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Temptation and the Shadow- a meditation James 1:19-25 Remember this, my dear brothers: be quick to listen but slow to speak and slow to rouse your temper; God's righteousness is never served by man's anger; do away with all bad habits that are left in you-accept and submit to the word which has been planted in you and can save your souls. But you must do what the word tells you to, and not just listen to it and deceive yourselves. To listen to the word and not obey is like looking at our own features in a mirror and...

Police in Tennessee have arrested the jilted woman's father and another man and charged them with murder. Billy Clay Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth were killed last month after they deleted Jenelle Potter, the daughter of one of the suspects, from their "friends" list. Both were shot in the head and Mr Payne's throat was cut. The couple's eight-month-old baby was found in the mother's arms, unharmed, when the bodies were discovered. "It's the worst thing I've ever seen," said Johnson County Sheriff Mike Reece, who has worked in local law enforcement for 27 years. "We've had murders, but nothing...

The great British preacher John Newton had a friend, a poet by the name of William Cowper, who along with Newton wrote hymns which eventually were compiled in the Olney Hymnal. Cowper’s more noted contributions to this hymnal were “Oh, for a closer walk with God” and “There is a fountain filled with blood.”......Sadly, we find documented in Forbes Winslow’s Anatomy of Suicide (written in 1840) that Cowper has tried more than once to take his own life. As psychiatrist and Christian author John White puts it, “Here then we are presented with a gifted and Godly man, a man...

In a new study, bound to stir controversy, researchers have found that people with low IQ tend to have socially conservative ideals and prejudiced attitudes toward others, including people of different races and homosexuals. The new study published earlier this month in the journal Psychological Science found that British children with lower general intelligence factor (similar to IQ) are more likely to be racially prejudiced as adults. "We found that lower general intelligence in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology," lead researchers Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri of Brock University,...

Gay marriage, and especially gay parenting, has been in the cross hairs in recent days. On Jan. 6, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum told a New Hampshire audience that children are better off with a father in prison than being raised in a home with lesbian parents and no father at all.

t was every man – and crew member – for himself. Survivors from the Costa Concordia spoke angrily yesterday of the nightmare evacuation from the stricken ship as women and children were left behind. In the terrifying moments after the giant vessel began to list, fights even broke out to get into the lifeboats. Men refused to prioritise women, expectant mothers and children as they pushed themselves forward to escape. Crew ignored their passengers – leaving ‘chefs and waiters’ to help out.

Many conservatives are absolutely perplexed by the question of what motivates liberals to take the patently wrong political positions they do. It’s difficult to explain it without believing such obviously wrong ideas like “liberals are just stupid”, or “they want to destroy our country”, but sometimes we resort to those explanations out of pure frustration. But what is the explanation? Why do seemingly good, intelligent people take positions that cause so much harm in the face of all the facts? I’ve finally stumbled upon the answer, and it’s so stunningly simple, yet profound in its implications, that it’s absolutely mind-boggling....

Last semester, I was giving a lecture on the history of the Supreme Court from 1953 to present. Toward the end of the lecture, I asked my students if they could name the current Chief Justice. None were able to do so. There were thirty students in the class. This was in a college classroom, mind you. I was annoyed by the failure of a single student to know the name of one of the three most powerful men in America. But, whenever annoyed, I have a tendency to make jokes to lighten the atmosphere. So I told my students...

The 20th century will be remembered for the totalitarian monsters of various stripes who conceived, planned and executed programs of selective mass extermination of humans. I think that all Leftists, without exception, including the meekest of democratic socialists, have been implicated - knowingly or in consciously cultivated ignorance – as apologists for, or accomplices and abettors to the crimes of the totalitarians. I am stating this categorical proposition so bluntly rather late in life, although I have been convinced of its verity for as long as I can remember being able to recognize the evidence, i.e. since my teens. I...

And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.(Genesis 3:8-10)In the moments following the transgression, to their horror, Adam and Eve experience the ever increasing ramifications of sin. Sin is death. It is death...

Catchy headlines about the latest counter-intuitive discovery in human psychology have a special place in journalism, offering a quirky distraction from the horrors of war and crime, the tedium of politics and the drudgery of economics. But even as readers smirk over the latest gee whizzery about human nature, it is generally assumed that behind the headlines, in the peer-reviewed pages of academia, most scientists are engaged in sober analysis of rigorously gathered data, and that this leads them reliably to the truth. Not so, says a new report in the journal Psychological Science, which claims to show “how unacceptably...

