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REAL LIFE NEWS: GOOD AND EVIL ARE POWERFUL FORCES

by Hazed

Wow, this is pretty mind-blowing research. It turns out that being extremely good, or terribly evil, actually confers mental and even physical powers to a person.

Professors from Harvard University discovered these crucial meta-physiological effects after studies in which subjects were given a dollar and offered the chance to donate it to charity, or keep it, and then were tested to see how long they could hold up a 5lb weight. It turns out those who gave to charity had endurance significantly longer than the selfish ones.

Other students were asked to write stories in which they did good deeds and they, too, turned out to be noticeably stronger than those whose tales were neutral, with them neither helping nor harming anyone.

Score one for the powers of light!

But test subjects who wrote stories in which they featured as bad guys turned out to be even stronger than the goody-goodies. Points to the dark side of the force!

"People perceive those who do good and evil to have more efficacy, more willpower, and less sensitivity to discomfort," says Kurt Gray from Harvard. "By perceiving themselves as good or evil, people embody these perceptions actually becoming more capable of physical endurance.

"Whether you're saintly or nefarious, there seems to be power in moral events."

So when Sir Galahad says, "My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure," he was onto something. But of course there's also strength to be gained from going down the other path.

The ones that really suffer are the wishy-washer fence-sitters - those who do no evil but don't do much good either. To quote The Register, from whence I got this story, they are fated to be "little more than pawns or collateral damage in the eternal battle between good and evil".

Clearly, it pays to take a stand, whether it's a good or evil one.

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