IIIIITHE1IIIII said:
MTZehvor said:
My point is that this study is a moot point at best. Even if you believe that religion is utterly stupid and pointless, and people are stupid for believing in it (which I would argue is not the case, but again, different argument), there is no connection behind the link this study attempts to draw and the actual beliefs of adults.
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Then allow me to make one: Only religious adults believe that prayers can alter the chances of different outcomes, which is a clear case of religious people having difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction.
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I feel like you've missed the entire point.
Here we go once more:
The article's point is that kids' ability to determine the likelihood of a story being able to occur is skewed by being taught stories from the Bible which would seem far-fetched to most people. In other words, kids are unable to determine the probability of an event actually being able to occur because they believe that similar events have ocurred in the past.
The situation here is entirely different, because adults have the ability to weigh the probability, and STILL believe in it. In other words, they believe in spite of the improbability. They realize how far-fetched it sounds, and still believe in it. Kids, meanwhile, believe in it without recognizing how far-fetched it sounds. That is the difference.
Think of it like this: there are plenty of adults out there that believe in God despite not having done so as a child (and, to be fair, the inverse is true as well). IF this finding had any link towards adults, i.e. adults only believed in religion because their ability to determine the normal from the far-fetched was obscured, then we would not expect many children who are raised secular to become religious. But that isn't the case, only 46% of Americans who were unaffiliated with religion as children remain so as adults. Granted, we're discussing regions much bigger than just America here, but the point is still the same regardless; lots of people still believe in what seems far-fetched regardless of whether they were supposedly indoctrinated as kids.
My point is simply that there is no link between kids's ability to distinguish between far-fetched and realistic and adults'. Kids cannot distinguish, and so believe both. Adults can distinguish, and believe in spite of the difficulty. That's the difference, and why I believe this study is pointless towards drawing conclusions about adulthood.