Religion Explained

Generation effect: Memory for self-generated information is often superior to memory for perceived items. In a particular scene you imagined, the details you volunteered will be recalled better than the ones suggested by others.

People are said to believe in supernatural agents because they are superstitious, they are led astray by their emotions, they are not mentally balanced, they are primitive, they do not understand probability, they are not scientifically trained, they are brainwashed by their culture, they are too insecure to challenge received wisdom. In this view, people believe because they fail to (or forget to, have no time to, are unwilling to, or just cannot) censure ill-formed or poorly justified thoughts

Consensus effect: People tend to adjust their impression of a scene to how others describe it; they may see for instance a face as angry, but if various people around them see is as 'disgusted' they too say they perceive it as expressing that emotion.

False consensus effect: This is the converse effect, whereby people tend wrongly to judge that their own impressions are shared by others, for instance that other people's emotional reaction to a scene is substantially similar to theirs.

The beliefs would vanish if people were more consistent in applying common-sense principles of mental management like the following:
Only allow clear and precise thoughts to enter your mind.
Only allow consistent thoughts.
Consider the evidence for a claim before accepting it.
Only consider refutable claims.

literacy allows complex mathematical operations during which some intermediate results must be stored. It allows elaborate arguments because it allows people to make long lists of elements that prove a particular point. It allows people to think of various conceptual structures as visual templates. In this way the 'sketchpad' aspect of writing is every bit as important as its long-term 'storage' function.

The explanation for the cultural success of rituals is to be found in processes that are not really transparent to practitioners, and become clearer only with the help of psychological experiments, anthropological comparisons and evolutionary considerations.

As I have emphasised several times already, many cultural creations, from visual art to music to the low status of tanners to the fascination of corpses, are successful because they activate a variety of mental capacities, most of which have other, very precise functions. In other words a lot of human culture consists of salient cognitive gadgets that have a great attention-grabbing power and high relevance for human minds as a side-effect of these minds being organised the way they are.

Evolution does not create specific behaviours; it creates mental organisation that makes people behave in particular ways.

In the case of misfortune, our propensity to think of salient events in terms of social interaction creates a context where supposedly powerful agents become more convincingly powerful. In both cases religious concepts are parasitic, which is just a colourful way of describing what technically would be called a relevance effect. The concepts are parasitic in the sense that their successful transmission is greatly enhanced by mental capacities that would be there, gods or no gods.