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Currently viewing the tag: "belief"
People who endorse conspiracy theories see authorities as fundamentally deceptive. The conviction that the “official story” is untrue can lead people to believe several alternative theories-despite contradictions among them. “Any conspiracy theory that stands in opposition to the official narrative will gain some degree of endorsement from someone who holds a conpiracist worldview,” according to Michael Wood, Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton of the University of Kent. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a story, scene, or poem based on a conspiracy theory.
Journaling Prompt: How do you feel about conspiracy theories? Are there any that intrigue you?
Art Prompt: Conspiracy Theory
Photo Credit: alvy on Flickr
“Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives,” Berns says. “Our findings indicate that it’s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people’s behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives.”
Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. “Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms,” Berns says…
“As culture changes, it affects our brains, and as our brains change, that affects our culture. You can’t separate the two,” Berns says…
Future conflicts over politics and religion will likely play out biologically, Berns says. Some cultures will choose to change their biology, and in the process, change their culture, he notes. He cites the battles over women’s reproductive rights and gay marriage as ongoing examples. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a story, scene, or poem based on a cultural shift that challenges people’s sacred values.
Journaling Prompt: Write about your personal values and how you feel if they are challenged.
Art Prompt: Brain and Societal Change
Photo Credit: mariopiperni on Flickr
Lucas was born into the Lunar Temple, a group of Americans, most from the Southwest, who believed that the Moon was a part of the Earth that was broken off in an ancient cataclysm, and that humans were devolved from more pure creatures who now lived in vast, spiral cities below the satellite’s surface. These beings were building monstrous engines two hundred miles across on the dark side of the Moon that, on the Day of Joining, they would use to bring the Moon hurtling back to Earth. -Brian Francis Slattery, Spaceman Blues: A Love Song
Writing Prompt: Write about a strange belief that one of your character’s holds.
Journaling Prompt: Write about the strangest thing that you once believed.
Art Prompt: Cult
Photo Credit: bilbord99 on Flickr
When Little Bit told Mayella about the mermaid, Mayella laughed and laughed. “You don’ fear no manatees, do you, girl?”
“No,” Little Bit said solemnly.
“Good,” said Mayella. “Manatees don’ hurt nobody.
They just swim along, thinkin’ their deep river dreams.”
“Deep river dreams?” I said. “What’s that?”
Mayella smiled. “That’s when everything’s slow and peaceful, and there’s plenty to eat, and there’s company when you want it, and nothing happens in a hurry, and you can think all you want on what God is and what God wants, and you can know it don’t much matter ’cause you doin’ what you s’posed to, and God’s doin’ what God’s s’posed to. That’s deep river dreamin’.” -Doglandby Will Shetterly
Writing Prompt: Write a scene, story, or poem about deep river dreams.
Journaling Prompt: What are your deep river dreams?
Art Prompt: Mermaid
Photo Credit: USFWS Endangered Species on Flickr
People who are prejudiced feel a much stronger need to make quick and firm judgments and decisions in order to reduce ambiguity. “Of course, everyone has to make decisions, but some people really hate uncertainty and therefore quickly rely on the most obvious information, often the first information they come across, to reduce it” Roets says. That’s also why they favor authorities and social norms which make it easier to make decisions. Then, once they’ve made up their mind, they stick to it. “If you provide information that contradicts their decision, they just ignore it.”
Roets argues that this way of thinking is linked to people’s need to categorize the world, often unconsciously. “When we meet someone, we immediately see that person as being male or female, young or old, black or white, without really being aware of this categorization,” he says. “Social categories are useful to reduce complexity, but the problem is that we also assign some properties to these categories. This can lead to prejudice and stereotyping.” -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a character’s inner monologue as they meet someone who is different from them in some significant way.
Journaling Prompt: Write about a prejudice you have and where you think it comes from.
Art Prompt: Prejudice
Photo Credit: Rick Camacho on Flickr
When we’re threatened we defend ourselves — and our systems. Before 9/11, for instance, President George W. Bush was sinking in the polls. But as soon as the planes hit the World Trade Center, the president’s approval ratings soared. So did support for Congress and the police. During Hurricane Katrina, America witnessed FEMA’s spectacular failure to rescue the hurricane’s victims. Yet many people blamed those victims for their fate rather than admitting the agency flunked and supporting ideas for fixing it. In times of crisis… we want to believe the system works. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a scene about a character’s reaction to a crisis.
Journaling Prompt: Have you judged the victims of a crisis because you wanted to keep intact your belief that the system works?
Art Prompt: Disaster
Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video on Flickr
Personally,I have nothing against the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. But I’d put in 30 years bouncing around the professional broadcast business and had had a hard time enough finding intelligent life on Earth, much less finding it out among the stars. I think it’s safe to say I’m with Clarke in that I don’t believe there are any advance aliens within listening distance of humanity — otherwise they’d have been here already and exterminated us on account of the noise.-Brad R. Torgeson, The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project, published in the October 2011 Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Writing Prompt: What do your character believe about aliens and how they would act if they came to our planet?
Journaling Prompt: What do you believe about aliens?
Art Prompt: Aliens
Photo Credit: karenandbrademerson on Flickr
The Pennsylvania Quakers initially introduced the concept of reforming criminals through time spent under confinement. The Quakers built a small prison, which was comprised of sixteen individual and fully isolated cells. This new concept was intended to achieve reform by forcing criminals to serve out their entire sentence in complete isolation and silence. The criminals were left only with a Holy Bible and the reformers believed that this would help them to achieve penance. It was from this practice that the word “penitentiary” was cast into modern society. Michael Esslinger, Alcatraz: A Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years
Writing Prompt: Create a scene where your protagonist is placed in solitary confinement and/or is brainwashed.
Journaling Prompt: Could anyone force you to change your beliefs?
Art Prompt: Solitary
Photo Credit: Dawn Endico on Flickr
People always claim that they want the truth, but most people only want a truth that fits their beliefs. Of course, they like to delude themselves that they make up their minds on the facts, but they really just select the facts that back up what they already believe. -L.E. Modesitt Jr., Flash
Writing Prompt: Write an inner monologue for your character illustrating how he or she chooses the facts to pay attention to in making a decision.
Journaling Prompt: How do your biases affect your decisions?
Art Prompt: Delusion of Reality
Photo Credit: martinhoward on Flickr
How would you choose?
Sunday was church again, and the sermon wasn’t too bad. It even made sense without having to rely on divine authority and grace. That kind of preaching — the kind that inspired human striving toward a better world—I could take, at least in small doses. Larger doses might have been harder, because I was definitely guilty of some significant sin, especially in the old sense of the word, and it didn’t make that much difference to my own feelings of guilt that I really hadn’t had much choice in the matter. I suppose that was one of the things that bothered me about the moralists—either the secular or the religious kinds. They both had lists of immoral acts, but no one talked about the structures in society and religion that often put people like me in a situation where the only “moral” course was to get killed or take great abuse, or both. I had both personal and philosophical objections to any system where martyrdom was the most moral course. -L.E. Modesitt Jr., Flash
Writing Prompt: Write about a character who is in a no win situation. What does he or she choose?
Journaling Prompt: What would you choose? Ethics or survival?
Art Prompt: Preaching
Photo Credit: Garrette on Flickr
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