

Our expert writers and editors follow researchers studying religion and spirituality, and the impact they have had on the sciences — past and present.

A 48-year-old woman in Switzerland stabbed herself several times in the chest, claiming  she heard divine voices that instructed her to commit the act as a religious sacrifice, a recent report of the woman's case reveals.

But doctors suspect that these "heavenly" voices likely had an earthly cause; namely, a slow-growing brain tumor that could've caused the woman's religious delusions, according to the case report, which was published Nov. 14in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.

Dr. Sebastian Walther, a psychiatrist at the University Hospital of Psychiatry in Bern, Switzerland, and a co-author of the report, said it's unusual to see a case like this. [27 Oddest Case Reports]

What makes the case unique is the suspected link between the location of the brain tumor and its disruption of brain networks that probably led to the woman's religious delusions and hearing of divine voices, Walther told Live Science.

When the woman showed up in the emergency room with deep gashes on her chest from self-inflicted stab wounds, she was seen by psychiatrists to evaluate her mental health, according to the report.

As doctors spoke with the woman about why she wanted to hurt herself, she told them that for the past three years, she had a strong feeling of being blessed, and she had been communicating with divine voices she considered to be "heavenly."

The Swiss woman explained that she heard two different divine voices, and that she would engage in religious-oriented conversations with both for hours at a time, according to the case report.

She heard these voices daily for several weeks or months at a time, and says they were giving her instructions or commenting on her actions, Walther said. This made her feel safe and close to God, or horrified, depending on what the voices said, he added.

Because the woman was experiencing religious delusions and persistent "auditory verbal hallucinations" in which she heard divine voices, the psychiatrists diagnosed her with psychosis, a condition in which a person loses contact with reality.

Religious delusions are quite frequent among people with psychosis, Walther said.

Slow-growing tumor

After doctors admitted the woman to the psychiatric unit of the hospital, they learned that this wasn't the first time she felt a strong interest in religion and spirituality. She described four previous times in her life, beginning at age 13 and again at ages 23, 32 and 41, when she experienced periods of intense spiritual and religious devotion.

During these periods, which lasted about a year or two, she would join Jehovah's Witnesses and then later resign, when she lost interest, according to the report.

As part of her psychiatric evaluation, the woman also underwent an MRI. The scan detected a brain tumor.

It turned out that the tumor — which probably appeared first in childhood or adolescence — was very slow-growing, and likely periodically affected her behavior since her teenage years, Walther said.

Indeed, the doctors suspected that her four previous episodes of intense religious devotion might have been a symptom of the tumor's progression, according to the case report.

The tumor affected areas of the brain involved in processing sound, which is possibly why she may have heard "divine" voices, but it also affected networks that influence a person's emotions, Walther said.

It's not clear why the woman's periodic devotion to religion eventually caused her to experience a psychotic episode in which she tried to severely injure herself.

The more likely explanation is that the tumor's slow growth periodically altered brain networks responsible for a strong interest in religion and spirituality, Walther said. But it's also possible that the occurrence of the brain tumor and psychotic episode were both due to chance, he said.

The woman did not receive any treatment for the tumor, which did not show signs of additional growth, Walther said. Because the tumor was located in a very delicate part of the brain, neither surgery nor radiation were recommended, he noted.

Ultimately, the woman was given antipsychotic medication to reduce the frequency of her hallucinations, Walther said. When the dose of this medication was reduced, the woman still showed signs of an above-average interest in religion, he said.

The last time Walther had contact with the woman, she had decided to taper off her medication and had started hearing voices again.

Originally published on Live Science.

Is religious belief driven by the heart or the head — that is, is it intuition or reason that explains why people believe in god or gods? The answer may be neither: A new study finds that cultural upbringing may explain religious creed.

The finding challenges the standard view among psychologists, who tend to report that religious beliefs come intuitively to people, the researchers said. 

"It is probably about time psychologists reconsider their understanding of belief as 'natural' or 'intuitive,' and instead focus on cultural and social learning factors that give rise to supernatural ideas," the researchers wrote in the study. [8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life]

Three tests

The scientists did three experiments to examine the widely accepted idea that religion is linked to intuition, as well as the lesser-held idea that religion can be explained by reason. In one experiment, 89 pilgrims taking part in the famous Camino de Santiago, or the "Way of Saint James" pilgrimage, completed a cognitive test. They answered questions about the strength of their religious or spiritual beliefs and the length of time they had spent on the pilgrimage. The pilgrims also completed probability tasks that assessed their levels of logical thinking and intuitive, or "gut feeling," thinking.

The results showed no link between religious beliefs and intuitive thinking. Nor was there a link between supernatural beliefs and analytical thinking, the researchers found.

In the second study, 37 people from the United Kingdom had to try to solve mathematical puzzles designed to measure intuition, and also rated their levels of supernatural belief. But, just like the pilgrim experiment, this test found no link between levels of intuitive thinking and religious belief, the researchers found. 

Finally, the researchers looked at the brain itself. Previous research suggested that analytical thinking may inhibit supernatural beliefs. Moreover, brain-imaging studies have indicated that the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG), located in the brain's frontal lobe, plays a role in this inhibition. For example, a small 2012 brain-imaging study published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience showed that this region was more active in people who had fewer supernatural thoughts.

So the researchers who worked on the new study attached electrodes to the scalps of 90 volunteers from the general public, activating the participants' rIFGs. This activation led to a spike in cognitive inhibition, but it didn't change the participants' levels of supernatural belief. The results suggest that there isn't a direct link between cognitive inhibition (usually caused by analytical thinking, but in this case caused by electrodes) and supernatural thoughts, the scientists said.

Given these results, it's "premature to explain belief in gods as 'intuitive,'" the researchers wrote in the study. Instead, people's spirituality or religiousness likely develops based on their upbringing, culture and education, the researchers said.

"Religious belief is most likely rooted in culture rather than in some primitive gut intuition," lead researcher Miguel Farias, a lecturer and director of studies in psychology at the University of Oxford, said in a statement.

Nature versus nurture

These results buck the prevailing view of religion, said Nathan Cofnas, a doctoral student of philosophy at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study. [Saint or Spiritual Slacker? Test Your Religious Knowledge]

"[The researchers] pose a big challenge to the view that religion manifests when people turn off their analytical thinking," Cofnas told Live Science in an email.

But this study isn't the last word, Cofnas noted. Other studies show that religiosity is highly heritable. "We know from twin studies that, at least in the American population, genes tend to have a greater influence than (shared) environment on whether someone becomes religious as an adult," he said. "So, there must be some psychological mechanism that varies among people and is associated with different levels of religiosity."

In addition, atheists are generally smarter than religious people, according to studies done in the United States. "The reason for this is not entirely clear, but it's possible that more intelligent people are more likely to reject religion after a rational investigation," Cofnas said.

It's likely true that social and educational factors play major roles in a person's religious beliefs, but core cognitive dispositions may also play a part, Cofnas said.

The study was published online Nov. 8 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Original article on Live Science.

Even people who don't believe in God judge other nonbelievers as less moral than religious types, new research finds.

The study showed that in 13 very different countries, people were more likely to think that a serial killer must be an atheist rather than a believer. These findings persisted even in highly secular countries such as Finland and China; they were also true even for people who reported zero belief in God.

"Even as secularism reduces overt religiosity in many places, religion has apparently still left a deep and abiding mark on human moral intuitions," study researcher Will Gervais, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, wrote with his colleagues Aug. 7 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. [8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life]

Atheism's reputation

Though there's no precise count of the number of atheists worldwide, the group of nonbelievers seems to be growing. In the United States, about 3 percent of adults call themselves atheist, and 4 percent say they're agnostic, according to a 2014 Pew survey. Those numbers were up from 1.6 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively, in 2007. (Nearly 16 percent of American adults also said that they were "nothing in particular" with regard to religion as of 2014 but did not explicitly disavow belief in God.) However, because there is a social stigma against atheism, some researchers think that atheists are undercounted. A 2017 study that asked the question more indirectly — by having participants count statements that were true about them, including some statements about religious belief — estimated that about 26 percent of Americans are nonbelievers. In 2016, an annual survey in Norway found that 39 percent of the population identified as atheist — more than the 37 percent who said they were religious.

Still, atheists get a bad rap compared with most other groups. In 2017, Pew asked people to rate their warmth toward various religious groups on a scale of zero to 100. The results placed atheists at 50, making them the least-liked group other than Muslims, who came in at 48. (For comparison, Jews were the most-liked group, with a rating of 67 on the 100-point scale.) One 2015 study found that in people's minds, atheism is linked with thoughts of death, perhaps because of atheists' implied lack of belief in the afterlife.

It might seem natural that religious people would resent atheists, but atheists should feel good about themselves … right? That wasn't the case, according to the new study.

Judging a serial killer

The researchers didn't ask people directly for their views on atheists, because they were interested in more subtle, almost unconscious, attitudes. So they took advantage of something called the "conjunction fallacy." This is the tendency of the mind to think that specific situations are more likely than general ones. In this case, 3,256 study participants from 13 different countries read a description of a man who tortured animals as a child and then became more and more violent in adulthood, eventually murdering five homeless people.

Half of the participants were then asked whether this serial killer was more likely to be a teacher or a teacher who believes in God. The other half were asked whether he was more likely to be a teacher or a teacher who is a nonbeliever.

Logically, "a teacher" is always the correct answer, because it's the less specific choice and thus more likely to be applicable. But people tend to make snap judgments, such that when the additional information meshes with their biases, they pick the more specific choice.

The specific choice that resonated with a description of a serial killer turned out to be "nonbeliever." Overall, people were nearly twice as likely to make the error of choosing the more specific option when that option described an atheist. Fifty-eight percent of the people who chose either a "teacher" or a "teacher and nonbeliever" said the serial killer was a nonbeliever teacher, compared with only 30 percent who chose "teacher and believer" instead of "teacher" alone. [Infographic: The World's Top Religions]

Internal prejudice

Most surprisingly, there was little difference in this error rate when the researchers looked at only the answers from the people who said they, themselves, were nonbelievers. About 52 percent of nonbelievers made the error of calling the serial-killing teacher a nonbeliever, compared with 28 percent who made the error of calling the killer a believer. Even absolute atheists, who rated their belief in a deity at zero, still made the conjunction fallacy more often when the choice was "nonbeliever teacher" (61 percent of the time) than when it was "believer teacher" (50 percent of the time).

