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Showing posts from February 24, 2008

Cognitive dissonance

The term 'Cognitive dissonance' was created by Leon Festinger, a social psychologist and professor, in 1957. He infiltrated into an eschatological religious group which were waiting for doomsday caused by 'Great flood'. They seemed to trust in a leader's direction sincererly. However, the last day supposed to perish didn't come. Festinger expected believers to get angry against their head of the group. But followers didn't show a wrath against the leader rather than they were relieved with no happening. Festinger recognized that human beings usually are skillful to deceive themselves to expel from unpleasant, irrational experience. To speak, we can't put up with our being weak or shabby enough to be hurted by other people and specific situaltions. On the contrary, we want to give an excuse not to violent against normal social system and strongly deny our wrong behavior or belief. It is really convenient system for our mental health. We are ready to defen

He declares 'God is not great'

Born in UK, Christopher Hitchens, 56, was chosen as the 5th most world-wide intellectual by professional readers conducted by 2 political and diplomatic magazines last year. He is following Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins and Vaclav Havel. He has been staying in America since 1980s and writing columns titling 'Minority Report' in 'The Nations'. He became generally known for the author of 'Hostage to History', 'For the Sake of Argument', 'The Missionary Position' and so on. Recently, he is also acknowledged politically being a sort of 'Neocon', after continuously criticizing left-wing of Anglo-America and Islamic fundamentalism. I am reading his book 'God is not Great', dealing with lots of gods and godness all over the world since the prehistoric age. Of cource, he mainly focuses on 2 big powers, 'Christianity' and 'Islam'. As an atheist and meterialist together with Richard Dawkins( Actually, I am sure