We've all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find. New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses. "Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away," Radvansky explains. "Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized." The study was published recently in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental...

News Release Americans For Truth About HomosexualityNovember 10, 2011; Contact: Peter LaBarbera: americansfortruth@gmail.comCHICAGO—The discovery that former Penn State University defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky has been molesting boys as young as 10 years old – and that university officials including head coach Joe Paterno did not do more to apprehend this predator – has shocked America. Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), said the scandal exposes the continuing problem of homosexual predators in society. He offers the following observations related to the PSU scandal: Many openly homosexual (“gay”) men, like CNN anchor Don Lemon, were molested as...

A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found. Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability. The psychologist, Diederik Stapel, of Tilburg University, committed academic fraud in “several dozen” published papers, many accepted in respected journals and reported in the news media, according to a report released on Monday by the three Dutch institutions where he has worked: the University of Groningen, the University...

A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found. Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability. The psychologist, Diederik Stapel, of Tilburg University, committed academic fraud in “several dozen” published papers ... In a prolific career, Dr. Stapel published papers on the effect of power on hypocrisy, on racial stereotyping and on how advertisements affect how people view themselves. Many of his findings appeared...

Crime scene psychopaths reveal themselves through their speech Psycopaths are estimated to make up 1 percent of the population and up to 25 percent of male offenders in correctional settings. NEW YORK — Psychopaths are known to be wily and manipulative, but even so, they unconsciously betray themselves, according to scientists who have looked for patterns in convicted murderers' speech as they described their crimes. The researchers interviewed 52 convicted murderers, 14 of them ranked as psychopaths according to the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, a 20-item assessment, and asked them to describe their crimes in detail. Using computer programs to analyze what...

Midnight on St Mary Street in Cardiff and everything is exactly as expected. Half a dozen young women slump in a gutter, men urinate outside a health-food shop and, as hordes stagger between nightclubs, someone lifts up a blow-up doll with a sex toy protruding out of it. The street smells of urine and lager, police struggle to break up a fight outside the Walkabout bar and a paramedic bundles a comatose girl on to a wheelchair. But it's a quiet night for 20-year-old Naomi Jenkins. She has 'only' drunk three shots of peach schnapps, cider and three shots of...

Ultimately, it is all my fault, my failure, my fall. I failed to persuade, failed to seduce, failed to sell. (I hate the concept of 'selling oneself', so prevalent in our culture, but it is what it is.) And it's my core that is responsible. My unchangeable core. It was my core that was rejected, despised, spat upon, accused, laid off from my job, told "I cannot love you". No Prozac, no therapy can change my core, they can only dull my senses, hypnotize me into accepting despair. I know what I'm talking about, the world has sent me a...

A special education teacher wrote to me about the abuse of Ritalin. The teacher said: “My students are on Ritalin. This is a brain shrinking, top tier heavily psychotropic drug, as you know. The authorities KNOW this is their weapon for the most intelligent boys... ” The teacher believes this is a high-level NWO plot, which is not a road I like to go down. But the teacher got me thinking... Here are the two parts I’m personally sure of: 1) The Education Establishment in this country, for 75 years, has used bogus methods (i.e., Whole Word) to teach reading....

Sally's husband was often abusive. One morning, over breakfast, Hank began yelling at her because she was on the phone instead of keeping him company. Later, after Hank went to work, Sally picked up his shirts from the laundry, ran some other errands for him, and decided to cook his favorite dish for dinner. Do you think Sally did the right thing? Sally, alas, believed that if she could only create an ideal loving home atmosphere, her husband's abusiveness would stop. Unfortunately, she was in fact rewarding her husband's negative behavior. In response to his outbursts, Hank found his chores...

WINNIPEG, Manitoba August 30, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A young man who admitted to downloading explicit pornographic images since he was 12, has been sentenced to two years supervised probation after he was charged for possessing photos and videos of children as young as 4 being sexually abused. Dr. Judith Reisman, a researcher on pedophilia and an expert on the insidious effects of pornography, told LSN that she is unsurprised that such a young man would be involved in child pornography. “Our government leaders allow pornography to pollute our once great nations and act surprised that we are breeding inhuman men,...

