Free A Manual for Creating Atheists by Peter Boghossian Page B

Boyer, research in the areas of anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, neurology, experimental psychology, etc. They’re all moving in similar directions, which is to seek reductive explanations for the appearance of religion in human affairs. They provide interesting albeit speculative answers to a range of related questions: Where did religion come from? What purpose does it serve? How can these issues be viewed from the standpoint of evolutionary biology? In what way does religion help the survival of the fittest? What is religion’s survival value from a cultural standpoint? Why do human cultures invariably develop religious superstitions and ideologies?
There’s a vast body of literature in sales, marketing, and advertising about persuasion and convincing people to buy products they don’t need. Entire industries revolve around figuring out how to influence consumers’ purchasing behavior. For more on these industries and the techniques they use, I recommend two PBS Frontline documentaries: The Persuaders and The Merchants of Cool .
An interesting but highly technical paper that relates attitudes about information sources to doxastic attitudes is Baltag, Rodenhäuser, and Smets’s “Doxastic Attitudes as Belief-Revision Policies” (Baltag, Rodenhäuser, & Smets, 2011). They write, “This paper explores the idea that an agent’s ‘information uptake’ (i.e., what she does with some new informational input) depends substantially on her attitude towards the source of information: her assessment of the reliability of the source” (p. 1). Their research is applicable to faith-based beliefs formed on the perception of the evidential accuracy of ancient texts. This article also opens up potential new interventions that target attitudes toward sources of information.
Additionally, I’d recommend social psychologist Arie Kruglanski’s body of work on what he terms “the need for closure.” Kruglanski has published interesting, though not entirely accessible for a lay audience, articles about the importance of being closed-minded.
Another type of doxastic closure involves ego and narcissism. For example, there are times when we’re too narcissistically involved in our conclusions, when our egos have been involved in a judgment, when we’ve spat out an opinion we’ve held for a long time, or when we don’t want to consider objections because we like to win arguments. It’s important not just to be aware, but also to be sincere when asking ourselves why we hold the beliefs we do. Sincerity is indispensible not just in leading an examined life, but also in having meaningful relationships.
The less pedantic sounding terms “snapping” (Dubrow-Eichel, 1989, p. 195) and “unfreezing” (Kim, 1979, p. 210) have been used to describe the moment of successful deprogramming when subjects cognitively leave religious cults.
In an interesting study, Orenstein relates religious belief and church attendance to belief in the paranormal (Orenstein, 2002). Orenstein makes this interesting and overlooked observation: “A particularly intriguing comparison in these data is between religious variables and educational attainment. There have been numerous calls for upgrading science education in order to combat paranormal beliefs… . However, the effects of education are so small that it appears that values and faith rather than rationality are the driving factors in paranormal belief. Moreover, if paranormal beliefs are as closely attached to religious beliefs as these data indicate, were the schools to present a skeptical position regarding the paranormal, they would run the risk of arousing a religiously-based opposition. Some observers suggest that the legitimacy of science itself is under attack by supporters of the paranormal” (Orenstein, 2002, p. 309).
In The Believing Brain , American author Michael Shermer discusses how science education does next to nothing to undermine belief in the paranormal (Shermer,