Epiphenom

I wonder how this insight into our cognition appli...

2012-05-30T14:36:39.657+01:00

I wonder how this insight into our cognition applies to the perceived efficiency of different scientific/laboratory methods. Laboratory scientists tend to be a bit ritualistic about how we like to do things...

Well, it's more that the police are not supern...

2012-05-29T16:26:56.444+01:00

Well, it's more that the police are not supernatural. If you have confidence in a 'real' system to keep law and order, you have less incentive to believe in a supernatural one.

Well, it's more that the police are not supern...

2012-05-29T16:26:35.731+01:00

Well, it's more that the police are not supernatural. If you have confidence in a 'real' system to keep law and order, you have less incentive to believe in a supernatural one.

That's kinda interesting. They should definite...

2012-05-29T11:53:14.408+01:00

That's kinda interesting. They should definitely have more of these "how to reduce distrust in atheism" studies.
But I'm wondering, why is police associated with secularism?? There are plenty of religious policemen. But evidently there was an effect.

Very interesting Tom and I particularly admired th...

2012-05-22T10:14:57.181+01:00

Very interesting Tom and I particularly admired the clarity of your prose - a pleasant change from the verbosity and excess use of jargon in much writing.

I think that that this correlation stems from the ...

2012-05-22T01:57:24.108+01:00

I think that that this correlation stems from the peculiar demographics of atheism in the United States. In the US, most people are born into at least nominally Christian families. People who publicly identify as atheists are typically educated, liberal, scientific types who arrive at their atheism for intellectual reasons... it's unsurprising that they are more grammatical writers than your average Christian American.

I think you would get different results if you looked at some ex-Soviet country where atheism is prevalent, and not really linked with education levels.

The only possible reference to abortion is when it...

2012-05-20T23:31:19.864+01:00

The only possible reference to abortion is when it says a fine must be paid if you cause a woman to miscarry, so not equivalent to murder as conservatives in general contend. As to immigration, "thou shalt not oppress an alien among you, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." As for taxes, "render unto Caesar" seems to say "pay them" but on the other hand tax collectors are treated as scum of the earth-well, I guess that may not be too different. In short, they shouldn't expect to find specific commentary on every modern issue.

One way or the other, he ain't what he used to...

2012-05-14T17:25:45.092+01:00

One way or the other, he ain't what he used to be.

The environment where we grow serves as a very big...

2012-05-14T12:52:53.801+01:00

The environment where we grow serves as a very big factor in the attitude and development of a teen. When they grow with people who drinks the tendency is that they will also learn to drink even at a younger age. The question now is how they will be able to handle their drinking. Parents can only be the ones that can help them control their drinking habit.

I think it helps that they mostly don't...

2012-05-13T23:48:56.616+01:00

I think it helps that they mostly don't read the Bible.

If they did, they might notice that the Jesus character never talks about homosexuality or abortion at all. Of course, there is lots of gay-bashing by other characters, just not by Jesus.

Still nothing on abortion, though.

Mr. Rees, "...Christians, which has no rule...

2012-05-12T15:14:56.374+01:00

Mr. Rees,

"...Christians, which has no rules against body donation."

There is no such thing as "Christians" as far as religious rules are concerned. To use such a generality is to display near total ignorance of the Christian world. There are currently 38000 Christian sects active in the world today and they do not have a common set of rules and attitudes about burial rites, disposal of bodies, donation of bodies to science, or organ donation. Even those that have guidelines for their members, allow for a a wide range of personal choice.

Some Christian sects believe in the literal resurrection of the body, these sects would definitely be against both donation of bodies to science and organ donation.

On the other hand, my Christian church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has this official policy: 'The donation of organs and tissues is a selfless act that often results in great benefit to individuals with medical conditions. The decision to will or donate one’s own body organs or tissue for medical purposes, or the decision to authorize the transplant of organs or tissue from a deceased family member, is made by the individual or the deceased member’s family.'

There are few, if any, religions in the world today that have wide-ranging 'theologically correct beliefs' that their members should or are expected to adhere--> no more than 'humanism' has non-theologically correct views that you and other members of the various humanist societies must adhere to and act on in certain ways. To pretend that this is the case, for you can not possibly be that uninformed, is sophistry.

To attempt to denigrate the deeply held personal religious understandings of people as 'folk...beliefs' displays hubristic ignorance.

Where in the world did you get the idea that religious belief was a set of rules or decrees from religious authorities that a group of like-identified people all hold exactly the same? A patently silly and improbable thought, and certainly not based on any reality.

What the members of a religious group have in common is a shared universal view (an enlarged world view) that helps them to understand and deal with the universally-large spiritual dimensions of existence. Not some set of rules or enforced beliefs.

I suggest a full course in Comparative World Religions to fill out your knowledge gaps.

Actually, almost all the religious people in this ...

2012-05-11T21:52:52.925+01:00

Actually, almost all the religious people in this study were Christians, which has no rules against body donation.

And what about organ donors? Again, the major religions don't block this. e.g. "Malaysian Muslims still reluctant to donate organs"

"Despite fatwas (religious decrees) allowing organ donation, Muslims in the Malaysia still remain reluctant to donate organs, said the chief coordinator of the National Transplant Resource Centre (NTRC) Dr Lela Yasmin Mansor."

There has a been some good research into how folk religious beliefs often differ from theologically correct beliefs. For example, even though people often state that their God is omniscient and omniprescent, when you probe their beliefs it's often clear that they intuitively treat there god as neither.

So we shouldn't be too surprised by these results.

Sir, If you are going to write about religion, y...