The researchers repeated the study with different scenarios (such as skipping out on a dinner check) and even with crimes people might associate with religion. In the case of child molestation, for example, people were still more likely to think that the perpetrator was a priest who didn't believe in God than a priest who did believe in God.

"Participants intuitively assume that the perpetrators of immoral acts are probably atheists," the researchers wrote. "These effects appeared across religiously diverse societies, including countries with Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim and nonreligious majorities."

Original article on Live Science.  

A slow fade from religious life may be less disruptive to your relationship with mom and dad than rejecting or changing religions altogether, a new study finds.

The findings may not surprise anyone who has quietly stopped going to services except on major holidays, but they're important for social scientists studying family harmony. According to a 2008 report by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 28 percent of Americans have rejected the religion of their childhood in order to switch faiths or to move away from religion as a whole.

Previous studies have found that families that share a faith between generations tend to be tighter-knit than those who don't, meaning that religious shifts between the generations could predict how close families are likely to be. [8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life]

"Children who change religions or reject their parents' religious beliefs and values may lose opportunities to engage in intimate communication with their parents," said lead study author Woosang Hwang, a doctoral candidate in human development and family science at Syracuse University.

Generational change

The new study, published in the June 1 issue of the Journal of Family Issues, drew from the Longitudinal Study of Generations, which first recruited grandparents from Southern California in 1971 and their children and grandchildren to answer questions about their lives and family interactions. The people in the survey were interviewed seven more times after the initial interview, through 2005.

In the new study, the researchers focused on data from 635 of the survey participants who were young adults in 1971. As part of the survey, these young adults and their parents had reported their religious beliefs and behaviors.  

In the 1971 survey, 31 percent of the young adult respondents said they had religious affiliations different from that of their mothers, and 32 percent had different affiliations from their fathers. More than half differed from their parents in how frequently they attended religious services and in religious intensity, a measure of how important religion is to one's sense of self.

The surveys had also asked the young adults about their feelings of closeness and frequency of contact with their parents. Hwang and his colleagues found that the adult children in 1971 who'd changed religious affiliation reported feeling less close and having less contact with their parents compared with those who simply were less intense or attended services less often than their parents.

Religious rifts

The correlation between closeness and religious affinity was stronger for mothers and children than it was for fathers and children, though the relationship was weakened regardless of the parent's gender, the researchers found. Though the study continued over three decades of periodic surveys, these gaps neither widened nor closed after young adulthood; the rifts associated with religious affiliation changes seemed quite stable. [Creationism vs. Evolution: 6 Big Battles]

The study wasn't designed to explain why a switch in religious affiliation might lead to a greater rift between parent and child than a decrease in religious activity, but Hwang and his colleagues speculated that the rejection of childhood religion might remove a regular opportunity for parents and their adult children to interact — be it through church, temple or other religious services. The rejection of the parents' religion might also cause intergenerational conflict, especially when it comes to the religious education of the grandchild generation, the researchers wrote. Or the rejection might reflect underlying differences in ideologies and social preferences between the generations.

While most Americans report belief in God and some religious affiliation, there has been a weakening of religious life in the United States. The 2008 Pew survey on religion in America found that 16 percent of American adults say they are religiously unaffiliated, which was twice the 7 percent who said they'd been raised that way. And although 77 percent of Americans reported a religious affiliation, according to that same survey, actual religious behavior is less common among the younger generation. For instance, while 80 percent of younger millennials born between 1990 and 1996 said they believed in God, only 28 percent attended services weekly. For comparison, 51 percent of adults born between 1928 and 1945 said they attended weekly services.

Hwang and his colleagues now plan to study how or if children can split from their parents' religion with minimal disruption to the relationship, he said. The researchers are also investigating the impact of following two different religious traditions on the relationship between husbands and wives.

Originally published on Live Science.

Despite his criticism of intelligent design and creationism, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins told people at a science festival this past the weekend that he believes religious education is a key subject for schoolchildren.

Dawkins, who is open about his atheism, said that understanding religion can help students get a better grasp of the world's history and culture. He made the statement during a public conversation at the Cheltenham Science Festival in Gloucestershire, England, on Sunday (June 11), according to The Telegraph.

It's basically impossible to study English literature without some knowledge of Christianity, Dawkins noted. [Saint or Spiritual Slacker? Test Your Religious Knowledge]

Dawkins is the author of several books, including "The Selfish Gene" (Oxford University Press, 1976), in which he talks about how genes associated with self-interested survival drive evolution; the 2006 best-seller "The God Delusion"; and his forthcoming book, "Science in the Soul" (Random House, August 2017).

Dawkins touched on religious education after being asked whether schools should stop teaching the subject due of fears that it result in children accepting religious doctrine without questioning it.

But, after stating his support for the subject — at least for historical and cultural purposes — he warned that it was "deeply wicked" and "evil" to use religion to scare children by saying that they could end up in "hell fire," Dawkins said, according to The Telegraph.

He also said that scientists should stop using the phrase "theory of evolution," largely because the term "theory" could lead people to think that it was not scientifically proven, he said, according to The Telegraph.

"I would recommend not calling it a theory, I would call it a fact," he said at the festival. "The word 'theory' is clearly misunderstood. Evolution is a fact and there is absolutely no question or doubt about that. Look at the evidence — it is overwhelming."

He added that Darwin used the term in the 19th century, "fair enough, but it is a fact, it is established as strongly as any other fact in science … It’s much better to abandon the word 'theory' altogether. Don't ever use the word theory of evolution."

Original article on Live Science.

For more than a millennium, scholars have noticed a curious correlation: Atheists tend to be more intelligent than religious people.

It's unclear why this trend persists, but researchers of a new study have an idea: Religion is an instinct, they say, and people who can rise above instincts are more intelligent than those who rely on them.

"Intelligence — in rationally solving problems — can be understood as involving overcoming instinct and being intellectually curious and thus open to non-instinctive possibilities," study lead author Edward Dutton, a research fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. [Saint or Spiritual Slacker? Test Your Religious Knowledge]

Smart cookie

In classical Greece and Rome, it was widely remarked that "fools" tended to be religious, while the "wise" were often skeptics, Dutton and his co-author, Dimitri Van der Linden, an assistant professor of psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, wrote in the study.

The ancients weren't the only ones to notice this association. Scientists ran a meta-analysis of 63 studies and found that religious people tend to be less intelligent than nonreligious people. The association was stronger among college students and the general public than for those younger than college age, they found. The association was also stronger for religious beliefs, rather than religious behavior, according to the meta-analysis, published in 2013 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.

But why does this association exist? Dutton set out to find answer, thinking that perhaps it was because nonreligious people were more rational than their religious brethren, and thus better able to reason that there was no God, he wrote.

But "more recently, I started to wonder if I'd got it wrong, actually," Dutton told Live Science. "I found evidence that intelligence is positively associated with certain kinds of bias."

For instance, a 2012 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that college students often get logical answers wrong but don't realize it. This so-called "bias blind spot" happens when people cannot detect bias, or flaws, within their own thinking. "If anything, a larger bias blind spot was associated with higher cognitive ability," the researchers of the 2012 study wrote in the abstract.

One question, for example, asked the students: "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" The problem isn't intuitive (the answer is not 10 cents), but rather requires students to suppress or evaluate the first solution that springs into their mind, the researchers wrote in the study. If they do this, they might find the right answer: The ball costs 5 cents, and the bat costs $1.05.

If intelligent people are less likely to perceive their own bias, that means they're less rational in some respects, Dutton said. So why is intelligence associated with atheism? The answer, he and his colleague suggest, is that religion is an instinct, and it takes intelligence to overcome an instinct, Dutton said. [8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life]

Basic instinct

The religion-is-an-instinct theory is a modified version of an idea developed by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who was not involved in the new study.

Called the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, Kanazawa's theory attempts to explain the differences in the behavior and attitudes between intelligent and less intelligent people, said Nathan Cofnas, who is pursuing a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom this fall. Cofnas, who specializes in the philosophy of science, was not involved with the new study.

The hypothesis is based on two assumptions, Cofnas told Live Science in an email.

"First, that we are psychologically adapted to solve recurrent problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the African savanna," Cofnas said. "Second, that 'general intelligence' (what is measured by IQ tests) evolved to help us deal with nonrecurrent problems for which we had no evolved psychological adaptations."

The assumptions imply that "intelligent people should be better than unintelligent people at dealing with 'evolutionary novelty' — situations and entities that did not exist in the ancestral environment," Cofnas said.

Dutton and Van der Linden modified this theory, suggesting that evolutionary novelty is something that opposes evolved instincts.

Philosophical take

The approach is an interesting one, but might have firmer standing if the researchers explained exactly what they mean by "religious instinct," Cofnas said.

"Dutton and Van der Linden propose that, if religion has an instinctual basis, intelligent people will be better able to overcome it and adopt atheism," Cofnas said. "But without knowing the precise nature of the 'religious instinct,' we can't rule out the possibility that atheism, or at least some forms of atheism, harness the same instinct(s)."

For instance, author Christopher Hitchens thought that communism was a religion; secular movements, such as veganism, appeal to many of the same impulses — and possibly 'instincts' — that traditional religions do, Cofnas said. Religious and nonreligious movements both rely on faith, identifying with a community of believers and zealotry, he said.

"I think it's misleading to use the term 'religion' as a slur for whatever you don't like," Cofnas said.

Religion and stress

The researchers also examined the link between instinct and stress, emphasizing that people tend to operate on instinct during stressful times, for instance, turning to religion during a near-death experience.

The researchers argue that intelligence helps people rise above these instincts during times of stress. [11 Tips to Lower Stress]

"If religion is indeed an evolved domain — an instinct — then it will become heightened at times of stress, when people are inclined to act instinctively, and there is clear evidence for this," Dutton said. "It also means that intelligence allows us to be able to pause and reason through the situation and the possible consequences of our actions."

People who are able to rise above their instincts are likely better problem-solvers, Dutton noted.

"Let's say someone had a go at you. Your instinct would be to punch them in the face," Dutton told Live Science. "A more intelligent person will be able to stop themselves from doing that, reason it through and better solve the problem, according to what they want."

