Religion is as old as mankind. Primitive man had primitive religions and he worshipped the elements of nature like sun, earth, air, cloud, water etc. Advances in civilisation led to institutionalised religions. The basic characteristics of all religions are similar. There is firm belief in a higher, unseen controlling power. Religion appears to be a psychological necessity for mankind. However,...

In the reasoning literature, paranormal beliefs have been proposed to be linked to two related phenomena: a biased perception of causality and a biased information-sampling strategy (believers tend to test fewer hypotheses and prefer confirmatory information). In parallel, recent contingency learning studies showed that, when two unrelated events coincide frequently, individuals interpret this ...

There are systemic features of contemporary Christianity that create an almost invisible class of non-believing clergy, ensnared in their ministries by a web of obligations, constraints, comforts, and community. Exemplars from five Protestant denominations, Southern Baptist, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian, Methodist and Church of Christ, were found and confidentially interviewed at lengt...

al-ghazali was one of the islamic scholars who was concerned to revival of religious teachings. in ihya’ ‘ulum al-din, he tried to provide a pattern in this regard for the believers of his time. in this article, authors attempt to discuss effects of religiosity with emphasis on psychological views of al-ghazali. for this purpose, al-ghazali’s ideas which has been expressed in four parts of ihya...

The ability to mentalize has been marked as an important cognitive mechanism enabling belief in supernatural agents. In five studies we cross-culturally investigated the relationship between mentalizing and belief in supernatural agents with large sample sizes (over 67,000 participants in total) and different operationalizations of mentalizing. The relative importance of mentalizing for endorsi...