the science of belief

[rone]

I've been meaning to share this with you for months now, but i kept forgetting.  Something whipartist posted reminded me about it.

Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe.  Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon.  One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena.  And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry.

The companion interview to this article, "Wired for Creationism?", should also be read.

Comments

[justjenine.livejournal.com]

i was reading the article, (thanks for the link, btw, very interesting stuff) and i snorted at "it's difficult to be a person." raley, who was dressing her pony to have tea with the queen asked why i was laughing and i told her it was something in this article i was reading. she said, in a very queenly and imperious voice, "and what else does this ARTICLE say?" i read the rest of that paragraph and she said, "that is NOT funny. that is SAD. because it is true, someday we WILL all die, and that is SAD, not funny."

she has made no attempt to mitigate the sadness of this with some sort of proposed afterlife. i suspect she may be the next step in human evolution, with the cognitive functioning error corrected.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Either that or she's going to become a goth.