Here’s what he found (click on image for larger view):

Young Canadians, who religious leaders once hoped would find their way back to faith, are instead doing the opposite: leading the country’s march toward secularism. And with the exception of evangelical Christians, they are doing it at an accelerated pace.
More than half of Canadians in the 15-to-29 age cohort either have no religion or never attend a service of worship, says Statistics Canada. Only 22 percent say religion is very important to them, down from 34 percent in 2002. And in a recent poll done by Nanos Research for The Globe and Mail, just one in five of the under-30 age group say they are the generation of their family that attends weekly religious services.
The cause, on the one hand, is a product of a progression that began with the crash of religious attendance 50 years ago, with each succeeding generation becoming further removed from—and ignorant of—religious beliefs and practices. Religious scholars see perhaps the majority of today’s young Canadian adults as disappearing down a black hole of spiritual illiteracy from which institutional religion cannot retrieve them. The cause is also a product of young adults increasingly seeing organized religion as illogical and out of touch with reality.

Sometimes I’m dazzled by how modern and fabulous we are, and how easy everything can be for us; that’s the gilded glow of technology, and I marvel at it all the time. And then my mom will call, and in the course of the conversation she’ll say something disjointed that disturbs me and reminds me of her frailty, and then she’ll mention that it’s snowing hard in Ohio and I’ll wonder how she’s going to get to the grocery store, and I look at my gadgets and gizmos, and I realize none of them will help me. If anything, they’ve filled me with the unreal idea that everything is possible; that virtual is actual; that you can delete things you don’t like; that you can find and have whatever it is you want whenever you want it; but instead I’m learning that the truest, immutable facts of life are a lot harder and slower and sometimes sadder, and always mystifying.

the best gifts circumvent guilt in two key ways: by eliminating the guilt that accompanies extravagant purchases, and by reducing the guilt that comes from coupling payment with consumption. The best advice on gift-giving, therefore, is to get something that someone really wants but would feel guilty buying otherwise.

Travis Ng and colleagues investigated the value of Hong Kong car number plates purchased through auction from 1997 to 2009 and found that an ordinary four-digit plate with one extra lucky “8” was sold 63.5 percent higher on average. An extra unlucky “4” by contrast diminished the average four-digit plate value by 11 percent. In Cantonese the number “8” rhymes with “prosperity” whereas the number “4” sounds like the word for “death.” Moreover the fluctuations in the prices of lucky and unlucky plates mirrored the economic fluctuations with unlucky numbers dropping the most during recessions.

After watching clips in which black characters were treated less favorably than whites, the viewers’ conscious attitudes about race did not change. But they were faster to associate white people with positive words such as “laughter” and black people with negative words such as “failure”—a sign that this implicit bias had found its way from the TV screen into people’s behavior, the researchers say. After watching clips in which black characters were treated better than whites, however, viewers not only displayed less implicit bias toward blacks, they also showed improved conscious attitudes toward blacks as measured by a questionnaire.

There really is a critical difference between someone worshiping Chewbacca the wookiee in his basement and someone going to church. Since most of us believe that Chewbacca is a fictional character (albeit not one without a certain hairy charm) and not a deity, the wookiee-worshiper is largely singular in his liturgical activities. He must disengage from the community, while at the same time doing a fair amount of mental work to maintain his “wookiee-as-deity” beliefs in the face of a “wookiee-as-Star-Wars-character” world. This may or may not be delusional, but it’s at least worrisome. By contrast, religion requires engagement with a community and this typically facilitates adaptive functioning.
Religion therefore contains a host of properties that actually militate against pathological delusion: (1) its general notions and practices are not obviously contradicted by evidence, (2) it requires very little mental effort to sustain most religious notions, and (3) it encourages community integration which promotes healthy psychological functioning.

Praying to God about the spill is futile, but many of those praying are the same ones getting out and performing the actual work to combat the spill and hopefully clean some of it. Several of the Louisiana lawmakers proposing the bill, for example, are those also on the ground helping with cleanup and recovery efforts. According to news reports, many of those who attended prayer vigils all along the Gulf coast in past weeks were cleanup workers taking part after a long day’s work in the field—workers who went back out the following day to start again. And the next day. And the next day. And the next day. If these people are risking their health and livelihoods to get out and do something about a disaster that affects each and every one of us no matter the location, we think that it’s absolutely fine if they want to pray at the same time. We just hope they’ll understand if we don’t join them in the god-offerings.

We must get past forcing all discussions of Science and the Sacred into the narrow hallway of God: Yes or No? Chaining down the discussion this way ensures that all the interesting, vital things that could be explored are missed and our opportunities are missed with them. All the necessary conversations about what we value and what we hold to be sacred are lost in the static. All the potential understand[ing] about our place the fabric of Being, and the meaning our own narratives of belonging, are drowned out in partisan sniping. More importantly, all understanding of how these narratives, which science now helps to provide, are lost in an impossible standard of impossible proof which neither science or religion can provide.

He discovered that such people often fail to identify specific emotions in others.
Trojano’s team asked seven locked-in people and 20 healthy controls to view and respond to pictures of famous actors portraying six basic emotions, such as happiness or fear. When asked to identify each emotion, the locked-in patients were wrong 57 percent of the times they viewed fear. They were also more likely than controls to misidentify anger, sadness, and disgust