I'm really tiring of Through the Wormhole forcing "god" into its episodes. I've railed on this before elsewhere, but tonight really pissed me off with one of the scientists declaring that humankind would cease to exist if there were no religion. His experiment was beyond pathetic and hardly thorough.
Basically he gave groups of people a handout with a bunch of five-word sentences and he asked them to cross out the last word in the sentence and then are a new sentence with the four remaining words. One subset of these groups were given sentences that would ultimately invoke thoughts of religion, such as, "She felt the spirit." The other subset just got regular/secular sentences.
He then made them perform the task that they were "really" hired for, to drink as many disgusting concoctions of vinegar and orange juice as they could as a form of self-control. The group that formed religious sentences drank roughly twice as much as the other/control group. And he did this with hundreds of people.
So, he felt that these people (on some subconscious level) needed to complete the task because the religion in the back of their minds forced them to do it. What a bogus experiment. Did he also do this with sentences that invoked thoughts of punishment, such as, "He was severely reprimanded," or "Crime does not pay," etc.? Did he do these experiments with sentences that explained reward, such as, "Good behavior is therapeutic," or "She earned the gold," etc.?
It basically explored the idea that we would become anarchists because without god in the back of our minds we would have no self-control. Maybe a graphic showing the prison population breakdown by religious and non-believers would have cured this disease.
I'm just so sick of this show pandering to the masses merely for entertainment. It's the Science Channel, know your audience.
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