Although religious belief is often claimed to help with physical ailments including pain, it is unclear what psychological and neural mechanisms underlie the influence of religious belief on pain. By analogy to other top-down processes of pain modulation we hypothesized that religious belief helps believers reinterpret the emotional significance of pain, leading to emotional detachment from it....

At least since M ARX and F REUD , there has existed a conceptualization of religious belief as pathological. 1 According to this view, religious beliefs result from, and are indicative of, some kind of intellectual flaw or deficiency (P LANTINGA 2000). We might say that religious beliefs are here construed as reflecting doxastic dysfunction (from the Greek word “doxa”, meaning “opinion” or “bel...

asking about the relation of religion and modernity has been always reflected by scholars, and answering it has formed different approaches, especially from the last parts of qajar monarchy. the intellectual approach follows originality of modernity and complete transition from tradition. in contrast, the traditional approach believes in following the tradition of predecessors and independence ...

This article reports on research undertaken in 2011–2012 into the role of religion and belief in one British university. In this indicative qualitative case study, we observed six important features in relation to religion and belief: a clear divide in attitudes to the place of religion and belief between operations and curriculum; a lack of knowledge and understanding of the religious landscap...

The authors review experimental evidence that religious conviction can be a defensive source of compensatory control when personal or external sources of control are low. They show evidence that (a) belief in religious deities and secular institutions can serve as external forms of control that can compensate for manipulations that lower personal control and (b) religious conviction can also se...

In writing this paper I hope to lessen the polarization of religious discourse by making space for agnosticism between atheism and religious faith. I do this by critiquing two arguments against agnosticism, one offered by a ““new atheists,”” Richard Dawkins, and the other offered by a defender of faith, William James. The new atheists are notable not only for the strident rhetorical attacks on ...

As citizens of the most technologically advanced and economically developed country in the world, nearly all Americans stalwartly maintain their faith in God, much more so than residents of other postindustrial countries (Norris and Ingelhart 2004). But what is the content and meaning of this belief? Perhaps belief in God has become so pervasive in contemporary American culture that it reflects...

Th e neurological study of religious behavior, belief, and experience faces many challenges related to research conception, experimental design, and interpretation of results. Some of these problems are common to other types of neurological study of behavioral and cognitive phenomena. Others are distinctive to the specifically religious domain of behavior, belief, and experience. Th is paper di...

This paper uses a psychological/computational theory of emotional coherence to explain several aspects of religious belief and practice. After reviewing evidence for the importance of emotion to religious thought and cognition in general, it describes psychological and social mechanisms of emotional cognition. These mechanisms are relevant to explaining the acquisition and maintenance of religi...

Abstract All the cards seem to be stacked against belief in immortality. Nonetheless, resources of particular religious traditions may avail where generic philosophical solutions fall short. With attention boredom and narcissism critiques, intimations deathlessness Śāntideva's radical altruism, recent Christian debates on soul intermediate state, I propose two criteria for a coherent religion-s...