The emotional substrate One-sentence summary of the major point in this article: BOTH Leftists and Rightists want to change the status quo (Have you ever heard of a conservative-dominated government that a lacked a legislative agenda?). But to begin from the beginning: I did my first piece of research into the psychology of politics in 1968. It was my Masters dissertation. I have been studying the subject ever since -- now with many academic publications on it behind me. So it seems reasonable that, over four decades later, I should look back and say what I have learned in the...

There were 32 Army suicides in July, the highest monthly toll ever recorded. The grim figure underscores the military’s continuing inability to find ways of preventing troubled soldiers from taking their own lives. Military officials said 22 active-duty soldiers were thought to have taken their own lives last month, along with 10 reservists. The incidents are under investigation, and it'll be several weeks before the Army definitively rules on each case. If the numbers hold up, July will be the worst month for Army suicide in two years, since the Army first began releasing monthly suicide data. The previous record...

MSNBC host Martin Bashir interviewed Stanton Peele, a psychologist and an "expert on addiction," this afternoon. Bashir urged Peele to psychologically evaluate supporters of the Tea Party. "It reminds us of addiction because addicts are seeking something that they can't have," Peele said. "They want a state of happiness or nirvana that can't be achieved except through an artificial substance and reminds us of the Norway situation, when people are thwarted at obtaining something they can't, have they often strike out and Norway is one kind of example to one kind of reaction to that kind of a frustration." Bashir...

Naomi Wolf argues, in a CNN article, that pornography is “rewiring the male brain” and “causing [men] to have more difficulty controlling their impulses.” Moreover, she says that watching pornography triggers the same dopamine releases in the brain caused by illicit-drug use, and that this sets off a corresponding spiral in which the user must have more of the stimulant, more often, to get the same enjoyment. This has spillover effects in the real world, as the men lose interest in their human romantic partners—or demand that the women reproduce the extreme behavior the men see on their TVs or...

Just a brief exposure to an image of the American flag shifts voters, even Democrats, to Republican beliefs, attitudes and voting behavior even though most don't believe it will impact their politics, according to a new two-year study just published in the scholarly Psychological Science. What's more, according to three authors from the University Chicago, Cornell University and Hebrew University, the impact had staying power. "A single exposure to an American flag resulted in a significant increase in participants' Republican voting intentions, voting behavior, political beliefs, and implicit and explicit attitudes, with some effects lasting 8 months," the study found....

Study after study has shown that children with married parents are better off, and our society has embraced the idea that children should be raised by married adults. The latest research digs deep into this long-held belief and reveals an interesting twist. A new British study finds that kids of married parents are more intellectually advanced than those born out of wedlock, but this has nothing to do with marriage. Rather it's a reflection of the types of people who tend to get married and those who don't, . . .

New research finds that men’s conspicuous spending is driven by the desire to have uncommitted romantic flings. And, gentlemen, women can see right through it. Study shows that flashy spending may work for the short term but not for marriage. Just as peacocks flaunt their tails before potential mates, men may flaunt flashy products to charm potential dates. Notably, not all men favored this strategy – just those men who were interested in short-term sexual relationships with women. The series of studies, "Peacocks, Porsches and Thorstein Veblen: Conspicuous Consumption as a Sexual Signaling System," was conducted with nearly 1,000 test...

The questions about Michele Bachmann's husband's crisis clinic - and reports its services including helping to "cure" homosexuals - went mainstream tonight, with an ABC News story featuring undercover video shot of one of the center's counselors saying it's "possible" to be "totally free" of such feelings. The "World News" report included an interview with a former patient at the clinic, who told the ABC reporter that he'd been sent there when he was 17 years old to try to "change" him. "[One counselor's] path for my therapy would be to read the Bible, pray to God that I would...

Could the widespread availability and consumption of pornography in recent years actually be rewiring the male brain? It is hard to ignore how many highly visible men in recent years (indeed, months) have behaved in sexually self-destructive ways. Some powerful men have long been sexually voracious; unlike today, though, they were far more discreet and generally used much better judgment in order to cover their tracks. Of course, the heightened technological ability nowadays to expose private behavior is part of the reason for this change. But that is precisely the point: so many of the men caught up in sex-tinged...

