Sam Harris is doing a study, but only people who identify as either a “dedicated Christian” or an “atheist/nonbeliever” – none of those fence-sitting middle of the road bastards.

We are preparing to run another fMRI study of belief and disbelief, and we need volunteers to help us refine our experimental stimuli. This promises to be the first study of religious faith at the level of the brain. By responding to the four surveys I have posted online, you can make an enormous contribution to this work.

Please answer as many of the surveys as you can. If you only have time to answer one, please choose at random (otherwise, we will have many more responses to the first than to the others).

Feel free to post this message to your blog or to forward the relevant links to your friends. We especially need Christians to respond, as one of the goals of these surveys is to design stimuli that a majority of Christians will find doctrinally sound.

Please note: Each survey starts with the same first page of questions.

I’m a little weirded out by all the questions on the one survey I’ve done so far that has a half dozen questions about vanity and body image along the lines of “I like to look at myself in the mirror” and “I enjoy showing off my body” but stopping short of “I can’t keep my hands of myself. I can only assume that this is some sort of control question, but survey creation is a bit lost on me.

I imagine that Sam is going to have no trouble getting one end of the spectrum to fill out surveys, so if you’re a dedicated Christian or know someone who is; send this on to them.