Faith vs. Facts - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...m-luhrmann-faith-vs-facts.html
faith facts religion morality belief mentality language concepts psychology
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a broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures.
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People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set
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the very language people use changes when they talk about religious beings, and the changes mean that they think about their realness differently.
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to say, “I believe that Jesus Christ is alive” signals that you know that other people might not think so. It also asserts reverence and piety
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We seem to regard religious beliefs and factual beliefs with what the philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen calls different “cognitive attitudes.”
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when people consider the truth of a religious belief, what the belief does for their lives matters more than, well, the facts.
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We evaluate religious beliefs more with our sense of destiny, purpose and the way we think the world should be
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religious and factual beliefs play different roles in interpreting the same events. Religious beliefs explain why, rather than how
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It’s the young kids who seem skeptical when researchers ask them about gods and ancestors, and the adults who seem clear and firm. It seems that supernatural ideas do things for adults they do not yet do for children.
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sacred values are immune to the normal cost-benefit trade-offs that govern other dimensions of our lives.
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The danger point seems to be when people feel themselves to be completely fused with a group defined by its sacred value.
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One of the interesting things about sacred values, however, is that they are both general (“I am a true Christian”) and particular (“I believe that abortion is murder”)
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It is possible that this is the key to effective negotiation, because the ambiguity allows the sacred value to be reframed without losing its essential truth
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these new ideas about religious belief should shape the way people negotiate about ownership of the land, just as they should shape the way we think about climate change deniers and vaccine avoiders. People aren’t dumb in not recognizing the facts. They are using a reasoning process that responds to moral arguments more than scientific ones, and we should understand that when we engage.