Earlier this year, a four-page document with a bland title, "Stipulation for Dismissal with Prejudice," was filed in a civil matter percolating on the King County Courthouse's ninth floor. Hardly anyone took notice. Most everyone had moved on. But that document — filed by lawyers tangled up in the estate of Stuart Greenberg, a nationally renowned psychologist whose life ended in scandal — signaled the end of a tortuous undertaking. Greenberg had proved such a toxic force — a poison coursing through the state's court system — that it took more than three years for lawyers and judges to sift...

In a New York Review of Books essay, Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, considers three books that take skeptical looks at "the epidemic of mental illness" sweeping the country: The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades.... A large survey of randomly selected...

Earlier this month, the popular magazine Psychology Today published an article by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa titled “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?" that was met, expectedly, with mass outrage. The article used data based on another study to make several claims such as "black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women" yet "subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others." After some attempted editing of the title, the magazine retracted the post from its website in its entirety. Kanazawa in turn is facing an investigation by the London School of...

A man walks into a bar, catches a girl's eye, and immediately looks gloomy, moody and averts his eyes. The woman is overcome with sexual attraction. Not your usual love story but maybe a more realistic one. Turns out, a winning smile isn't the way to a woman's heart; men who swagger and look gloomy are more likely to set pulses raising.That's according to Jessica Tracy at the University of British Columbia, Canada, who asked more than 1000 adults to rate the sexual attractiveness of hundreds of photos of the opposite sex. The images showed men and women in various...

Between unresolved family conflicts, relationship struggles and his mixed-race identity, James Puckett had enough on his mind in college that he sought professional help. But after bouncing from one therapist to another, he still felt stuck. “They were all female, and they did give me some comfort,” said Mr. Puckett, 30, who works for a domestic-abuse program in Wisconsin. “But I was getting the same rhetoric about changing my behavior without any challenge to see the bigger picture of what was behind these very male coping reactions, like putting your hand through a wall.” He decided to seek out a...

There's a psychologist who can predict with 91% accuracy whether a relationship will live or die. His name is Dr. John Gottman, and he runs something called The Marriage Clinic. Gottman uses several factors to determine which marriages "will succeed or fail. But the main one is this: contempt. If a spouse mocks the other, talks down to him, rolls eyes, or sneers, that marriage is a goner. Gottman's seminal research reminds me of my friend, Laura, and her relationship with boyfriend, Justin. On the surface, the couple seemed perfectly matched: they were both teachers, runners, and avid skiers. But...

There's still no foolproof way to predict who will develop dementia, but brain scientists say they have identified a new clue: Cluelessness, as in an inability to tell when people are lying or using sarcasm. A preliminary new study conducted at the University of California at San Francisco suggests that the neurodegenerative process responsible for dementia also causes deterioration of regions of the brain responsible for detecting insincere speech. "These patients cannot detect lies," study author Dr. Katherine Rankin, of the university's Memory and Aging Center, said in a written statement. "This fact can help them be diagnosed earlier." It...

three Cornell researchers [looked at] whether we can determine who is a criminal by looking at his face. Their finding: We can. The researchers gathered head shots of Caucasian males, ages 20 to 29, put them all against a white background and controlled for attractiveness and display of facial emotion. Half were photos of convicts. The criminals were on their first conviction, had short hair and little to no facial hair. About half the criminals had been convicted of violent crimes (forcible rapes, murder, assault) and half for nonviolent crimes (forgery, theft, arson and drug dealing). On a scale of...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Nicolai Sennels, a Danish psychologist who worked for several years with young criminal Muslims in a Copenhagen prison. He is the author of Among Criminal Muslims. A Psychologist’s Experience from the Copenhagen Municipality. The book will be out in English later this year. He can be contact at: nicolaisennels@gmail.com. FP: Nicolai Sennels, welcome back to Frontpage Interview. I would like to talk to you today about how a Muslim upbringing creates terrorists. Let’s begin with this question: as a child psychologist, how would you explain that so many Muslims become terrorists or sympathize with terrorists?...

‘Evil spirits’ disrupts teaching March 3 2011 at 09:22pm By Slindile Maluleka INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPERS Teaching at a Durban school was disrupted yesterday and today amid a wave of hysteria as pupils claimed they were being possessed by evil spirits.Durban Girls’ Secondary School in Dartnell Crescent, Greyville, was closed again today because of further disruptions.Police, who were called to the school yesterday, cordoned off the road as some pupils were reportedly seen running wildly across it soon after 10am. Some were rolling on the pavement.The school’s governing body chairman, Sam Kikine, who arrived later, confirmed that the pupils were hysterical.“The incident...

