morals

tags: Christopher Hitchens on The Ten Commandments, religion, cults, ethics, morals, catholicism, christians, Vanity Fair, streaming video In this streaming video, Christopher Hitchens deconstructs the ten commandments and then rewrites them so they actually are an ethical code and so they mean something for everyday life.

The more moral you believe yourself to be, the less moral you may be inclined to act, according to a new study in Psychological Science. Psychologists evaluated the moral self-image of subject participants and then presented them with a variety of scenarios in which they were asked to donate money to charity and to choose between business practices that were either environment-friendly or cost-effective. The subjects who described themselves as being more ethical both donated less to charity and opted for cheaper, more harmful business practices compared to subjects who described themselves…

Throughout our language, the vocabulary of physical cleanliness is also used to describe moral cleanliness. We describe saints as pure and thieves as dirty; consciences can be clean and sins can be washed away. But more and more, psychological studies tell us that these concepts are entwined in a very real way. The act of cleaning, or even just thinking about the concept of cleanliness, can influence a person's moral compass, swinging it towards a less judgmental direction. This isn't the first time that I've blogged about this. Two years ago, Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist found that…