The study was published May 16 in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science.

Original article on Live Science.

Ireland's state police recently concluded their investigation of comedian Stephen Fry, who stood accused of criminal blasphemy.

In an interview that aired on Irish public television, Fry had described God as "capricious, mean-minded, stupid," and "an utter maniac." And Ireland’s Defamation Act of 2009 clearly prohibits the "publication or utterance of blasphemous matter." Yet on May 8 the police closed the case, explaining they’d been "unable to find a substantial number of outraged people."

The mild resolution to this incident stands in stark contrast to recent news out of Pakistan – which has seen a spike in blasphemy-related violence – and Indonesia, where the outgoing governor of Jakarta was just sentenced to two years in prison for speaking irreverently against Islam.

The Irish case is also a timely reminder, though, that anti-blasphemy laws are hardly unique to the Muslim world. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly one-fifth of European countries and a third of countries in the Americas, notably Canada, have laws against blasphemy. 

In my research for a new literary study of blasphemy, I found that these laws may differ in many respects from their more well-known counterparts in Muslim nations, but they also share some common features with them.

In particular, they're all united in regarding blasphemy as a form of "injury" – even as they disagree about what, exactly, blasphemy injures.

The hurt of blasphemy

In dropping their investigation of Stephen Fry, for example, the Irish police noted that the original complainant does not consider himself personally offended. Therefore they've determined he is "not an injured party."

In the Muslim world, such injured parties are often a lot easier to find. Cultural anthropologist Saba Mahmood says that many devout Muslims perceive blasphemy as an almost physical injury: an intolerable offense that hurts both God himself and the whole community of the faithful. 

For Mahmood that perception was brought powerfully home in 2005, when a Danish newspaper published cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Interviewing a number of Muslims at the time, Mahmood was "struck,"” she writes, "by the sense of personal loss" they conveyed. People she interviewed were very clear on this point: 

The intensity of this "hurt," "wounding" and "ridicule" helps to explain how blasphemy can remain a capital offense in a theocratic state like Pakistan. The punishment is tailored to the enormity of the perceived crime.

That may sound like a foreign concept to secular ears. The reality, though, is that most Western blasphemy laws are rooted in a similar logic of religious offense.

As historians like Leonard Levy and David Nash have documented, these laws – dating, mostly, from the 1200s to the early 1800s – were designed to protect Christian beliefs and practices from the sort of "hurt" and "ridicule" that animates Islamic blasphemy laws today. But as the West became increasingly secular, religious injury gradually lost much of its power to provoke. By the mid-20th century, most Western blasphemy laws had become virtually dead letters.

That's certainly true of the U.S., where such laws remain "on the books" in six states but haven’t been invoked since at least the early 1970s. They’re now widely held to be nullified by the First Amendment.

Yet looking beyond the American context, one will find that blasphemy laws are hardly obsolete throughout the West. Instead, they’re acquiring new uses for the 21st century.

Religious offense in a secular world

Consider the case of a Danish man who was charged with blasphemy, in February, for burning a Quran and for posting a video of the act online.

In the past, Denmark's blasphemy law had only ever been enforced to punish anti-Christian expression. (It was last used in 1946.) Today it serves to highlight an ongoing trend: In an increasingly pluralist, multicultural West, blasphemy laws find fresh purpose in policing intolerance between religious communities.

Instead of preventing injury to God, these laws now seek to prevent injury to the social fabric of avowedly secular states.

That's true not only of the West’s centuries-old blasphemy laws but also of more recent ones. Ireland, for instance, passed a law in 2009 that prohibits the "publication or utterance of blasphemous matter." More specifically, it targets any person who "utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion."

With its emphasis on the "outrage" blasphemy may cause among "any religion," this measure seems to be aimed less at protecting the sacred than at preventing intolerance among diverse religious groups.

The law itself has caused outrage of a different sort, however. Advocacy organizations, such as Atheist Ireland, have expressed fierce opposition to the law and to the example it sets internationally. In late 2009, for instance, Pakistan borrowed the exact language of the Irish law in its own proposed statement on blasphemy to the United Nations’ Human Rights Council.

Thus, Atheist Ireland warns on its website that "Islamic States can now point to a modern pluralist Western State passing a new blasphemy law in the 21st century."

Blasphemy in modernity

That warning resonates with the common Western view of blasphemy as an antiquated concept, a medieval throwback with no relevance to "modern," "developed" societies.

As Columbia University professor Gauri Viswanathan puts it, blasphemy is often used "to separate cultures of modernity from those of premodernity." Starting from the assumption that blasphemy can exist only in a backward society, critics point to blasphemy as evidence of the backwardness of entire religious cultures.

I would argue, however, that this eurocentric view is growing increasingly difficult to sustain. If anything, blasphemy seems to be enjoying a resurgence in many corners of the supposedly secular West.

The real question now is not whether blasphemy counts as a crime. Instead it’s about who, or what – God or the state, religion or pluralism – is the injured party.

Steve Pinkerton, Lecturer in English, Case Western Reserve University

Editor's Note: This story was first published on May 3 and updated on May 10 to include information about the investigation of comedian Stephen Fry, who was accused of criminal blasphemy.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In 1998, Lee Strobel, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and a graduate of Yale Law School, published "The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus." Strobel had formerly been an atheist and was compelled by his wife's conversion to evangelical Christianity to refute the key Christian claims about Jesus.

Paramount among these was the historicity of Jesus' resurrection, but other claims included the belief in Jesus as the literal Son of God and the accuracy of the New Testament writings. Strobel, however, was unable to refute these claims to his satisfaction, and he then converted to Christianity as well. His book became one of the bestselling works of Christian apologetic (that is, a defense of the reasonableness and accuracy of Christianity) of all time.

This Friday, April 7, a motion picture adaptation of "The Case for Christ" is being released. The movie attempts to make a compelling case for historicity of Jesus' resurrection. As one character says to Strobel early in the movie, "If the resurrection of Jesus didn't happen, it's [i.e., the Christian faith] a house of cards."

As a religious studies professor specializing in the New Testament and early Christianity, I hold that Strobel's book and the movie adaptation have not proven the historicity of Jesus' resurrection for several reasons.

Are all of Strobel's arguments relevant?

The movie claims that its central focus is on the evidence for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection. Several of its arguments, however, are not directly relevant to this issue.

For instance, Strobel makes much of the fact that there are over 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in existence, far more than any other ancient writings. He does this in order to argue that we can be quite sure that the original forms of the New Testament writings have been transmitted accurately. While this number of manuscripts sounds very impressive, most of these are relatively late, in many cases from the 10th century or later. Fewer than 10 papyrus manuscripts from the second century exist, and many of these are very fragmentary.

I would certainly agree that these early manuscripts provide us with a fairly good idea of what the original form of the New Testament writings might have looked like. Yet even if these second-century copies are accurate, all we then have are first-century writings that claim Jesus was raised from the dead. That in no way proves the historicity of the resurrection.

What do the New Testament writings prove?

One key argument in the movie comes from the New Testament writing known as First Corinthians, written by the Apostle Paul to a group of Christians in Corinth to address controversies that had arisen in their community. Paul is thought to have written this letter around the year 52, about 20 years after Jesus' death. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, Paul gives a list of people to whom the risen Jesus appeared.

These witnesses to the resurrected Jesus include the Apostle Peter, James the brother of Jesus, and, most intriguingly, a group of more than 500 people at the same time. Many scholars believe that Paul here is quoting from a much earlier Christian creed, which perhaps originated only a few years after Jesus' death.

This passage helps to demonstrate that the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead originated extremely early in the history of Christianity. Indeed, many New Testament scholars would not dispute that some of Jesus' followers believed they had seen him alive only weeks or months after his death. For example, Bart Ehrman, a prominent New Testament scholar who is outspoken about his agnosticism, states:

This does not, however, in any way prove that Jesus was resurrected. It is not unusual for people to see loved ones who have died: In a study of nearly 20,000 people, 13 percent reported seeing the dead. There are a range of explanations for this phenomenon, running the gamut from the physical and emotional exhaustion caused by the death of a loved one all the way to the belief that some aspects of human personality are capable of surviving bodily death.

In other words, the sightings of the risen Jesus are not nearly as unique as Strobel would suggest.

A miracle or not?

But what of the 500 people who saw the risen Jesus at the same time?

First of all, biblical scholars have no idea what event Paul is referring to here. Some have suggested that it is a reference to the "day of Pentecost" (Acts 2:1), when the Holy Spirit gave the Christian community in Jerusalem a supernatural ability to speak in languages that were unknown to them. But one leading scholar has suggested that this event was added to the list of resurrection appearances by Paul, and that its origins are uncertain.

Second, even if Paul is reporting accurately, it is no different from large groups of people claiming to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary or a UFO. Although the precise mechanisms for such group hallucinations remain uncertain, I very much doubt that Strobel would regard all such instances as factual.

Strobel also argues that the resurrection is the best explanation for the fact that Jesus' tomb was empty on Easter morning. Some scholars would question how early the empty tomb story is. There is significant evidence that the Romans did not typically remove victims from crosses after death. Therefore, it is possible that a belief in Jesus' resurrection emerged first, and that the empty tomb story originated only when early critics of Christianity doubted the veracity of this claim.

But even if we assume that the tomb really was empty that morning, what is there to prove that it was a miracle and not that Christ's body was moved for uncertain reasons? Miracles are, by definition, extremely improbable events, and I see no reason to assume that one has taken place when other explanations are far more plausible.

Who are the experts?

Apart from all of these other weaknesses in Strobel's presentation, I believe that Strobel has made no real effort to bring in a diversity of scholarly views.

In the movie, Strobel crisscrosses the country, interviewing scholars and other professionals about the historicity of Jesus' resurrection. The movie does not explain how Strobel chose which experts to interview, but in his book he characterizes them as "leading scholars and authorities who have impeccable academic credentials."

