What's New Archive ● 2018 ● April
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April 22, 2018
Added Prejudice in Religions (2018) by Michael Moore to the Psychology of Religion page under Theism in the Modern Documents section of the Secular Web Library.
In this paper exploring the links between prejudice and religion, Michael Moore distinguishes between a kind of institutionalized religiosity that promotes an in-group mentality, and a more interiorized kind of belongingness. Moore then goes on to consider several competing explanations of the demonstrated connections between religiosity and prejudice. For example, psychologists have long noted the tension between professed attitudes of welcoming openness among the religious and an actual positive correlation between religiosity and prejudice. Part of the reason for such a correlation is that intolerance is almost the inevitable outcome of privileging one's own religion as more important than all others. There are also significant correlations between greater religious participation or identification and greater levels of racial prejudice, even apart from the correlation between racist attitudes and authoritarian fundamentalism in particular.
New in the Kiosk: An Earthly Version of Pascal's Wager (2018) by Brian Edward Hicks
Blaise Pascal is famous for, among other things, devising an argument for belief in God's existence even in the absence of good reasons to believe in God. He proposed that a rational person would reason that if God does not exist, then either believing or not believing that He does exist would cost nothing. But a rational person would also reason that if God does in fact exist, then failing to believe that He does would cost personal salvation. Does Pascal's wager really work? Would a rational person place greater value on a questionable promise of benefit than on intellectual rigor? How rational would a parallel belief in "Philo's benefactor" be, and what does the answer to that question tell us about the reasonableness of forming beliefs on the basis of Pascal's wager?
Recommended reading from the Bookstore: The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies--How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (2011) by Michael Shermer.
In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths. Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.