Children Exposed To Religion Have Difficulty Distinguishing Fact From Fiction | Hacker News Reader

Children Exposed To Religion Have Difficulty Distinguishing Fact From Fiction

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54 pointsgivan26 comments

Full text of the paper is paywalled on the linked wiley.com page, but is available from Boston University at [1]. The corresponding author is an assistant professor there, so I assume that this is a legitimate copy of the paper.

[1] http://www.bu.edu/learninglab/files/2012/05/Corriveau-Chen-H... [pdf]

Slightly skeptical because the title sounds so reinforcing of what I suspect is the case. Would be interesting to see with larger sample sizes.

I always suspected that the real reason things like fantasy novels/harry potter are so often banned is that teaching people to identify fact from fiction might cause awkward questions.

Funnily enough, most of the kids from our super-religious relatives have gone into the army - another institution where you are told what to do, and told what is morally 'correct'.

Without wishing to seem rude, they clearly weren't paying very much attention to the "Thou shall not kill" bit of the bible!

There is an anthropological theory that religion itself ( as we know it ) was an invented construct to overcome the taboo against shedding blood to facilitate war.

Don't think that the bloodshed taboo is all that ancient or quaint; it was a significant concern for , say, 18th century surgeons.

This is a common misconception. The injunction is only against unlawful (or more broadly, non socially sanctioned) killings. Killing while engaged in warfare is acceptable by this code.

It's not a misconception.

It doesn't say "thou shalt not kill unlawfully" or "thou shalt not kill without social sanction". It says "thou shalt not kill". Period. Nowhere in the Bible is any condition or qualification placed on this commandment.

Reconciling this commandment with all the killing in the Bible that God has no problem with is not as easy as you want it to be.

I'm religious and my young children are believers - and yet we're all quite 'cynical.' Properly understood, doubt is a component of faith in our religion.

What I see lacking in children's (religious and non-religious alike) are the squashing of curiosity and questioning: Some of my children's friends have school curriculum that reads more like propaganda than facts and reasoning. And woe be the child that contradicts the local public-school teacher.

If this effect in the article was only contained to the religious, I'd be quite surprised, as the way some topics in some school are covered include a lot of hand-waving and rote acceptance.

As it is explained in the paper, I don't see how these results contradict the theory laid out in Born Believers. Young children, even at the age where they begin to be able to argue on the basis of causality, will constantly have had their world views challenged, conditioned and corrected by their authorities, whether these authorities are religious, secular, right or wrong.

As even old, intelligent and wise people will have to make constant leaps of faith to make sense of the world, I find it hard to accept that children aren't inherently inclined to accept events as non-causal.

I'd suggest that without a bigger sample size, and more obvious selection criteria 66 is an absurdly small sample size on which to base those claims.

What is fact and what is fiction depends on person's senses and beliefs. Perception of a blind person is much different from perception of non-blind person. Accordingly, perception of a spiritual person is much different from perception of non-spiritual person.

> What is fact and what is fiction depends on person's senses and beliefs.

You probably didn't mean that: the difference between fact and fiction doesn't depend on anyone's senses and beliefs, but on what the world is as a whole.

What we think is fact or fiction will depend on our senses and beliefs.

Basically, even a genuine belief in in unicorns and pixie dust don't make those a fact. It's fiction, the believer just doesn't know it.

As for religion and secularity… well, either there is a God, or there isn't. If there is, secularity won't make it go away. If there isn't, religion won't make it true.

There is no objetive reality, only subjetive. The "real world" is what your senses and knowledge tells you. You claim there is a "true reality" outside your mind, and I claim that for all it is worth, are the same and indistinguishable. If there's something we can't observe, does it really exists?

The important is to accept we are wrong when evidence arises, and change our mental model.

> There is no objetive reality, only subjetive. The "real world" is what your senses and knowledge tells you.

I was never sure how to deal with this postmodernist crap. When someone deliberately confuses the map and the territory, what can I say?

Let us just observe that sometimes, I believe something, and then, I see something else happen. That tend to give me a sense that something is going on outside of my mind. http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth

This generalizes to the entire humanity, by the way. Most people believed in a Young Earth, then we discovered fossils. Most people used to think the Earth was the centre of the universe, then Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, proved otherwise.

> The important is to accept we are wrong when evidence arises, and change our mental model.

That I must agree with. On the other hand, I'm not sure how this can help those who believe in magical thinking.

> I was never sure how to deal with this postmodernist crap. When someone deliberately confuses the map and the territory, what can I say?

Hit them with a rock. Objective reality hurts.

I suppose if you remember creating yourself, and exactly how and why you did that before you had experienced any of your subjective reality (so presumably there was none), then your view is both worthy and consistent.

Serious questions for you mcosta: If you don't believe in objective reality then what do you think made you? Where did the rules (i.e. chemistry, DNA, neural layout) of your mind come from that allow you to function and have subjective experiences?

The objective reality is really just made of jello. We humans are blind to this reality. Except Bill Cosby, he gets it.

I know for the longest time growing up as a Christian child I assumed ghosts must be real.

Which would be pretty consistent. I mean, even if souls are supposed to go to Heaven or Hell, the idea of having them lingering upon our world is not outlandish.

Souls are supposed to be real, so why not ghosts? Yeah, let's ask that: if souls are real, are ghosts real too? Why, or why not?

> if souls are real, are ghosts real too? Why, or why not?

No, because God tells us so.

"real" to who?

  "real" is of type        (Concept -> World  -> Bool)
  Expected a value of type (Concept -> Person -> Bool)
  The type 'World' and 'Person' are not compatible.

And no, I am not kidding. Your question relies on a flawed assumption.

Was this caused by religion or the parochial school?

This post was killed by user flags.

Super tiny sample size.

well, and also 6 year olds. Every now and then, while talking to a 6 year old, I try to imagine what it might be like to be forensically interviewing one. Very tricky and very easy to leave the result of such an interview open to post hoc criticism.

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