Yet the two biblical scholars who feature in the movie, Gary Habermas and William Lane Craig, both teach at institutions (Liberty University and Biola University, respectively) that require their faculty to sign statements affirming that they believe the Bible is inspired by God and is free of any contradictions, historical inaccuracies or moral failings. For example, the Liberty University faculty application requires assent to the following statement:

The overwhelming majority of professional biblical scholars teaching in the United States and elsewhere are not required to sign such statements of faith. Many of the other scholars he interviews in his book have similar affiliations. Strobel has thus drawn from a quite narrow range of scholars that are not representative of the field as a whole. (I estimate there are somewhere around 10,000 professional biblical scholars globally.)

In an email reply to my question about whether most professional biblical scholars would find his arguments for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection to be persuasive, Strobel said,

No compelling evidence

In response to Strobel, I would say that if he had asked scholars teaching at public universities, private colleges and universities (many of which have a religious affiliation) or denominational seminaries, he would get a much different verdict on the historicity of the resurrection.

Christian apologists frequently say that the main reason that secular scholars don't affirm the historicity of the resurrection is because they have an "anti-supernatural bias," just as Strobel does in the quote above. In his characterization, secular scholars simply refuse to believe that miracles can happen, and that stance means that they will never accept the historicity of the resurrection, no matter how much evidence is provided.

Yet apologists like Gary Habermas, I argue, are just as anti-supernaturalist when it comes to miraculous claims outside of the beginnings of Christianity, such as those involving later Catholic saints or miracles from non-Christian religious traditions.

I have very little doubt that some of Jesus' followers believed that they had seen him alive after his death. Yet the world is full of such extraordinary claims, and "The Case for Christ" has provided, in my evaluation, no truly compelling evidence to prove the historicity of Jesus' resurrection.

Brent Landau, Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Texas at Austin

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The Trump administration has been using the phrase "radical Islam" when discussing the "war on terror." From his inauguration address to remarks to military leaders, President Trump has been warning against "Islamic terrorists."

Many different kinds of individuals and movements get collapsed into this category of radical Islam. A common one that is increasingly being used by politicians and journalists both in Europe and the U.S. to equate with "radical Islam" is the Salafist tradition.

For example, Michael Flynn, who recently resigned as national security advisor, was clear that what unites terrorists is their belief in the "ideology" of Salafism. Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president, also describes Salafism as a "fundamental understanding of Islam" that justifies terrorism.

France and Germany are targeting this movement, vowing to "clean up" or shut down Salafist mosques, since several arrested and suspected terrorists had spent time in these communities.

As a scholar of religion and politics, I have done research in Salafi communities, specifically in France and India, two countries where Muslims are the largest religious minorities.

Salafists constitute a minority of the Muslim population. For example, in France, estimates range from 5,000 to 20,000 – out of a Muslim population of over 4 million. Security experts estimate a worldwide number of 50 million out of 1.6 billion Muslims.

But there's not much understanding of Salafism, its history and its diversity. In fact, Muslims themselves often have different definitions of what it means to be a Salafist.

So, who are Salafists?

Origins of Salafism

The Arabic term salaf means "ancestors." It refers technically to the first three generations of Muslims who surrounded the Prophet Muhammad. Because they had direct experience with the original Islamic teachings and practices, they are generally respected across the Muslim world.

Self-identified Salafists tend to believe they are simply trying to emulate the path of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. This might include an array of practices from dress to culinary habits as well as ethical teachings and commitment to faith.

Salafism as a movement is believed to have originated in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some historians claim it started as a theological reform movement within Sunni Islam. The impetus was to return to the original teachings and practices of the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran – a consequence, in part, of social changes and Western colonialism.

They specifically cite the works of Egyptian, Persian and Syrian intellectuals from the 19th century as shaping Salafist movements. One recent study, however, argues that these intellectuals from the past never even used the term Salafism. In other words, there is no authoritative account of how or when exactly this movement originated.

Finally, it is also open to debate as to which Islamic groups, schools of thought and practices may be considered Salafist. This is because groups and individuals who are labeled Salafist do not always view themselves this way. And they disagree amongst each other over what defines authentic Salafist practice.

Here's what my research shows

The vast majority of people who loosely affiliate with Salafism, however, are either simply nonpolitical or actively reject politics as morally corrupt. From 2005-2014, I spent a total of two years as an ethnographic researcher in the cities of Lyon, in southeastern France, and in Hyderabad, in south India. I clearly observed this among these two communities.

Every week I participated in mosque lessons and Islamic study circles among dozens of Salafist women. These communities maintain strict separation between men and women, but I was able to interact with and interview a few men as well.

Based on conversations and observation, I learned that they actually avoided politics. They did not attend protests or do advocacy, and in Lyon many did not vote in elections.

It is the case that there are Muslim women, including many converts, who actively embrace Salafism. They take up strict forms of veiling and work hard to practice their religion every day.

Let's take Amal, a 22-year-old woman who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in southeastern France. I met her during my time as an ethnographic researcher on Muslim minorities in France. Amal identifies with the Salafist tradition in Islam. And if we go by the definitions being floated around, she would be considered a "radical Muslim": She prayed five times daily, fasted all 30 days of Ramadan, and wore the "jilbab," a loose, full-body garment that covers everything but the face. Steadfast in her religiosity, she also studied the Quran regularly and attended local mosques in the area.

She worked hard to live her life in accordance with the ethical teachings of Islam. This included spending part of her week tutoring Muslim girls in the neighborhood who homeschooled. Amal worried a great deal about their futures in France, since anti-veiling legislation had constrained their opportunities. She also quietly worried about the future of Islam, believing it is under siege both by governments and by the ungodly and destructive work of the Islamic State.

Religious does not mean radical

As anthropologists of religion have shown, Salafi women are not passive adherents. Nor are they forced into strict practices by their husbands. Still, this doesn't mean they're all the same.

Among the French Salafist women I knew, most were the daughters and granddaughters of immigrants from the former French North African colonies. Almost a third were converts to Islam that chose specifically the Salafist tradition as opposed to mainstream currents of Islam. They were drawn to the clear expectations, rigorous routines and teachings about trusting God.

While some of the women were raised in religious families, many broke away from their Muslim families or earned the wrath of their parents for turning to Salafism. Because the parents practiced a cultural form of Islam, or did not practice at all, they did not want their daughters to wear the jilbab. Despite this disapproval, the women focused a great deal on what it meant to have faith in God, and they emphasized that they had to continually struggle to strengthen that faith.

These struggles included various ethical behaviors including not talking too much, suppressing one's ego and respecting people's privacy. Along the way, some committed "sins," like smoking or lying, and deviated from the teachings by not praying or fasting. Some even doubted their faith, which they considered normal and acceptable.

In my research, non-Muslims as well as other Muslims claimed Salafists were judgmental of those who did not believe or practice like them. In my observation, the contrary was the case: Salafis emphasized that one's faith and piety were deeply private matters that no one but God had the right to judge.

Diverse views

However, like any movement or tradition, Salafism is profoundly diverse and encompasses a number of debates and struggles for legitimacy.

So, there are those self-identified Salafists around the world who join political organizations or participate in political debates. These include, for example, several political parties in Egypt and the Ahl-i-Hadees in India.

A small minority, estimated to be 250,000 in number by security experts, rejects nation-states and embraces political violence. They span continents but are centered in Iraq and Syria.

Different from Wahhabism

In today's climate, however, it has become a political term. This is partly because of its connection to Saudi Arabia.

Salafism is sometimes referred to as Wahhabism, the Saudi Arabian variant of the movement that is intimately tied to the Saudi regime. They share some intellectual roots and theological emphases, but they also differ, especially in how they approach Islamic jurisprudence. While Wahhabis follow one of the main Sunni orthodox schools of law, Salafis tend to think through legal questions independently. So equating the two is a mistake.

For some Salafists, labeling them as Wahhabi is a way to dismiss their faith or even insult them. Identifying with Salafism does not mean one supports the politics of the Saudi state. In my research, in both India and France, people sometimes noted concerns about the Saudi government's political corruption or human rights record.

Yet outwardly, practices might overlap. For example, many Salafist women wear the niqab (that covers the face). Saudi intellectual centers and sheikhs provide literature and training in numerous countries. They circulate lectures as well as money for building mosques and schools.

And of course, Mecca and Medina are the spiritual centers for Muslims more broadly. In this way there is a transfer of intellectual and spiritual resources from Saudi Arabia that supports Salafist communities around the globe.

Avoiding stereotypes, assumptions

Why is it important to recognize the complexity and diversity of the Salafist movement?

It is true that as one part of the global Islamic revival, it appears to be growing. And it likely will remain part of the social landscape in a number of cities for the foreseeable future.

But, it is important not to assume that people's religious faith and practices are the same as terrorist violence. It fuels fear and hatred – like the kind that inspired the recent shootings at the mosque in Quebec or the arson attack that burned down a mosque in Texas.

So, from my perspective, when we hear politicians warn us of the "global Salafi threat," or if we see a woman like Amal walking down the street in her jilbab, it's vital to remember the dangers of simplistic (and mistaken) stereotypes of "radical Muslims."

Z. Fareen Parvez, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A woman in Spain who suddenly became very religious and believed she was speaking with the Virgin Mary turned out to have a brain tumor that appears to have caused her symptoms, according to a new report of the case.

The 60-year-old women was said to be a happy, positive person who was not particularly religious. But over a two-month period, her friends and family noticed changes in her personality and behavior. She appeared sad and withdrawn, and also showed increasing interest in the Bible and other sacred writings, the report said.

The woman started spending hours during the day reciting religious writings. She also had mystical experiences, in which she reported seeing, feeling and talking with the Virgin Mary, the report said. [8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life]

Those close to her thought the woman might be experiencing depression, because she was caring for a relative with cancer at the time.

However, when her doctors performed an MRI, they saw several lesions in her brain. After taking a biopsy from one of the lesions, doctors diagnosed the woman with glioblastoma multiforme, a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer.

The tumors were too large to treat with surgery, so the woman received chemotherapy and radiation for the cancer. Her doctors also prescribed antipsychotic drugs for her, because some studies have suggested this class of drugs may have an anti-cancer effect on glioblastoma.

During the woman's five-week treatment, her religious visions gradually disappeared, the report said.

In this patient's case, "it is clear that the religious experience represented a fracture" from her prior behavior that was "not preceded by a gradual change in her thinking and acting," the researchers, from the Hospital General Universitario Morales Meseguer in Murcia, Spain, wrote in their paper, published online Dec. 12, 2016, in the journal Neurocase. "Nor was there any kind of trigger or reason [for the behavior change] except for the disease, and hence, it can be considered a clearly pathological experience," they said.

