Atheists Become Emotionally Aroused When Daring God to Do Terrible Things

We examined whether atheists exhibit evidence of emotional arousal when they dare God to cause harm to themselves and their intimates. In Study 1, the participants (16 atheists, 13 religious individuals) read aloud 36 statements of three different types: God, offensive, and neutral. In Study 2 (N =...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Lindeman, Marjaana (Author) ; Heywood, Bethany (Author) ; Riekki, Tapani (Author) ; Makkonen, Tommi (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group 2014
In: The international journal for the psychology of religion
Year: 2014, Volume: 24, Issue: 2, Pages: 124-132
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Parallel Edition:Electronic
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Summary:We examined whether atheists exhibit evidence of emotional arousal when they dare God to cause harm to themselves and their intimates. In Study 1, the participants (16 atheists, 13 religious individuals) read aloud 36 statements of three different types: God, offensive, and neutral. In Study 2 (N = 19 atheists), 10 new stimulus statements were included in which atheists wished for negative events to occur. The atheists did not think the God statements were as unpleasant as the religious participants did in their verbal reports. However, the skin conductance level showed that asking God to do awful things was equally stressful to atheists as it was to religious people and that atheists were more affected by God statements than by wish or offensive statements. The results imply that atheists' attitudes toward God are ambivalent in that their explicit beliefs conflict with their affective response.
ISSN:1532-7582
Contains:Enthalten in: The international journal for the psychology of religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2013.771991