ATHIESTS WIN RIGHTS TO HAVE BAPTISM REMOVED AS HE DID NOT CONSENT AS A BABY

John Hunt, a newly qualified nurse, was baptised at the age of five months at the parish church of St Jude with St Aidin in Thornton Heath, south London.
As a schoolboy he decided he did not believe in God and stopped going to Sunday school aged 11.

Now 56 and living in Croydon, he said he wanted parish records amended to note he did not consent to the baptism in 1953.
He was told that his baptism cannot be deleted because it is a matter of historical record.
He then secured a "de-baptism" certificate produced by the National Secular Society (NSS), rejecting "superstitions" or the idea of original sin.
It reads: "I reject all its creeds and other such superstitions in particular the perfidious belief that any baby needs to be cleansed of original sin."
This week the church backed down and said the entry would be "corrected".
A representative of Southwark diocese told him: "I have spoken to the Archdeacon of Croydon and he has undertaken, in this particular case, to have it cross-referenced with the baptismal entry and pasted into the back fly-leaf of the relevant register at St Jude's Church." Dr Hunt, a former software engineer, said: "I am delighted that on this occasion the church are going to do what they said they would do."
He added: "It's about time that some of us stood up to be counted. I am hoping that others will follow my lead.
"It is important that we send a signal to the church and to the Government that an increasing proportion of the population don't place any faith in the various churches.
"The fact that we have 26 bishops in the House of Lords is an anachronism."
The NSS said an estimated 100,000 people had downloaded similar certificates from its website over the past five years, producing mock official versions and has had to order more parchment to meet demand.
Terry Sanderson, the NSS president, last month said the certificate was originally a "tongue in cheek" joke but conceded that the procedure was now being taken serious by a growing number of atheists.

PRAYING TO GOD IS LIKE TALKING TO A FRIEND SAYS SCIENTISTS

IS PRAYER just another kind of friendly conversation? Yes, says Uffe Schjødt, who used MRI to scan the brains of 20 devout Christians. "It's like talking to another human. We found no evidence of anything mystical."
Schjødt, of the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and colleagues, asked volunteers to carry out two tasks involving both religious and "secular" activities. In the first task, they silently recited the Lord's Prayer, then a nursery rhyme. Identical brain areas, typically associated with rehearsal and repetition, were activated.
In the second, they improvised personal prayers before making requests to Santa Claus. Improvised prayers triggered patterns that match those seen when people communicate with each other, and activated circuitry that is linked with the theory of mind - an awareness that other individuals have their own independent motivations and intentions (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsn050).
Two of the activated regions are thought to process desire and consider how another individual - in this case God - might react. Also activated were part of the prefrontal cortex linked to the consideration of another person's intentions, and an area thought to help access memories of previous encounters with that person.
The prefrontal cortex is key to theory of mind. Crucially, this area was inactive during the Santa Claus task, suggesting volunteers viewed Santa as fictitious but God as a real individual.
Previous studies have found that the prefrontal cortex is not activated when people interact with inanimate objects, such as a computer game. "The brain doesn't activate these areas because they don't expect reciprocity, nor find it necessary to think about the computer's intentions," says Schjødt.
He says the results show people believe they are talking to someone when they pray, an outcome that pleased both atheists and Christians: "Atheists said it shows that it's all an illusion," says Schjødt, while Christians said it was evidence that God is real.
Brain scans reveal that people believe they are talking to someone when they pray
Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford points out that the study proves neither: "This has nothing to do with whether God exists or not, only with subjects' beliefs about whether God exists."