Cthulhu Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize

[Lauren Johnson]

Perfect!!

Feb 6, 2016 | News

KINGSPORT STAR HERALD February 5, 2016
OSLO, NORWAY Dread Lord, and presidential candidate, Cthulhu has more to savor this week on the campaign trail than the vulture-picked carcasses of the campaigns of Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Martin O'Malley and others. Cthulhu has been officially nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, according to Henriette Berg Aasen, Nobel watcher and director of the Peace Research Cooperative of Oslo.

Letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee nominating Cthulhu for the Nobel Peace Prize

Aasen told the Kingsport Star Herald that Cthulhu has been nominated, as He is yearly, by the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu (known also as CTHU). Cthulhu joins a long list of historical luminaries nominated for the coveted prize like Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Rush Limbaugh, Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin.Aasen says CTHU selected the independent candidate and demon god because "when He rises from the Deep, humanity will finally know peace and understanding. Our conflicts will disperse. Our prejudices will fade. The Truth of existence will fill us. And those of us left will join as one in praise of Pax Cthulhia."

Throughout his presidential campaign, Cthulhu has called for one final World War where America will conquer the globe using its massive military machine alongside His powerful alien allies, eat the heads of state and commerce around the world and to inspire "equality through insanity" as our "carefully constructed veneer of reality melts" before us.

[Magda Hassan]

You know it makes sense.

[David Guyatt]

You know it makes sense.

::laughingdog::

[Tracy Riddle]

There's an episode of Night Gallery (Rod Serling's show in the early 70s) called "Professor Peabody's Last Lecture," where Carl Reiner does an affectionate send-up of all things Lovecraftian

[Lauren Johnson]

There's an episode of Night Gallery (Rod Serling's show in the early 70s) called "Professor Peabody's Last Lecture," where Carl Reiner does an affectionate send-up of all things Lovecraftian

I found it on Hulu (the fourth segment): http://www.hulu.com/watch/58787

[Michael Barwell]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotheology - wakey-wakey humes.

Belief in a vengeful god 'may have helped to establish early civilisations'

- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scienc...65696.html

Study finds strong belief in a punitive god may have aided co-operation between strangers who follow same religion

• Steve Connor Science Editor
  
• Wednesday 10 February 2016 19:19 BST
  

Belief in an all-powerful god, as depicted by Michelangelo, led people in the study to co-operate with strangers of the same faith Belief in a vengeful god who metes out terrible punishment might have aided unselfish co-operation between strangers that helped to establish early civilisations, according to a study into the psychology of religious faith.
Scientists have found that the stronger the belief in an all-powerful and punitive god, the more likely it is that these believers will be more generous to strangers who follow the same religion.
The findings have emerged from an investigation of nearly 600 people around the world from eight indigenous communities and diverse faiths including Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism with widely varying attitudes to divine retribution.

The country where 'no young people believe God created the universe'


The researchers found that the stronger the belief in all-seeing and punitive gods, the more likely it was that people would contribute to the wellbeing of fellow believers who they have never met, even to the detriment of themselves and their immediate community.
The results suggest that belief in omnipotent, vengeful gods may have contributed to the apparently altruistic co-operation between distant social groups which helped to establish the rise of cities and civilisations following the invention of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago.
"Our results support the hypothesis that beliefs in moralistic, punitive and knowing gods increase impartial behaviour towards distant co-religionists, and therefore can contribute to the expansion of prosociality," the researchers write in their study, published in the journal Nature.
The scientists, led by Benjamin Purzycki of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, interviewed each participant and asked them to take part in a game where they could offer a limited number of real coins to their own community, or to a group of fellow believers in a distant place who they had never met.
The game was carefully designed to allow each participant to follow their own conscience in deciding which cup to put their coins their own community's cup or that of a distant community. Each participant was also asked a battery of questions to determine how all-seeing and vengeful they viewed their god.
"When people report not knowing if a god punishes, they put considerably fewer coins in the cups of distant co-religionists," the scientists said.
However, it was belief in a vengeful god that seemed to be the overriding link with how generous someone was to strangers of the same faith, the scientists found.
Read more

• David Bowie fans petition God to 'send him back to Earth'
  
• Oregon rancher: God told me to invade the wildlife refuge
  
• Bishop of Gloucester says people should stop referring to God as 'He'
  
• Alabama councilman says God told him to ban saggy pants
  

"Belief in rewards from the god could not account for the results supernatural punishment seemed responsible," said Dominic Johnson of Oxford University, who was not involved in the research, writing in an accompanying article in Nature. "It is worth emphasising that the subjects in this experiment were not co-operative with random strangers, only with strangers that shared the same god," Dr Johnson said.
"We therefore still face the challenge of understanding the promotion of co-operation and trust among members of different religions. [The] finding that sharing the same god is key to co-operation suggests that this may be an even harder nut to crack," he said.
"Religion is arguably the most powerful mechanism that societies have found to bind people together in common purpose… We are still grappling to understand, from a scientific perspective, why and under what circumstances humans sacrifice their own welfare for the benefit of distant others," he added.

And then we evolved.