{"id":6235,"date":"2010-01-19T12:43:47","date_gmt":"2010-01-19T20:43:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=6235"},"modified":"2010-01-19T12:44:08","modified_gmt":"2010-01-19T20:44:08","slug":"6235","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=6235","title":{"rendered":"Sex, food, and giving money away"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last Sunday, we took up a collection for Haiti relief work here in the Palo Alto church; next Sunday is the formal beginning of the annual canvass, or fundraising drive. In the midst of all this, a member of the church happened to send me <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/01\/17\/opinion\/17kristof.html\">a column by Nicholas Kristoffy titled &#8220;Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex, and Giving.&#8221;<\/a> Kristoffy writes:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Brain scans by neuroscientists confirm that altruism carries its own rewards. A team including Dr. Jorge Moll of the National Institutes of Health <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/content\/103\/42\/15623.full\" title=\"Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper.\">found<\/a> that when a research subject was encouraged to think of giving money to a charity, parts of the brain lit up that are normally associated with selfish pleasures like eating or sex.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d argue that sex is not a selfish pleasure (at least, not when it involves another person). Nevertheless, giving money does feel awfully good to me &#8212; better than food, maybe not quite as good as sex. Actually, this might be a good rebuttal to the whole doctrine of original sin &#8212; if helping others makes us feel so good, doesn&#8217;t that mean we are essentially good?<\/p>\n<p><small><em>Thanks to Dick D. for sending me the column.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last Sunday, we took up a collection for Haiti relief work here in the Palo Alto church; next Sunday is the formal beginning of the annual canvass, or fundraising drive. In the midst of all this, a member of the church happened to send me a column by Nicholas Kristoffy titled &#8220;Our Basic Human Pleasures: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-justice-peace","category-theology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6235"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6237,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6235\/revisions\/6237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}