[Immortalist]

</span><blockquote><span class="smallfont">Quote:</span><hr size="1" />Originally Posted by
I have a question to everyone who claims that religion is stupid/tool of control/outdated/wrong/unfounded/contradictory/unscientific/whatever, how much serious research backs your claims? I have yet to hear a significant argument that works against Christianity.<hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>

"There can not be a magic bullet to explain the existence and common features of religion, as the phenomenon is the result of aggregate relevance - that is, of successful activation of a whole variety of mental systems. This is also the case for belief, as we will see presently.

Indeed, the activation of a panoply of systems in the mind explains the very existence of religious concepts and their cultural success and the fact that people find them plausible and the fact that not everyone finds them so and the way religion appeared in human history and its persistence in the context of modern science....

...but philosophers only had the tools of introspection and reasoning to figure out how minds worked. When psychologists replace all of these with experimental studies, they found a whole menagerie of mental processes that apparently conspire to lead us away from clear and supported beliefs. Consider for instance the following:

Consensus effect: People tend to adjust their impression of a scene to how others describe it; for instance, they may perceieve a facial expression as one of anger, but if various people around them see it as one of disgust, they too say they perceive it as expressing that emotion.

False consensus effect: This is the converse effect, whereby people tend wrongly to judge that their own impressions are shared by others- for instance, that other people's emotional reaction to a scene is substantially similar to theirs.

Generation Effect: Memory for self generated information is often superior to memory for perceived items. In a particular scene you imagined, the details you volunteered will be recalled better than the ones suggested by others.

Memory Illusions: It is easy for experimental psychologists to create false memories, whereby people are intuitively certain they did hear or see some item that was in fact imagined. Also, imagining that you perform a particular action, if that is repeated often enough, may create the illusion that you actually performed it.

Source monitoring defects: People in some circumstances seem to get confused about the source of particular information. (Was it their own inference or someone else's judgement? Did they hear it or see it or read about it?) This makes it difficult to assess the reliability of that information.

Confirmation bias: Once people entertain a particular hypothesis, they tend to deflect and recall positive instances that seem to confirm it, but they are often less good at detecting possible refutation. Positive instances remind one of the hypothesis and are counted as evidence; negative instances do not remind one of the hypothesis and therefore do not count at all.

Cognative dissonance reduction: People tend to readjust memories of previous beliefs and impressions in light of new experience. If some information leads them to form a particular impression of some people, they will tend to think that they had the impression all along, even if their previous judgement were in fact the opposite."

Pascal Boyer
Religion Explained