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Post by merkavah12 on Jul 30, 2014 13:08:14 GMT
www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-28537149"According to new research from Boston University, young children with a religious background are less able to distinguish between fantasy and reality compared with their secular counterparts." "Some commentators believe these findings show that religious children use their specific background to explain the magical elements of fantasy stories. "By relating seemingly impossible religious events achieved through divine intervention (eg, Jesus transforming water into wine) to fictional narratives, religious children would more heavily rely on religion to justify their false categorisations," writes Shadee Ashtari for the Huffington Post. This blurring of reality and fantasy, even for children, is not always a good thing, says notable atheist blogger Hemant Mehta. "Religion blurs the lines between fact and fiction. You only hope kids exposed to it figure it out soon enough," he writes for Patheos. In a provocative fashion, Mehta says that the study could be viewed as "evidence for those who believe religious indoctrination is a form of mental child abuse." Thoughts?
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Post by unkleE on Jul 31, 2014 12:14:58 GMT
Connor Wood, who is studying the science of religion and blogs at the excellent Science on Religion blog, reckons this is a beat-up - see his piece with the tongue in cheek title Informal Study Finds Bloggers Can’t Tell Fact from Fiction. He argues that the study was poorly designed (if it wanted to test that conclusion) and in fact only proves the point if you assume that Bible stories are fantasy. I'm not sure I fully agree with him, but he knows more about it than I do.
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syzygy
Master of the Arts
Posts: 103
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Post by syzygy on Aug 2, 2014 14:10:23 GMT
A reply to this study, which I read somewhere but can't find now, says, basically, So what? Other studies show that familiarity with alternative worlds in childhood (whether one believes in them or not) has benefits for life through adulthood. Something to do with imagination.
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Post by ignorantianescia on Dec 19, 2014 11:41:27 GMT
A reply to this study, which I read somewhere but can't find now, says, basically, So what? Other studies show that familiarity with alternative worlds in childhood (whether one believes in them or not) has benefits for life through adulthood. Something to do with imagination. This point is reflected in an article by Vox about Barrett's thesis. Both Corriveau and Barrett make the point that a broader imagination may help in useful situations that face common-sense bias, like accepting counter-intuitive science. www.vox.com/2014/7/30/5949421/are-kids-born-with-an-innate-belief-in-godThe article is a bit disorderly, unfortunately. It still isn't clear to me what finding exactly is supposed to contradict Barrett's theory.
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Post by himself on Jan 2, 2015 15:09:50 GMT
Apparently lots of people have lost the ability to tell science from pseudo-science.
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Post by chavoux on Jul 8, 2015 20:37:30 GMT
A data point of one, but I distictly remember that I made a clear distinction between Jesus (God) and "fairy tales" from a very young age. I did actually have an issue with quasi-realistic characters like spiderman/superman/Tarzan instead. :-) ;-)
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