this study examines votes, ideologies and goals of iran’s cultural-intellectual currents after the islamic revolution in order to describe their scale and type impacts on women rights in iran. in the first section, a theoretical explanation of the relationship between social currents and legal demands based on social realism approach along with viewpoints of scholars who believe in the correlat...

BACKGROUND While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief at the level of the brain. Nor is it known whether religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of fact. Our lab previously has used functional neuroimaging to study belief as a general mode of cognition [1], and ot...

The present study examined the association between belief in life after death and six measures of psychiatric symptomology in a national sample of 1403 adult Americans. A statistically significant inverse relationship was found between belief in life after death and symptom severity on all six symptom clusters that were examined (i.e., anxiety, depression, obsession-compulsion, paranoia, phobia...

Buddhism originated as a movement of spiritual renunciants who followed Siddhartha Gautama, a prince of the Shakya people in northern India around 500 B.C.E. (before the common era, often designated B.C.). Legend recounts that after Siddhartha confronted the realities of old age, illness, and death, he renounced his privileged social position to seek spiritual salvation. Through years spent stu...

In the United States, lay-adults with a range of educational backgrounds often conceptualize species change within a non-Darwinian adaptationist framework, or reject such ideas altogether, opting instead for creationist accounts in which species are viewed as immutable. In this study, such findings were investigated further by examining the relationship between religious belief, scientific expe...

People cleave to ideological convictions with greater intensity in the aftermath of threat. The posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) plays a key role in both detecting discrepancies between desired and current conditions and adjusting subsequent behavior to resolve such conflicts. Building on prior literature examining the role of the pMFC in shifts in relatively low-level decision processes,...