It's not clear how often people experience "hyper-religiosity" or other behavior changes as their first symptom of a brain tumor, the researchers said. One review found that up to 22 percent of all brain tumors may first appear along with psychotic symptoms.

From this one case, it's not possible to pinpoint the part of the brain responsible for the women's religious experience, the researchers said. But, they note that the right temporal lobe, a brain region that has previously been linked to the development of mystical experiences, also appeared to be involved in the woman's case.

The researchers also said that, before the woman's extreme religious behavior, she did believe in God, so this "was not a case of religious conversion."

The woman's condition quickly declined — she experienced a stroke two months after she started treatment, the report said. Eight months after her cancer diagnosis, she died due to the progression of her tumor.

The researchers also suspect that, before her cancer diagnosis, the patient may have experienced non-convulsive seizures, possibly as a result of her brain tumor. They suspected this because of particular changes they saw in her brain scan. Some cases of hyper-religious behavior have also been reported in people with epilepsy, according to the report. However, the researchers were unable to perform tests to confirm the epilepsy diagnosis.

Original article on Live Science.

The U.S. has a science problem. Around half of the country's citizens reject the facts of evolution; fewer than a third agree there is a scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, and the number who accept the importance of vaccines is ticking downward.

Those numbers, all gleaned from recent Pew and Gallup research polls, might suggest that Americans are an anti-science bunch. But yet, Americans love science. Even as many in the U.S. reject certain scientific conclusions, National Science Foundation surveys have found that public support of science is high, with more than 75 percent of Americans saying they are in favor of taxpayer-funded basic research. 

"The whole discussion around scientific denial has become very, very simplified," said Troy Campbell, a psychologist at the University of Oregon. [6 Politicians Who Got the Science Wrong]

Campbell and other psychologists are presenting findings from polls and other research that they say reveal Americans' complex relationship with science. The presentations are occurring today (Jan. 21) at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) in San Antonio.

Science denial — whether it comes in the form of dismissing fact-based evidence as being untrue or in accepting notions that are not factual as being true — is not typically rooted in blanket anti-science attitudes, the research showed. But the facts aren't always paramount, either. Often, people's denial of scientific evidence is based on motivations other than finding truth, such as protecting their social identity, the research said.

Why deny?

One key thing to understand about people who engage in science denial is that very few people deny science as a whole, according to research by Yale University psychologist Dan Kahan, also presenting at SPSP on Saturday. For example, the more liberal a person is, the more likely he or she is to agree that humans are causing global warming; a conservative is far more likely to blame natural climate variation or say scientists are making the whole thing up. [Wishful Thinking: 6 'Magic Bullet' Cures That Don't Exist]

But that same conservative may be just fine with the evidence for the efficacy of vaccines, and there is virtually no partisan split on issues like the safety of nanotechnology, the use of artificial sweeteners in drinks or the health impacts of living near high-voltage power lines, Kahan wrote in a book chapter soon to be published in the "Oxford Handbook on the Science of Science Communication." 

Kahan's research has also shown that the more science-literate people are, the more strongly they hold to their beliefs — even if those beliefs are totally wrong.  

In other words, it's not about hating science or misunderstanding the facts. It's about motivation.

"Beliefs are difficult to budge, because people don't act like scientists, weighing up evidence in an even-handed way," Matthew Hornsey, a psychologist at the University of Queensland, wrote in an email to Live Science. "When someone wants to believe something, then they act more like lawyers trying to prosecute what they already want to be true. And they cherry-pick the evidence to be able to do that."

The real question, Hornsey said, is why people want to believe something that flies in the face of scientific evidence. In some cases, the reason can be political: Solving the problems created by climate change would mean standing in the way of the free market, something conservatives tend to oppose.

In other cases, people might have some other vested interest in their beliefs, Hornsey said. A smoker may not want to believe her or his habit is really going to cause lung cancer, because that would mean the person would have to quit. Social identity can also be an important driver of beliefs, Hornsey said. Studies of teens in Midwestern towns have found that these individuals typically go along with the crowd, he said, believing in evolution if the majority of their friends do and believing in creationism if that's what the people around them believe.

"For someone living in a 'creationist community,' to express belief in evolution might be seen as a distancing act, as a signal that one was defiantly assuming an outsider status," Hornsey said.

Changing minds

When someone's self-image or social acceptance is at stake, badgering them with facts isn't likely to change their minds, research has shown.

In fact, a 2010 studyfound that when people were shown incorrect information alongside a correction, the update failed to reverse their initial belief in the misinformation. Even worse, partisans who were motivated to believe the original incorrect information became even more firm in their belief in that information after reading a correction, the researchers found. For example, conservatives who were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war believed that claim more firmly after reading a correction.

So researchers are suggesting more-subtle ways to change people's attitudes toward accepting scientific facts. Hornsey said he and his colleagues call this "psychological jiujitsu," in reference to the martial art that teaches people to use their opponent's own weight against them. [Best Supporting Role: 8 Celebs Who Promote Science]

In this approach, people who accept scientific facts might try to get at the root of the disbeliefs held by those who don't, and then address that basis, rather than addressing the surface denial. Campbell and his colleagues have found, for example, that if free-market solutions to climate change are presented as an option, self-identified Republicans become less likely to deny climate science.

Using this jiujitsu approach is challenging, Hornsey and his colleagues wrote in an article soon to be published in the journal American Psychologist, because people's underlying motivations are not always clear. Sometimes, the people themselves may not know why they think the way they do. And no single message will fit all possible reasons for disbelief, the researchers warned. [Evolution vs. Creationism: 6 Big Battles]

"A two-tiered strategy would be optimal: messages about evidence and scientific consensus that should be sufficient for the majority, and a jiujitsu approach for the unconvinced minority," the authors wrote.

There's another trap to watch out for, though, Campbell warned: smugness. If a message from a science-accepting person comes across to a denier as being holier-than-thou, or as judgmental of a person's whole character, it's likely to backfire, he said.

"I like to say, 'Tell people they already are the people you want them to be,'" Campbell said. For example, "don't go to somebody and say, 'You don't care about the environment enough.' Point out all the ways they do care about the environment."

From there, Campbell said, there is common ground to work from. Successful persuasion, he said, finds common values without triggering people's self-protective instincts.

"The general thing I think is important to say is 'I like and care about you,'" Campbell said. Once respect is established, he said, "any criticism is very much tapered, and is not a holistic admonishment of who you are."

Original article on Live Science. 

On Friday (Jan. 20), Donald Trump will place his hand on the Bible and swear an oath to serve the United States as its 45th president and preserve the U.S. Constitution to the best of his abilities.

Before his oath, there will be an invocation and prayer reading by His Eminence Timothy Michael Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York; Rev. Dr. Samuel Rodriguez, of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference; and Pastor Paula White, of New Destiny Christian Center, according to an official schedule of events. The benediction and more readings will follow.

Prayers and reverends and bibles? The religious overtones don't end there.

Most presidents end the Oath of Office with, "so help me God," a tradition that many say was started by George Washington, according to Constitution Daily. Even so, neither the phrase "so help me God" nor the use of a Bible is officially required in the presidential oath. Nor is the separation of church and state explicitly spelled out in the Constitution. [The Weirdest Inaugurations in US History]

So how did the inauguration become so entrenched with "God?"

Washington did place his hand on a Bible during his swearing in, though apparently the specific choice of Bible was not surrounded by so much formality and hype. It was, historians say, an afterthought, the Washington Post reported. Trump will be sworn in using two Bibles: one embossed with his name that his mother gave him in 1955 when he graduated elementary school at First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, New York; the other was the Bible used by Abraham Lincoln.

The Lincoln Bible "is bound in burgundy velvet with a gold-washed white metal rim along the edges of the covers," according to an official statement. The Bible, used during three other inaugurations — 1861, 2009 and 2013 — is part of the Library of Congress collections.

What about the "separation of church and state?" Didn't the First Amendment ensure a dividing wall between the two? (Not really, historians say, though its words have been misinterpreted since the beginning.)

First Amendment was tool to help pass Constitution

When the Founding Fathers sat down in Philadelphia to draft the U.S. Constitution in 1787, they were preoccupied with establishing the machinery for an effective new government and included very few guarantees of individual rights.

Though some members of the Constitutional Convention brought up the benefit of including some kind of bill of rights, those recommendations were rejected, probably because delegates feared more sticky debate over the already controversial document, historians say.

It wasn't long before those safeguards became important, with some states refusing to ratify the Constitution without the addition of protections for individual rights. Thomas Jefferson called the original omission of a bill of rights a major mistake, according to a letter he wrote to James Madison, pushing the future president to draft the amendments.

The promise of the future inclusion of the Bill of Rights eventually appeased the dissenters and helped get the Constitution ratified by the required number of states in 1789.

Officially added in 1791 along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, the religious portion of the First Amendment to the Constitution became known as the Establishment Clause:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Jefferson separated church and state

Besides its usefulness in getting the Constitution passed, the original intent of the First Amendment was to ensure that residents of the new United States enjoyed a tolerant society, not necessarily one completely free of religion. [10 Historically Significant Political Protests]

Fresh in the minds of many of the early immigrants to America was persecution at the hands of the governments in their home countries. The First Amendment prohibited the U.S. government from mingling in the religious business or forcing worship on any of its subjects, but did not make an outright proclamation that the affairs of the state should be totally void of any religious connotations.

The famous "separation of church and state" utterance is attributed to Thomas Jefferson, who, though an intensely spiritual man himself, wrote in an 1802 letter to leaders of a minority faith in Connecticut:

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,'" he wrote, "thus building a wall of eternal separation between Church and State."

Plastic reindeers deemed constitutional

Church and state are decidedly un-separate today, argue several groups of people, including those who protested Obama's inauguration plans in 2009.

Examples often cited include:

The Pledge of Allegiance: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation under God, indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for all."

"In God We Trust": This phrase is found on all U.S. paper bills and coins. It became the official national motto in 1956 — at the height of anti-atheism and anti-Communist sentiment — and the state motto of Florida in 2006.

The employment of Chaplains in Congress and the military.

