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Ah, seems you've already come across Ramachandran (sorry, I missed the edit) - he does some very interesting research! You should give his lectures a go if you can ever track him down. He's a great orator and it sounds as though he was taught english by a Scottsman with brilliantly rolled R's.

Or rather, it just seems to show that god answers a lot more prayers in the developed world. Also, because I can't help myself, I don't buy the whole "man makes evil" thing. I don't know that I have the time to launch fully into the free will argument right now (I did it to death with...

Yeah, fair call. Some people argue that emotion is simply a really basic, primitive, undirected form of sensation. However, most people seem to experience emotional stimulation via various sensory pathways, e.g. sad music can make people cry, skin massage can make people feel elated and certain...

Not quite, synaesthesia is when you have crossed sensory modalities. For example, some people see colours when the cochlear in the ear is stimulated (they will commonly hear sound at the same time). Edit: wiki has a decent article on it. A random celebrity case: Vladimir Nabakov, the writer of...

On brain hemispheres: oh, I certainly wasn't putting that forward as evidence for the claim that some people are 'right/left brained', rather I was speculating that that sort of data might have been what kicked off some of that left/right brain dichotomy stuff (e.g. through a poorly reported...

I was just checking out the wiki page on the Large Hadron Collider to see when they are planning to get it up and running (May this year, apparently) and I found this excerpt after scrolling down the page: I was amused.

Bare minimum: read the last page or two. You'll see that I've already brought up issues with the claim. (i.e. asking 'how can the wealthy and well-off claim god as the cause of their prosperity while the poor, many of whom are religious, remain in a state of destitution?')

Aye, this is roughly the kind of system which underlies my decision to be vegetarian.

Haha, I'm an atheist and an ethical relativist and I still don't eat meat as a result of the ethical views I hold (despite acknowledging that they are just subjective preferences). To surjulz: your 'hedonism' point is a strawman argument. I am still restrained by a value system despite being...

That's fine, as long as you realise that you're denying one of the foundational theorems of modern science. I agree that economic forces have generated the unequal distrubution. However, the issue I'm refering to emerges when people claim that god is responsible for positive things (e.g...

A couple of issues for the god that interacts: - Violation of conservation of energy - Beyond being 'mysterious' how can people name god as being a causal force in all the good parts of their life while people live in abject conditions all over the world? I don't want a part in a god who will...

Also, on the amygdala and neuroplasticity. I've attached a paper I read a while back which reviews some evidence that points to the experience-expectant(/dependent) nature of the limbic system which includes the amygdala (just to emphasise your point... and you might find it interesting). It's...

Pedantic technical note: those hormones are produced by the anterior pituitary (though I'm unsure what LHRH is... I suspect it might be another name for GnRH? which is released from the hypothalamus). The relevant gonad hormones (released in response to FSH and LH) are steroids like...

Would it be unkind/overly presumptuous to assume that you are a troll? (Quote: "bibal")

Well spotted - it's a direct paste from another thread (Adam & Eve or Evolution), hence my saying that I was bringing in stuff from an old post. I think you were involved in the discussion at the time.

Exactly. He's brilliant.

On this matter we can actually look back to the Hume quote I posted above!: "Let us suppose that matter is finite. A finite number of particles is only susceptible of finite transpositions: and it must happen, in an eternal duration, that every possible order or position must be tried an...

As others have said, we don't have any PhDs here (yet!) and so we are limited in how much evidence we can provide. Slidey is pretty knowledgeable on this stuff, however, so I'll refer you to a past post of his:

Trivia -- David Hume almost stumbled on the basic idea when considering the origins of the universe in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published 1779 - posthumously... he know what happened to people seen to oppose the church). I brought up the relevant passage once in another thread...

The same old reply ("roar", by the way): Suppose I said to you "give cupid a chance... I know he just seems like some silly old mythological construct, and I know that loving relationships regularly errupt in hostility, but just give him a chance and I'm sure that you will come to believe"...