Motivated thinking leads people to perceive similarity between the self and ingroups, but under some conditions, people may recognize that personal beliefs are misaligned with the beliefs of ingroups. In two focal experiments and two replications, we find evidence that perceived belief similarity moderates ingroup favoritism. As part of a charity donation task, participants donated money to a c...

If one would tackle any major problem in life it is helpful to observe the comprehensive nature of the thing from an external vantage point before diving into the gritty details. This is also described as grasping the “big picture” or getting a birds-eye-view on the problem. I think that this holistic approach is helpful when dealing with ethical issues as well. In this paper I will first defin...

BACKGROUND The Islamic Medical Association of Uganda, has been implementing the faith-based approach to HIV prevention without baseline data on expected positive outcomes. OBJECTIVES To establish evidence-based baseline data on expected positive outcomes of the faith-based approach to HIV prevention. METHODS A cross-sectional study of 15-24 year-old youths was analyzed for significant assoc...

In this report 6566 women enrolled in the Mater-University of Queensland Study of Pregnancy (MUSP) were separated into three groups; members of religious sects, Christians who attend church frequently and Christians who are infrequent attenders. These three groups, respectively labelled Christian sects, Christian attenders and lukewarm Christians were compared on a number of social background, ...

Clash of Cultures: Muslims and Christians in the Ethnosizing Process The paper explores the evolution of ethnic identities of two important and distinct immigrant religious groups. Using data from Germany, a large European country with many immigrants, we study the adaptation processes of Muslims and Christians. Individual data on language, culture, societal interactions, history of migration a...

There is a long liberal political tradition of marshalling arguments aimed at convincing Christians that distinctively Christian reasons for issuing coercive laws are not sufficient to justify those laws. In the first part of this paper I argue that the two most popular of these arguments, attributable to Locke, will not reliably convince committed biblical Christians, nor, probably, should the...

This article is about the implications of an already dominant workplace group (Christians) asking for more Christian religious expression beyond Title VII. It is my contention that despite the good intentions of Christians advocating for implementation of “faith-at-work” initiatives, the desire to increase workplace Christian expression will likely turn into higher levels of exclusion for non-C...

During the Great Plague of London (1665), William Winstanley veered from his better known roles as arbiter of success and failure in his works of biography or as a comic author under the pseudonym Poor Robin, and instead engaged with his reading audience as a plague writer in the rare book The Christians Refuge: Or Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague in this Time of Generall Contagion to Whic...

HOW SHOULD CHRISTIANS APPLY the Old Testament Law? Obviously commands in the Mosaic Law are important, for they make up a substantial portion of God's written revelation. Yet the Old Testament contains many laws that seem strange to modern readers (e.g., "Do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk," Exod. 34:26; "Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material," Lev. 19:19; "Make tassels...