Court cases challenging the Establishment Clause are frequent. Many debate the practice of school-sponsored prayer, or the presence of religious displays in public places during the holidays.

In two such cases in the 1980s, one Christmas crèche display was deemed constitutional because it also included secular figures such as a plastic reindeer and thus was considered a general celebration of the season, while the other reindeer-free display was declared in violation of the Establishment Clause.

Original article on Live Science.

Editor's Note: This article was first published in 2009 and updated with new information by Jeanna Bryner in 2017.

Engravings of a cross and a menorah carved thousands of years ago were recently found in a cave in Israel, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). Though the two figures were etched close together on a cistern wall, they were likely created hundreds of years apart, the archaeologists said.

Hikers unexpectedly came upon the ancient carvings while exploring subterranean passages in southern Israel. Archaeologists with the IAA dated the menorah carving to the second century A.D. and the cross to the fourth century A.D. The menorah, which has seven arms and three legs, represents the traditional candelabra that stood in the Second Temple in Jerusalem, IAA experts said in a statement. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]

The discovery of two side-by-side symbols associated with Judaism and Christianity, respectively, coincides with a rare overlap of the Hanukkah and Christmas holidays in 2016, with the first night of Hanukkah falling on Christmas Eve. Such an alignment has happened only four times since 1900 — in 1902, 1940, 1978 and 2016, Vox.com reported. 

Other carvings on the walls, including one that resembles a key, are yet to be identified. But some of the underground caves at this lowlands site, known as the Judean Shephelah, have long been recognized as hideouts for renegade Jews during the uprising led by Simon bar Kokhba against the Roman invaders around 2,000 years ago, said Sa'ar Ganor, the district archaeologist of Ashkelon for the IAA.

"The menorah was probably etched in the cistern after the water installation was hewn in the bedrock, maybe by inhabitants of the Jewish settlement that was situated there during the Second Temple period and the time of Bar Kokhba," Ganor said in the statement.

"The cross was etched later on, during the Byzantine period," he added.

Modern menorahs typically have nine arms, eight representing the eight nights of Hanukkah, and one extra to hold the candle that lights all the others. The seven-armed design is associated with menorahs used in the First and Second Temples, and predates the Hanukkah holiday, which emerged after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in A.D. 70.

The seven-armed menorah was an important symbol for Jews in the ancient world; it may even have been used to identify kosher bread about 1,500 years ago, IAA archaeologists announced in 2012. Excavations in Akko, a city in Israel, uncovered a ceramic stamp carved in the shape of a seven-branched menorah, which was likely used by a baker during the Byzantine period to mark baked goods for Jewish customers. 

Menorah symbols have also been found in ancient Hebrew scrolls, stamped on a jar handle and in graffiti carved into stone in an ancient Turkish city.

But wall engravings of menorahs are less common, making this new find important for unraveling the puzzle of life in the Judean Shephelah caves thousands of years ago, Ganor explained.

"It is rare to find a wall engraving of a menorah," Ganor said. "This exciting discovery, which was symbolically revealed during the Hanukkah holiday, substantiates the scientific research regarding the Jewish nature of the settlement during the Second Temple period." 

Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

It is that time of year again: People are dusting off their holiday decorations in order to make their homes and public spaces festive. It is also the time when certain stories and songs are being repeated.

Television holiday shows such as "A Charlie Brown Christmas" are almost iconic, with audiences watching them year after year. And the same is true of holiday songs such as "Jingle Bells," or "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," that are played at almost all stores.

Children too are retold the same classic stories like "The Night Before Christmas," Dr. Seuss' "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."

For many of us, these stories and songs have come to define the spirit of the holidays. But, as the cultural diversity in the U.S. increases, scholars are exploring how to discuss with children issues of importance, like race and religion, through stories.

The single story

In 2009, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie gave a talk on the danger of a "single story." She stated that telling a single story – defining a race, religion, culture, etc. based on a single experience or characteristic – contributes to stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes, she said, was that they made the "one story become the only story."

Adichie recalled that when she came to the U.S. to study, her roommate remarked that Adichie spoke very good English, and asked if she would play some "tribal music." Adichie said that the official language of Nigeria was English, and her favorite music was that of American singer Mariah Carey.

The problem was Adichie's roommate had a "single story of Africa" – one in which she understood Adichie as coming from a place of "catastrophe." As Adichie said, her roommate could not imagine she shared any similarities with Adichie, and there was "no possibility of a connection as human equals."

Risks of single narratives

Adichie's story is not uncommon. I study children's literature. In my own study of children's picture books, I found that certain stereotypes of race and culture were repeated over and over again, creating a single story.

For example, Jewish characters were often portrayed as coming from poor families, their lives filled with tension and chaos, or full of fear of supernatural forces.

Stories of African families featured characters who were poor, half-naked, and living primitive lifestyles. African-Americans were typically represented in context of their slave past. Asian characters were shown dressed in kimonos and sashes, often learning specific moral lessons from elders.

The same was true when depicting Muslims. Scholar Heidi Torres, for example, found in a study of 56 picture books that Muslims were depicted as living in primarily Muslim, rather than diverse, communities.

When children read these stories, they tend to develop single narratives, whether related to race or religion.

Torres, for example, suggests that children risk developing a negative story about Islam and Muslims rather than understand the multiple ways in which Muslims live across the world.

Illustrator Molly Bang voices similar sentiments when she says that children by the age of five develop a particular way of seeing the world after reading such narratives. Noted art historian Ernst Gombrich explains how such views of the world leave a deep impression on children’s minds through "memory images" – familiar and recognizable images that define for children how they understand a race, religion or culture.

Using stories for critical conversations

Stories help children make sense of their own and others' experiences.

For example, in their study of young children's retelling of stories, early childhood literacy scholars Judith Lysakar and Tiffany Sedberry found that children paid attention to the many moral details regarding race: In "The Other Side," a segregation story involving two characters – Clover, an African-American girl, and Annie, a white girl – children wanted to know why a fence always separated the two.

The same researchers found that once children connected with the story, they could actually put themselves in the situation of the main character. After listening to "One Green Apple," the story of a young Muslim immigrant girl, who after arriving in the U.S. found that she could not make friends as she did not know English, children used their own knowledge and beliefs to make sense of the story.

In this case, they understood the immigrant girl's story not as that of a Muslim immigrant, but a refugee, as a result of war and violence. They also used their own experiences to retell what it would mean to learn a new language.

Research shows this deep emotional engagement with stories can be used for conversations around race and religion.

In their study of children's talk around issues of race, researchers Lee Heffernan and Mitzi Lewison engaged children in conversation on citizenship after reading "Whitewash," a true story of a young African-American girl who is attacked on her way home from school by a gang who spray-paints her face white.

Children in this third grade class connected this hate crime to crimes in their own community that were racist and anti-Semitic. They wrote a petition to stop all hate speech in their own school and posted it in the front hallway of the school.

Retelling the same old stories

So, what can parents do so children can grow up with multiple perspectives around race and religion?

Researchers who have studied the role of multiculturalism suggest the importance of reading different versions of traditional stories, so as to move away from the single story. Researchers Jeane Copenhaver-Johnson, Joy Bowman and Andrea Johnson, for example, studied the Santa story through an African-American perspective.

These researchers used Melodye Rosale's "'Twas the Night B'Fore Christmas: An African American Version," a retelling of the familiar "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" poem.

Initially, children were surprised to know that Santa was black. Some even asked if he was the "real Santa's helper," a pejorative perspective. Until this book, children had known only a single story – that Santa must be white. This discussion of Santa and race led children to research and write about other texts that left out African-Americans.

Similarly, researchers Stephanie Flores-Koulish and Wendy Marie Smith-D’Arezzo found that alternative versions of well-known traditional stories helped children challenge stereotypes.

For example, in David Wiesner's version of "Three Little Pigs," the wolf tells his side of the story. It gets children to think of the pigs as a juicy hamburger and sympathize with the wolf. In the traditional story, the wolf is the villain.

From reading such alternative versions of traditional stories, children develop alternate points of views and learn to challenge stereotypes. So why not tell Santa and holiday stories from around the world this year?

Peggy Albers, Professor of Language and Literacy Education, Georgia State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

People who have had "a religious experience" often report feelings of joy, peace and warmth, and new research has found that during these experiences, certain reward centers in the brain are activated.

The study found that, among devoutly religious people, spiritual feelings activate the same areas of the brain as other rewarding and pleasurable experiences, like love, sex and drugs.

"We're just beginning to understand how the brain participates in experiences that believers interpret as spiritual, divine or transcendent," study co-author Dr. Jeff Anderson, a neuroradiologist at the University of Utah School of Medicine, said in a statement. "In the last few years, brain imaging technologies have matured in ways that are letting us approach questions that have been around for millennia."

In the study, the researchers analyzed the brains of 19 devout Mormons in their 20s and 30s who had completed 1.5 to two years of missionary service for the Mormon Church. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

The participants spent an hour in a brain scanner, and were shown quotes and videos meant to evoke spiritual feelings. For example, participants were shown passages from the Book of Mormon as well as videos produced by the Mormon Church. They were also asked to pray in the scanner for 6 minutes. At several points during the session, participants were asked, "Are you feeling the spirit?" (This is a phrase used in the Mormon Church to refer to feelings of religious joy.) The responses ranged from "not feeling" to "very strongly feeling."

The results showed that "feeling the spirit" was linked with activation of the nucleus accumbens, a brain region involved in processing feelings of reward. This activation peaked about 1 to 3 seconds before participants said they were experiencing peak spiritual feelings (which they indicated with the press of a button).

Spiritual feelings were also linked with activation of a region called the medial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to be involved in judgment and moral reasoning, as well as activation of brain regions linked with increased attention and alertness.

The researchers noted that more studies, including those that look at people from different religions and cultures, are needed in order to identify other brain regions linked with religious experiences.

Original article on Live Science.

Camera technology designed for astrophysics research is helping a network of mosques in the United Kingdom schedule dawn prayers — known as fajr — that can be observed at the same times across communities.

Fajr is traditionally practiced at daybreak, but different calculations of when the sun rises can lead to prayer times that vary greatly — as much as 45 minutes, even between mosques that are close together, reported the Times.