It’s hard to admit a mistake, especially when it involves money. But refusing to cut losses and doubling down when a stock goes south is a prescription for mental and financial pain. The market is bigger and smarter than any investor — even you. The market will steamroll investors who habitually stay on margin when the major indexes sell off repeatedly in heavy volume. Only buying a particular sector, say technology, means that your portfolio may be out of style like last season’s shoes. But there’s hope.

I read Kay Hymowitz’s new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, recently. First, the good points: Hymowitz does acknowledge that women have made great strides in our society mainly due to advances in technology and the knowledge economy that gives better jobs to those with degrees, degrees that “take years.” Hymowitz has a good chapter titled “The New Girl Order” in which she admits that Americans now like girls better than boys. She does a fair job of describing some of the biases against boys, though she does little to rectify them. Now...

....But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”... It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked...

In order to serve as President of these United States, one must have supreme confidence in one's self. The question is, "When does that confidence cross into neurosis?" With increasing frequency, articles and editorials are beginning to appear, everywhere from the Boston Globe to the New York Times, denoting the expanding ego of Barrack Obama and his ever-expanding sense of autocracy. A singular query that seems to be a common thread in the analysis of the stunning Democrat defeat last November is, "Will President Obama's ego allow him to recognize and understand defeat and moderate his approach and policies,...

At the most recent conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the most talked-about speech was one that essentially accused the attendees of bias. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist from the University of Virginia, started his presentation by polling the audience of approximately 1,000 psychologists. When he asked how many considered themselves to be politically liberal, about 80 percent of the hands went up. Centrists and libertarians? Dr. Haidt estimated that fewer than three-dozen hands were raised. When he asked how many were conservatives, precisely three hands went up. As The New York Times reported, Haidt called that...

Through a chat room on the internet, a woman met a man with whom she was convinced would “meet her needs.” After agreeing to meet in a hotel in a specified city, she decided to leave her husband and three children for this exciting stranger. Her decision was made six hours after that first meeting. People can have a powerful influence over us; they can either bless us or curse us; they can help us in our quest for good, or they can compel us to do evil. Some are masters of manipulation and have mastered the art of controlling...

According to the New York Post Adhami, 44, said being gay was a 'painful trial' which comes as a result of past trauma. He said: 'An enormously overwhelming percentage of people struggle with homosexual feeling because of some form of violent emotional or sexual abuse at some point in their life. A small, tiny percentage of people are born with a natural inclination that they cannot explain. You find this in the animal kingdom at some level as well.' Adhami was named Imam and senior adviser of the proposed mosque by Park51, the organisation behind it. Fred Sainz, a spokesman...

Most saw the Jan. 8 shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others in Arizona as a product of insanity. But assassination researcher Manfred Schneider told SPIEGEL that the presumed gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, did not act irrationally. Rather, his crime resulted from "hyper-rationality." SPIEGEL: Mr. Schneider, on Jan. 8 in Arizona, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the head at close range and killed six people. While the world searches for explanations, you write, in your recent book "Das Attentat" ("The Assassination"), that an assassin like Loughner is not crazy but the product of hyper-rationality. What...

Beautiful people don't just get all the breaks, scientists say they're likely smarter than most people, too. A study in England conducted by researchers at the London School of Economics found that attractive men and women generally have higher IQs. "Physical attractiveness is significantly positively associated with general intelligence," said LSE lead researcher Satoshi Kanazawa, in the latest issue of the journal, Intelligence. The study indicated attractive men have IQs that are 13.6 points above the average, while beautiful women are 11.4 points higher than average.

When a happy young couple says “I do,” their marriage is contingent on their performing a specific sexual act. If they want to make their marriage real, they must consummate it. And that means that the meaning of marriage lies in the possibility of procreation. A marriage unconsummated is not a marriage. It is nullified, as though the ceremony had never happened. To become real, a marriage requires the possibility of conception. It does not require conception. Failure to conceive has never been grounds for nullification. Older, presumably infertile, couples are allowed to marry because if they had performed the...