With religion people were usually never argued into it in the first place, so they usually cannot be argued out of it.

Once religious people can admit this fact, then and only then do they have the potential for questioning what seems so obvious to them. But studies show they won't even admit this against the overwhelming evidence of psychological studies. Here then is an excerpt from The Outsider Test for Faith(OTF):

Look at Michael Shermer’s extensive research on why people believe in God and weird things. Nine out of ten people say that other people are influenced by nonrational factors to believe in weird things, and yet these same respondents turn around and say that they are the exceptions to this. How is it possible for nine out of ten respondents to be the exceptions to what nine out of ten of them recognize to be the rule? Logically they cannot all be correct about this. Either 90 percent of them came to their conclusions rationally, which we KNOW is not the case from psychological studies, or the respondents are simply deceiving themselves and are no different than other people.

As human beings we have what Shermer calls an intellectual attribution bias, “where we consider our own actions as being rationally motivated, whereas we see those of others as more emotionally driven. Our commitment to a belief is attributed to a rational decision and intellectual choice; whereas the other person’s is attributed to need and emotion.” And Shermer goes on to explain that “Smart people, because they are more intelligent and better educated, are better able to give intellectual reasons justifying their beliefs that they arrived at for non-intelligent reasons,” even though “smart people, like everyone else, recognize that emotional needs and being raised to believe something are how most of us most of the time come to our beliefs.”

So upon what basis do nearly all believers around the world think they are the exceptions if this is the case? They CANNOT all be the exceptions! Believers are simply in denial when they claim their religious faith passes the OTF. Psychology has repeatedly shown us that people, all people, seek to confirm what they believe, and we also have an intellectual attribution bias to explain away what we intuitively know to be true. We do not come to our conclusions based solely on rational considerations. Because of these biases, believers should be just as skeptical that their particular religious faith passes the OTF as they do when other believers in other different religions claim the same thing.

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