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Showing posts from November, 2015

Warped Views Part 1: Peering through the Lens of Religion -- How Religion Influences our Thinking (And On Child Nudity and Breastfeeding in Public)

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I'm  Imagine a world with no religion. I'm not talking about zero religious belief, spirituality, or superstition. I am talking about organized religion that reinforces all of these things and bottles them up in one convenient to access package of ideologies ready made to believe without any effort. What if this influence faded into, well, nothing? What would that look like exactly? Now, hear me out. I realize it's not likely, nor at all that realistic.  The psychologist Bruce M. Hood's books Supersense and The Science of Superstition do a great job at illustrating why we have superstitious beliefs in the first place. Apparently, our brains are hard wired to experience certain types of errors that lead to superstitious reasoning more often than not. Jesse Bering's book The Belief Instinct applies this well known fact and asks how much do our superstitious beliefs feed into our everyday beliefs systems, including religion. It's no