The so-called OpenFajr project, launched by Dr. Shahid Merali, a general practitioner with a practice in Birmingham, sought to standardize fajr from mosque to mosque with the help of technology used by astronomers for gathering data about the skies. [8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life]

Merali used a light-sensitive camera capable of imaging the horizon in 360 degrees, He installed it on a rooftop, where it captured 25,000 photos of the early morning sky over the course of one year. The images were then analyzed by academics, researchers and religious scholars to construct a timetable that synchronized fajr for 150,000 Muslims served by 170 mosques in the Birmingham area.

The OpenFajr results were documented in a paper published online in May. Similar efforts are now planned in London and Peterborough, and eventually across the country, according to the Times.

Original article on Live Science.

Just in time for All Souls Day on Nov. 2, the Catholic Church has published instructions for the cremation of the "faithfully departed."

The guidelines, released today (Oct. 25), state that a person's ashes must be kept in a sacred place, not in a home or other domestic residence, and should not be scattered or divvied up in any way.

The guidelines are not meant to suggest that the Catholic Church now prefers cremation over burial of the body, as that isn't the case. In fact, they stem from earlier burial instructions published in 1963, when the Holy Office established "Piam et Constantem," which established that Catholics should be buried with reverence and that cremation wasn't "opposed per se to the Christian religion." As such, those who were cremated could still receive the sacraments and funeral rites as long as their decision to be cremated was not an indication of their "denial of Christian dogmas, the animosity of a secret society, or hatred of the Catholic religion and the Church," the "Piam et Constantem" read, according to a statement by the Vatican.

Even so, according to the Vatican, cremation practices contrary to the Christian faith have popped up. As a result, the new guidelines are meant to emphasize that the Catholic Church's preference is for the remains of Christians to be buried and, to state instructions for conserving the ashes when cremation is chosen. [After Death: 8 Burial Alternatives That Are Going Mainstream] 

According to Catholic teachings, to honor the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, burial in a cemetery or other sacred place is "above all the most fitting way to express faith and hope in the resurrection of the body," the Vatican statement reads. Burial in a sacred place also allows family and other loved ones to pray for and remember the dead, according to the statement.

Catholics believe that the soul is immortal and does not depend on the physical body. Since cremation of the deceased's remains do not affect his or her soul, according to the Church, there are no doctrinal objections to the practice. (As a side note, even some distinguished scholars are pondering the existence of a soul, and what that soul might look like.)

As for why the ashes shouldn't be scattered, in the eyes of the Church, such an action could suggest the belief in another form of a god. "In order that every appearance of pantheism, naturalism or nihilism be avoided, it is not permitted to scatter the ashes of the faithful departed in the air, on land, at sea or in some other way, nor may they be preserved in mementos, pieces of jewelry or other objects," the statement reads.

If these guidelines aren't followed, the Church will deny funeral rites, according to the statement. "When the deceased notoriously has requested cremation and the scattering of their ashes for reasons contrary to the Christian faith, a Christian funeral must be denied to that person according to the norms of the law," the statement reads.

It's been more than 40 years since a human stepped on another world, and the usual motivators — national pride, scientific discovery and even profit — may not be enough. Instead, people may turn to religion, according to some experts.

At the annual Mars Society convention in Washington, D.C. last week, in a panel called "Cosmos in Cosmoi — Worldview & Visions for the Future of Humanity as a Multi-Planetary Species," four experts discussed the reasons human beings have explored outer space, including religious and social motivators. The panel was moderated by Nicole Willett, education director of the Mars Society.

The group noted that popular notions of the religion-science divide don't often hold up to scrutiny, and that the urge to go to remote places can be rooted in a fundamentally religious impulse. [Should Humanity Take Religion on Interstellar Space Voyage?]

"Religion has received a sometimes justified, sometimes not justified, rap as being opposed to science and knowledge," said Paul Levinson, a science fiction writer and professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University, during the Sept. 23 panel. "We should take this idea of interrelationship of space travel and religion a little further."

Levinson noted that human spaceflight to other worlds basically stopped in the 1970s, and that the motivations were clearly not powerful enough. "Since we got to the moon and we'd already beaten the Soviets that motive was gone," he said. Science proved insufficient as well. "Science continues to be motivating factor, but it's a weak motivation," he said. "NASA has tried, and it hasn't ignited any real passion."

Profit hasn't proven very helpful, either. "Everybody wants to make a buck," Levinson said. "SpaceX has had some mixed success, and Richard Branson has put some money into it, but I don't see a fleet of spaceships going out beyond the solar system."

That led him to think that some religious motive, based on wonder, might be the way to go. "There's a motivation every sentient being has. Every person and, for all I know, dolphins, has wonder… We ask what is the meaning of our place in the universe. Science doesn't even scratch the deepest parts of that question."

Lance Strate, also a professor of communications at Fordham, said the whole enterprise of space travel was always about more than just the science, or even beating the USSR. "Moses Maimonides came up with idea of planets as intermediary between angels and humans," he said. "All of this suggests we are trying to look for something beyond ourselves."

"The space program is channeling all these resources and labor to send people to our conception of heaven," he added. "Think about the question of what is the reason for doing this."

Beyond motivation, religions are not automatically challenged by space travel, Levinson said. He noted that evangelicals are more likely to believe that aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico. Also, many of the questions that govern ritual and practice would take a different meaning in space. "Where is Mecca if you're on Mars?" he said.

Michael Waltemathe, a theologian at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany, added that space's challenges to religious observance have already been hashed out. "There was a fatwa put out by Malay Muslim authorities on how to do rituals on the International Space Station — all this has been thought through," he said. (The fatwa says that one can use a "home" time zone to time the prayers, and simply face in any direction.)

Rev. James Heiser, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Diocese of North America, noted that Johannes Kepler's speculation on the nature of life on other planets wasn't a direct challenge to his faith.

Asked by Willett about the psychological aspects of long space journeys, Waltemathe added that the religious tradition of setting up monastic communities in remote areas could tie into space travel as well. "The theological idea was that these people were on their own to get a greater connection to transcendence," he said.

Levinson said some forms of religious observance may become less important, because when traveling in space all the celestial markers — moonrise, sunrise, sunset or what phase the moon is in, no longer exist. That could actually have a strengthening effect on religion, he said. "They will see these rituals are not that necessary and religion can then get down to exploring the basis of what religion is — which is what are we doing in this universe." 

You can follow Space.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+. Original article on Space.com.

The percentage of Americans who say they currently smoke marijuana has nearly doubled since 2013, a new survey finds.

Thirteen percent of adults in the U.S. now say they currently smoke pot — up from 7 percent in 2013, according to the new Gallup poll.

The percentage of Americans who said they had ever tried marijuana also increased since 2013. This year, 43 percent of Americans said they had tried the drug — up from 38 percent in 2013, according to the poll. [Where Americans Smoke and Grow Marijuana (Maps)]

Recreational marijuana use is legal in four states (Colorado, Washington, Alaska and Oregon) and the District of Columbia. In addition, half of U.S. states have some version of a medical marijuana law, according to Gallup. In November, four more states will vote on whether to allow medical marijuana.

People's age and religiousness played key roles in whether they had ever tried marijuana, the Gallup researchers found. Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. adults under age 30 said they currently use marijuana, according to the poll. In each of the older age groups the researchers looked at, no more than 1 in 10 people said they currently use marijuana.

However, more adults ages 30 to 49 and 50 to 64 said they had ever tried marijuana than adults ages 18 to 29. Nearly half of the adults ages 30 to 64 had tried the drug at least once in their life, whereas only 38 percent of people ages 18 to 29 reported having tried marijuana, the researchers found. The older groups may have been more likely to have tried the drug simply because they've had more years to do so, or because attitudes toward marijuana have changed over time, the researchers wrote.

Americans who said they attend church weekly were much less likely to smoke marijuana than those who said they rarely or never attend church: Only 2 percent of weekly churchgoers said they currently smoke marijuana, compared with 14 percent of those who said they do not go to church, according to the poll.

Adults in the western U.S. were more likely to report that they currently smoke marijuana compared with adults in the eastern, Midwest and southern U.S., according to the poll. (A survey from July found that marijuana use was particularly high in San Francisco and Denver compared with the rest of the country.)

The results are based on telephone interviews with more than 1,000 adults in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The interviews were conducted July 13-17, 2016.

Originally published on Live Science.

More than 3,000 years ago, an ancient Egyptian woman tattooed her body with dozens of symbols — including lotus blossoms, cows and divine eyes — that may have been linked to her religious status or her ritual practice.

Preserved in amazing detail on her mummified torso, the surviving images represent the only known examples of tattoos found on Egyptian mummies showing recognizable pictures, rather than abstract designs.

The mummy was found at a site on the west bank of the Nile River known as Deir el-Medina, a village dating to between 1550 B.C. and 1080 B.C. that housed artisans and workers who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. [In Photos: Egypt's Oldest Mummy Wrappings]

Stanford University bioarchaeologist Anne Austin was examining human remains at Deir el-Medina for the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology when she first glimpsed unusual markings on a mummy's neck.

Austin initially thought the markings on the neck had been painted there, she told Live Science in an email. According to Austin, it was a common practice in Egypt at that time to place amulets around the neck before a burial. She suggested that amulets could have been drawn on the skin for the burial as well, which could have been the case for this torso.

But further investigation of the mummy revealed that these ancient illustrations — and others on the body — were unusual, hinting that they might be a more permanent skin adornment than a painted design, she said.

"As we started to analyze the markings on the arms, we realized that these markings were shrunken and distorted," Austin said. "Therefore, they must have been made prior to mummification."

Together with archaeologist Cédric Gobeil, director of the French Archaeological Mission of Deir el-Medina, Austin cataloged dozens of tattoos, many of which have yet to be identified. But a number of them were recognizable and had religious significance.

"Several are associated with the goddess Hathor, such as cows with special necklaces," Austin told Live Science. "Others — such as snakes placed on the upper arms — are also associated with female deities in ancient Egypt."

The mummy's neck, back and shoulders were decorated with images of Wadjet eyes — divine eyes associated with protection.

The Wadjet eyes on the neck may have carried yet another layer of meaning: Additional images known as nefer symbols, "the sign of beauty or goodness," appeared between them, Austin said.

"At the nearby site of Deir el-Bahri, the combination of the Wadjet and nefer have been interpreted as a formula for the phrase 'to do good,'" Austin said.