2012-05-11T17:59:12.166+01:00

Sir,

If you are going to write about religion, you ought to make a least some small effort to learn about it.

Nearly all major religions have beliefs about the proper disposal or disposition of the dead bodies of their believers.

It is the non-believers that think there is nothing particularly significant about their body after their death - after all, they are dead and have no further existence of any kind, so the body is just another piece of dead meat.

Generally (and that is a difficult thing to say if we must be inclusive of all major religions) religious people tend to believe that at death the spiritual component of themselves is separated from the physical body. We have to stay pretty general here or we'll run up on some doctrinal shoal. What happens next is not generally agreed upon but we can safely say that most believers have some sort of belief about how and why their dead body should be cared for in a particular way. Some of these beliefs conflict with the idea of donating a body to science or even donating organs after death.

Your flip quip 'And perhaps, despite the theological teachings that say a dead body is empty, perhaps ordinary folk-religion takes a different perspective.' comes across, to me at least, as the statement of someone who is willfully ignorant of the subject he writes about.

It's a fair point to make that neither system ...

2012-05-06T21:15:43.450+01:00

It's a fair point to make that neither system should be considered to be 'better'. They each have pros and cons, depending on the situation.

Another point is that it may simply be that, culturally, these subjects associated analytical thinking with non-religion, and intuitive thinking with non-religion. So when they are primed accordingly, they shift their responses.

"Deep thinking" is a kind of misnomer he...

2012-05-06T13:35:03.931+01:00

"Deep thinking" is a kind of misnomer here. In cognitive psychology, it has become accepted to distinguish two systems of thinking, System 2 analytic, working memory analysis, correlates with IQ and System 1 a large and open array of thought processes about which little is known, that involves unconscious processes and conscious outcomes, and relies on both innate thought and the accumulated conclusions of a lifetime of experiences.
The distinction is presented in Nobel laureate Kahneman's recent book. The task in question (bottle and cap) is part of a quick and dirty method to assess System 2 processing.
Hard to say which is deeper. Harder yet to determine which is the way to go, when coming to an entire worldview. To allow System 2 to get a handle on the issue, one must basically reduce the question of belief in God to something akin to a scientific hypothesis, and some religious folks do endorse this approach. To me, this is a kind of secular version of what religion is about.

It was a parallel-group study, meaning that half t...

2012-05-02T20:57:53.920+01:00

It was a parallel-group study, meaning that half the subjects got the 'analytical thinking' prime, and the other half got the neutral prime. So, for example, half read the questions in a normal, plain font.

Then they measure beliefs.

So, strictly speaking we don't know that their beliefs went down after the analytical thinking prime, just that they were lower than the other group.

But, assuming both groups were the same at the start, and the neutral prime had no effect, then that's the most likely explanation.

Haha, at the ending. But I'm curious, were the...

2012-05-02T19:51:50.525+01:00

Haha, at the ending. But I'm curious, were the students asked about the religious position before the test and after or during the test, for comparison? I mean, how exactly did the researchers know belief in the supernatural decreased? What two things were compared?

Wow, finally Comic Sans has a justification for it...

2012-05-01T17:59:48.838+01:00

Wow, finally Comic Sans has a justification for its existence.

Peter - I meant to write Canada, not Columbia. Da...

2012-05-01T08:44:26.208+01:00

Peter - I meant to write Canada, not Columbia. Damned word blindness :) Fixed now!

One thing in the article needs to be corrected. Th...

2012-05-01T01:02:31.767+01:00

One thing in the article needs to be corrected. The University of British Columbia is in Vancouver, not Columbia.

Other than that, a fascinating read and a very clever way of testing an idea.

That's pretty fascinating. I had read how wea...

2012-05-01T00:26:17.771+01:00

That's pretty fascinating. I had read how wearing a white lab coat could help increase your concentration, but having skepticism of religion triggered by such a physical cue is unexpected, at least to me.

Sometimes the research you review here seems like ...

2012-04-30T22:11:12.753+01:00

Sometimes the research you review here seems like a Poe. But I know it isn't.

Two things. First, we may have intuitively 'kn...

2012-04-29T07:38:44.532+01:00

Two things. First, we may have intuitively 'known' it, but it hadn't ben demonstrated in a controlled, scientific experiment. It's always necessary to challenge assumptions, especially seeing as we know from other experiments that most people have rather flattering beliefs about their own abilities!

Second, there's been a general assumption that intelligence is directly linked to non-belief. What these studies show is that it's maybe not intelligence, but rather thinking style, that's the key factor.

This is an obvious correlation. Haven't we alw...

2012-04-28T21:18:23.682+01:00

This is an obvious correlation. Haven't we always known about it? Most atheists are atheists because they've had a good long think about religion, and decided that it was a sum with an incorrect answer. Religion itself has become part of intuition, most of us grow up around it and are presented with the ideas involved as answers for questions we can't understand. As Todd said, intuition is part trained, and from a young age most of us were trained into believing many ideas related to religion, whether we knew it or not. E.g. heaven is up, hell is down. Being a virgin is a good thing. Etc. All rather random in isolation, but they stem from religion. And I also think that the human race has been getting cleverer as the number of atheists has risen. And that doesn't take a genius to notice! Instinct is becoming less and less powerful in our decision making and lives because we're getting further and further away from the animals we are. Basically, to sum up, I would just like to say 'well, duh!'

Anon, we're in the same boat - when I saw that...

2012-04-27T20:22:47.340+01:00

Anon, we're in the same boat - when I saw that question and answer I assumed that the paper must have had a typo in it!