Situational Ethics: Dance The Swiveled Hips

"Ask 100 people what they get out of religion and you will probably get 100 different answers. Some worship out of habit, others out of fear of death. New experiments offer two surprising reasons people find God: sex and stress relief.

'You can become more or less religious depending on the situation,' says Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who was not involved in the studies.

Such fickle religious behaviour could be especially important as promiscuous students mature into monogamous adults, says Douglas Kenrick, a psychologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, whose team uncovered the link between mating and religion.

'It's an interesting and surprising phenomenon,' says Kenrick, who speculates that people ramp up their belief in a system that tends to enforce monogamy when they're confronted with fierce sexual competition. It might have been expected, for example, that people are more religious when they are young, when they have to compete more for sex. 'People actually switch on and off their religious beliefs over their lifetime to fit the current mating context they're in,' he adds."

Ewen Callaway, finding Jesus in people's pants again - which they change often - according to the style council known as New Scientist.