I can buy that the stronger the belief, the lower the ACC response. They believe that they are right, because they believe that they are right. It is same way that faith-healing parents believe that they are doing the right thing by withholding insulin from their diabetic child. Or the belief of the radical terrorist that he is doing god's work. I'm sure that those individuals would also have low ACC levels, but you'd have a difficult time time convincing me that their closely held, and passionately felt beliefs are anything but utter non-sense. Believers believe!
And yes, before you jump on those examples, I realize that they are 'extreme'. I'm just of the opinion that moderate religious belief, and our 'tolerance' of it, is what makes it possible for the extremes to arise... to the detriment of all mankind.
An interesting control for the study above would be to recruit other delusional personalities, say people who believe that SkyNet is real and therefore what decisions they make today (on some psychological test) are unimportant. Would they also have lower ACC levels and lower anxiety?
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I think this is a bit of a misunderstanding as to the function of faith and prayer. It's a common belief of non-believers to view them as a crutch, when in many cases they're used as guidance (ie. "What should I do?" or "Give me the strength for what I must do.").
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No misunderstanding here. There are a lot of religious people who certainly do use prayer as a crutch and an excuse for not doing something. Ex-President Bush's response to the questions of what he was going to do about Katrina and countless other real-world problems... prayer. The way that you are phrasing 'prayer' as a reflective function is no different from what a rational non-believer would do when they think things through for themselves and come to an honest conclusion about what needs to be done. I would say that the secular method of decision making just removes a god as a middleman.