Austin explained that the symbols' position on the woman's throat — directly over her voice box — may have signaled that whenever the woman spoke or sang, she invoked a ritual power to do good.

These figural tattooed images — the first of their kind found on an Egyptian mummy — provide important clues about the significance and symbolic nature of tattooing within ancient Egyptian culture, Austin said.

"Interestingly, all of the tattoos found so far have been exclusively on women, though we are curious to see if that trend continues as more tattoos are identified," she added.

Follow Mindy Weisberger on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

A Belgium-based Egyptologist has discovered the oldest depictions of ancient Egyptian demons, showing that demonic entities populated the ancient Egyptians' imaginations as far back as 4,000 years ago.

Presented recently at the International Conference on Ancient Egyptian Demonology at Swansea University, U.K., these demons gripped their victims and cut off their heads.

Wael Sherbiny, an independent scholar who specializes in the ancient Egyptian religious texts, found two demons on two Middle Kingdom coffins about 4,000 years old.

The third was portrayed in a 4,000-year-old leather roll the researcher had previously discovered in the shelves of the Egyptian museum in Cairo, where it was stored and forgotten for more than 70 years. It was the oldest and longest Egyptian leather manuscript.

Oldest, Longest Ancient Egyptian Leather Manuscript Found

"These three demons are already familiar to scholars from ancient texts. However, the depiction of two of them was unknown until now," Sherbiny told Discovery News.

"The drawings show them in either a purely zoomorphic or anthropomorphic representation," he added.

Two demons, called In-tep, pictured as a dog-like baboon, and Chery-benut, depicted as unspecified figure with human head, appear as guardians at the entrance of a complex building, possibly a kind of temple, that contains several chambers guarded by other demonic entities.

"The texts link this building to the moon god Thoth and the bark of the sun god," Sherbiny said.

'Demon Traps' Found in 17th-Century English House

He noted that apart from their names, no accompanying textual elements refer to the tasks of these two demons.

"The name of the first demon, In-tep, may denote his dangerous role in severing heads as a punishment to any intruder of the sacred space," Sherbiny said.

The third demon, Ikenty, was the guardian of a fiery gate that led to a restricted area concealing a divine image. The demon's appearance was already known as it was portrayed on a Middle Kingdom coffin (1870-1830 BC) in the form of a large bird with a black feline head.

Anti-Demonic Burial Found in Poland

Sherbiny discovered the same demon in a slightly different, but highly intriguing form in the much older Cairo leather roll, basically finding the oldest image of Ikenty.

"The texts indicate that this demon has a swift attack with inescapably powerful grip on whomever he sees," Sherbiny said.

The ancient Egyptian world of belief was inhabited by a huge number of entities with super powers. They could play both malevolent or benevolent roles, as threats, maladies and dangers, or as protectors, helpers and defenders.

"They turn up in variety of contexts that touch upon different spheres of human life and after life," Sherbiny said.

Mystery of Mummified Lung Solved

In-tep, Chery-benut and Ikenty revealed that the elaborate and polychrome drawings of entities from the New Kingdom (about 3,500 years ago) onwards have much older roots than previously thought.

Sherbiny will publish the images of the demons in a forthcoming, extensive study which includes an integral analysis of the contexts in which the demons appear.

"Unfortunately little has survived, and the examples I discovered represent a rare opportunity to witness how the ancient Egyptians imagined the invisible," Sherbiny said.

Originally published on Discovery News.

Despite the fact that most historical figures are male — such as Jesus, Muhammad and the Buddha — and that most conservative religious institutions rely on male leaders, including priests and Orthodox rabbis, new data shows that women today tend to be more religious than men.

The new survey results represent six faith groups (Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and the religiously unaffiliated) from 84 different countries, according to the Pew Research Center, which collected the data from 2008 to 2015.

After sifting through the responses, Pew found that, in general, women are more devout than men on several measures of religious commitment. But among some groups, such as Orthodox Jews and Muslims, men tend to go to religious centers more than women do, likely because they are encouraged to take part in certain services, the report found. [8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life]

Pew asked several questions to get a better idea of how religious people were. For instance, when asked whether they affiliate with a religion, more women than men said they identified with a faith group (83.4 percent versus 79.9 percent).

"This gap of 3.5 percentage points means that an estimated 97 million more women than men claim a religious affiliation worldwide, as of 2010," Pew said in a statement.

Moreover, women tend to pray more often than men do in about half, or 43, of the countries surveyed. Only Israel, in which about 22 percent of all Jewish adults identify as Orthodox, do men report praying more times per day than women. In the remaining countries, men and women reported praying an equal amount, Pew found.

Still, daily prayer had the largest gender gap (8 percent) of all of the survey questions. Even women who said they were religiously unaffiliated, including women in the United States and Uruguay, indicated that they prayed more times per day than unaffiliated men did.

When asked how important religion was in their daily lives, women in 36 of the 84 countries rated it higher than their male counterparts did. But in 46 of the countries, men and women were equally likely to say that religion was "very important" to them. Only Israel and Mozambique had results showing that men were more likely to consider religion more important than women did.

However, nearly equal percentages of men and women reported belief in heaven, hell and angels, Pew found. But that wasn't universally the case: Women were more likely to believe in angels in 14 of the 63 countries that were asked this question. And men were more likely than women to believe in heaven and hell in Lebanon and in angels in Pakistan.

Muslims and Christians

Muslim men and women reported being about equally religious, but that wasn't the case with Christians.

Among Muslims, women reported praying more than men by only 2 percentage points in 40 of the countries surveyed. Moreover, Muslim men attended religious services, on average, 28 percent more often than women, likely because of social norms, Pew said. But on most other points, Muslim men and women reported similar levels of devoutness behaviors. [Evolution vs. Creationism: 6 Big Battles]

In contrast, Christian women reported being far more religious than Christian men did. In 54 countries, Christian women reported praying more by a gap of about 10 percentage points compared with men.  Christian women were also more likely to say that religion was "very important" to them, giving them a 7-percentage-point lead over men in this category.

In addition, Christian women were about 7 percentage points more likely than Christian men to attend weekly religious services in 53 of the countries surveyed, Pew found.

It's not entirely clear why these gender disparities exist, but researchers have considered a range of sources, including varying biology, psychology, genetics, family environment, social status, workforce participation and a lack of "existential security" felt by many women because they generally are more afflicted than men by poverty, illness, old age and violence, Pew said.

The answer likely involves multiple factors, but there is still disagreement about which issues matter more, Pew reported.

Interestingly, women who work tended to report being less religious than women who don't earn a salary, even when the researchers accounted for other factors, such as education level, age and marital status, Pew said.

This analysis about the beliefs of employed women suggests that women are not universally more religious than men, but that their devoutness could be the result of nurture (for instance, social and cultural factors) rather than nature (for example, biological or evolutionary forces).

"[It] suggest[s] that social and cultural factors, such as religious traditions and workforce participation, play an important role in shaping the religious gender gap," Pew said.

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

To open a medieval reliquary containing a saint's bones, you have to have a good reason, said Sabine Sten.

Sten is an osteoarchaeologist (a type of scientist who studiesskeletal remains from archaeological sites) at Uppsala University in Sweden. Two years ago, she got permission to open a reliquary (a container used to hold objects deemed holy) at the Uppsala Cathedral, to study the bones of Erik Jedvardsson, a medieval Swedish king turned saint.

"We have analyzed thousands of individuals from the medieval period in Sweden, but the people we lack resources from [are] the people like Erik, who have high status," Sten told Live Science. The bones hadn't been examined since 1946—before the rise of radiocarbon dating and DNA tests. After a new analysis, Sten and her team announced that Erik's remains may be authentic, and could reveal more information about his healthy life and gruesome death. [Religious Mysteries: 8 Alleged Relics of Jesus]

For almost as long as Christianity has been around, Christian relics have been objects of worship, but they became increasingly popular in Europe in the Middle Ages. Churches across the continent claimed to have venerable artifacts like the foreskin of Jesus, as well as the nails and cross used in his crucifixion, and the tooth of Mary Magdalene.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all holy relics hold up to scientific scrutiny. For instance, a 2010 study in the journal Forensic Science International concluded that the charred relics of Joan of Arc kept in a glass bottle in France were fake (and even included some cat bone fragments). And radiocarbon dating tests showed that the two skulls in a relic shrine in Sweden thought to belong to the 14th century St. Birgitta and her daughter, Katarina, were actually separated by about 200 years —one was much older, and the other much younger, than they should have been.

No historical sources from Erik's lifetime mention him. But according to texts written more than a century later, Erik led the First Swedish Crusade, spreading Christianity to the Finns, until the king was beheaded in 1160 by rebels aligned with a Danish claimant to the throne. Erik became a saint after his death, and his remains have supposedly been kept in a reliquary in Uppsala Cathedral since 1257. They were even left in place after the 16th century Reformation, in which Sweden transformed from a Catholic country into a Protestant one. [Holy Dream Team? The Most Notorious Catholic Saints]

From the reliquary, Sten and her colleagues studied 23 bones, seemingly from the same person. (DNA test results are still pending, which would definitively confirm whether all of these bones belonged to one individual.) The radiocarbon tests, which measure the age of organic materials, were consistent with a death in 1160, the researchers said.

The analysis showed that the bones belonged to a man who died at age 35 to 40. Standing at about 5 feet 6 inches (1.7 meters) tall, he was well fed and well built, with no discernible diseases, the researchers found.

"His body is very healthy," Sten said. Compared with men in their 30s in Sweden today, Erik's bones were much stronger — actually, 25 percent stronger, according to a measurement of his bone density —hinting that he had a very active life.

"We can also see that he was consuming freshwater fish," Sten added, which makes sense considering that, in the 12th century, Christians had to observe more fast[ing] days in which they were not allowed to eat meat from sheep, cattle or pigs.

According to legend, Erik was attacked, tormented and beheaded by his enemies after leaving a church. The bone analysis showed that he suffered seven severe cuts on his legs, and one of his neck vertebra was cut through.

For now, Sten said she and her colleagues are still waiting on the DNA results in order to learn more about Erik's genealogy and whether he was harboring diseases that are invisible to the naked eye.

Their initial findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the Swedish journal Fornvännen.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.