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Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain.
Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy…
The experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation.
— Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? - NYTimes.com (via myserendipities)(via infoneer-pulse)
Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain.
Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy…
The experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation.
— Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? - NYTimes.com (via myserendipities)(via infoneer-pulse)
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Stanley Hauerwas (via azspot)
I think Hauerwas meant to say “atheists do not need to believe in God because they too believe in belief.” Or was it “theologians can hit the broad side of barn by making an obvious point.”
If American cannot produce an interesting atheist, has it been able to produce an interesing theologian?
If the only kind of atheism that counts is calling into question the American Protestant, is the only kind of theologian the one who counts the one calling into question the American Protestant?
Theologians should not be in the business of amateur sociology. And neither should atheists. The reason we can’t produce an interesting variant of either is neither is willing to talk about God in any interesting way. While the God of most American Protestants is not interesting enough to deny, the God of most American Protestant theologians is not interesting enough to believe in.
American Protestants should surely move beyond being syncretistic and enculturated boobs. But so should American Protestant theologians. Critiquing the obvious is not theology.
Besides, the whole “American Protestant” shtick is inaccurate. They haven’t been Protestants for about a century now. Nobody is now protesting anything or knew they ever were. Just like they haven’t been a Jewish sect for about two centuries. They’re Evangelicals and that’s a different animal. The Max Weber hammer doesn’t pound this nail in quite the same way.
By and large American Evangelicals don’t “believe in belief” in today’s society. It would be more accurate to say that they believe in dis-belief, or more technically, doubt. Where the Industrial Age Puritan finds their referent in the socio-religious machine and factory mindset, the post-Modern Puritan finds their referent in the Heisenburg Principle, or more technically, the Wittgensteinian geist. The first is construction oriented, the second deconstruction oriented. Religious certainty has given place to religious doubt. The Industrial Protestants believed in God because of order, the post-Modern Puritan believes in God in spite of the lack of order.
So today’s American atheists have the problem of finding the God American theologican can’t articulate and American Evangelicals don’t believe in.
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