Religious faith is sustained by multiple independent psychological flames

Evidence

These findings are easy to misunderstand, so let’s start by clarifying what they don’t mean. We observed a dip in religious belief; we certainly did not turn fervent believers into atheists by a single visit to our lab. Moreover, these results don’t mean that we can dispose of religion altogether by simply encouraging analytical thinking. Why? Because many flames sustain the fire of religious faith. The fire keeps burning even if one of the flames (intuitive appeal) is subdued. Some of these other flames lie deep in perennial human anxieties, such as anxieties about death and randomness. Others are equally powerful cultural forces that push people toward faith. (I turn to these next.) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 607

Categorization

• XREF: For the Sin reader: Rodrigues’ faith surviving apostasy and analytic doubt makes sense if belief rests on several independent flames beyond intuition, such as death and randomness anxieties. — connects to: Allport’s bipolar religion model was empirically dismantled into multiple independent dimensions; Three independent labs converged that religious belief tracks intuitive thinking. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 600