I have to wonder how and why faith can trump reason for many people. No amount of patient reason will change the religious fundamentalist. Perhaps it would be cruel if they don't have a god on which to prop their lives then they have nothing at all.

The following is an extract from an interesting article discussing Psychology’s Treacherous Trio: Confirmation Bias, Cognitive Dissonance, and Motivated Reasoning

"In 2009, a nine year-old Brazilian girl became pregnant with twins after being raped by her stepfather. With advice from doctors, her mother opted for her to have an abortion. After pleading with Brazil, which outlaws abortions except when the mother’s life is in danger or when she has been raped, her daughter was granted one. Then things got really ugly. When the Archbishop of the city of Recife heard the news he invoked Canon law and excommunicated the mother and daughter and the members of the medical team who performed the abortion; the stepfather, meanwhile, remained a loyal and accepted member of the church.

Was it right for the girl to have an abortion? Was the Archbishop correct to condone her, the mother, and the medical team? And what of Brazil’s stance on the matter?

We’ve heard these debates fleshed out countless times, and almost always to no avail. Far more interesting (and quantifiable) are the psychological forces that fuel these conversations. While many like to believe that they have a special access to the truth, the reality is that we all see the world not as it is, but as we want it to be: Republicans watch Fox while Democrats watch MSNBC; creationists see fossils as evidence of God, evolutionary biologists see fossils as evidence of evolution; a mother sees abortion as the best thing for her daughter, and the church sees it as unholy and sinful. You get the point – our beliefs dictate what we see and how we see."

Cont'd

Cont'd

"The question is: why do humans remain so steadfast to their beliefs, sometimes even in the face of overwhelming opposing evidence?

The answer rests in a few psychological tendencies that when mixed together form a potent recipe for ignorance. The first is confirmation bias, which I wrote about last month over at Scientificamerican.com. Confirmation bias is exactly what it sounds like – the propensity for people to look for what confirms their beliefs and ignore what contradicts their beliefs while not being concerned for the truth.

The classic confirmation bias study comes from Stanford back in the late 1970s. Researchers brought in two groups of participants, one that supported capital punishment and one that opposed capital punishment. Both groups read two studies, “one seemingly confirming and one seemingly disconfirming their existing beliefs about the deterrent efficacy of the death penalty.” After reading the studies and other commentary, all of which were fake, researchers found that the proponents and opponents of capital punishment rated the studies that confirmed their point of view as higher than the studies that disconfirmed their point of view. Sadly, as the authors conclude, “people of opposing views can each find support for those views in the same body of evidence.”

Then there’s cognitive dissonance, which describes a “state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent.” Leon Festinger introduced it in 1957 after he infiltrated and studied a UFO cult convinced the world would end at midnight on December 21st, 1954. In his book When Prophecy Fails, Festinger recounts how after midnight came and went, cult members began to look for reasons for why the end of the world had not come. Eventually the leader of the cult, Marian Keech, explained to her members that she received a message from automatic writing, which told her that the God of Earth decided to spare the planet from destruction. Relieved, the cult members continued to spread their doomsday ideology to non-believers. "

http://tinyurl.com/3ecflzo

Oh gawd, hasn't this been settled?

Hands up all those who've met God or have some contact details

Anyone?

Anyone at all?

Next subject...

woot,

“Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to an awesome time, with awesome realistic people that want to work toward maintaining our secular nation…”

And to give your anticipation a wee boost, go to this link and watch the video :o)

http://www.atheistconvention.org.au/

See you next April

David

Well if most of the atheists posting here are any guide, the movement's as pompously self-righteous as any religious institution--minus the theology, or any content whatever bar a slavish and credulous adherence to "reason", whatever that is. As if it has ever been anything untinctured or reasonable per se. No one can deny the accomplishments of empirical science, but to hoist it aloft as something we may huddle round, to witlessly try to take warmth from its cold light, while simultaneously denying and denigrating those other capacities of the mind (sorry, brain; the mind doesn't exist either does it?) that beguile us, that facilitate aesthetic and altruistic and sundry numinous experience that confounds the rationalising purge, is to deny a fascinating aspect of human nature--this mysterious and persistent desire for meaning--purely because we don't understand it in "rational" terms; and, ironically, on the fatuous grounds that we do! That we rationally see through it all, that we've solved the enigma of our existence once and for all and may discard everything extraneous to the dictates of reason--that is extraneous ultimately to a clumsily-calculating and credulous faith in the physical senses. I'm not sure whether to condemn it as arrogant, artless, or the height of folly!
I hasten to add that I have no hope in a God or an afterlife. Nevertheless the riddle of life remains a riddle for me. I think Ditchkins's positivism is as credulous as Christianity.

P.S.
Ammonite, my posts have been perfectly clear from the start, just not what the faithful want to hear. I'm just spinning my wheels.

It's really sad that you see science as something cold Squeers :(

The riddle of life may be a riddle to you, but it is also to science. Without it, there would be no science. You look at the riddle and appear to want to close your eyes and cover your ears, whilst putting down those that investigate it, take it all on board and adventure into it's depths. You see no enjoyment in it, no sense of wonder and delight. To you it seems to be that it is a cold, harsh thing.

What a wonderful, enlightening, beautiful thing is reality, yet many people see it as not enough and want more :( how terribly sad :(

The scientific method is our best method for investigation of it. I don't see why you think as you do of it. That you cannot see beauty in understanding.