Although many people believe in God or gods, many populations remain non-believers. The issues of belief and non-believer keep fluctuating over time because of many underlying reasons among different people. Religious believe and disbelieve primarily influenced by both the psychology of an individual and the cultural phenomenon in which one is exposed. When one's mind is thinking about something, there is a likelihood that he or she will believe in something that the mind is thinking and the nature of the environment in which one has exposed plays a more significant role when it comes to the issue of believing. One tends to believe in something that most people believe within the same environment(Sanchez et al., 2017)
Statistics show that 92% believe in God, while 71% believe with absolute certainty. The number of youth who are committed to attending church is reducing yearly with a percentage of 28% as compared to adults which range from 48%-52%. The reason attributed to this is that there is a changing the need for youth populations. Studies show that 47% of Americans who are not attending church services are thinking of a church to attend, but the determining factor depends on the friend who is inviting them. The percentage of those who believe church and religion are helpful is 49%, while 37% could not find any negative impact on attending church services. The percentage who attend church weekly is 17.7% (Marler & Hadaway, 2002), (Hadaway & Marler, 2005)
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
One gap in the literature that is believed to be the primary cause of religious disbelieve among many people is the issue of the analytical thinking process. According to theories that try to explain the human thinking process, there are two essential processes that are very crucial when it comes to human thinking. The two processes are relying on, and frugal heuristics that results in intuitive responses and the other relies on deliberate, analytical processing. Both processes can run parallel to each other, but deliberate, analytical processing often overrides the system that relies on a frugal heuristic. There has been evidence that the intuitive cognitive process is able to facilitate and support the idea of believing in supernatural things which is a significant aspect when it comes to the issue of religious beliefs. The intuitive cognitive process creates intuitions such as belief in teleology, mind-body dualism, psychological immortality and mind perception
Consequences of Becoming religious
Being religious has both positive and negative effects. The positive consequences include emotional, physical health, spiritual well-being to both personal and family life of a person. When one is religious most of the time he or she can hand both the emotional and spiritual things of their life, and they are able to control what they eat and do thus contributing good physical health of and individual, and to the more considerable extent the family also benefits because they are able to influence others. Religious helps in bringing people together and allow them to support one another as a community, and it brings people together in times of need and comfort those that they require comfort thus creates happiness.
The negative consequences of being religious are that most of them feel that they are more superior than others, and they believe to be teaching morals and teachings that are more superior than those thought by other religions. Religious also creates a conflict of people because they may not agree on some issues. Religious makes some people discriminate others and make them believe that there is no good in other people especially in a scenario of difference (Shenhav, Rand, & Greene, 2012)
Theories that Explain Why People are Religious
The conflict theory of religion by Karl Max states that “religion is the opium of the people”. He noted that religion is teaching people to accept their lot in life without putting any consideration on whether it has a positive or negative impact. The positive aspect of religion was preserved to the afterlife. According to Karl Max theory, religion prohibits social change by teaching morals such as non-resistance to oppression, diverting peoples mind to world injustices, justifying the inequalities of power and wealth for the poor and putting emphasis on rewards that are yet to come.
Max Weber theory of social change states that religion is a salvation religion that claims people can be saved when they accept to be converted to certain beliefs and moral codes. According to him, in Christianity, sin and atonement to God's grace play a fundamental role. Salvation demanded a continuous struggle against sin. The basis of his research was to discover the impact of religion on social change. He focused on studying different religions such as Hinduism, Ancient Judaism, Taoism, Buddhism and Christianity before making the conclusion that religion is a continuous struggle against sin.
Durkheim theory of functionalism acknowledged that religion plays a significant role in influencing the thinking and behaviour of people in society. According to him, people tend to separate religious symbols, objects and rituals. Rituals to most people are sacred from those objects that are used daily in daily routines. Rituals are believed to separate people from the profane objects.
Religion is not only concerned with belief, but it entailed other factors such as regular rituals and ceremonies that members of the society involve themselves in. The purpose of the ritual was to make people of the community bind together in unity. Sacred rituals were performed during birth, initiation, marriage, death and during times of crisis such as during droughts. The importance of religion was to contribute to the health and for purposes of continuation of the society in general. He finally concluded that religion would diminish when society becomes modernized and that religion will be replaced by scientific thinking when the time comes by.
Case That Thinking Carries Believe
Religion plays a fundamental role among those who believe in a religion that those who are atheist. Different aspects of those who believe religion was analyzed based on their communications with others. The same elements were also analyzed on the atheist basing on their communication on their twitter accounts. The information obtained after an analysis showed interesting results. Christians were happier than atheists and are well connected. Christians are less analytical as compared to the atheist. In Christian communications, there is more positivity than the negativity. The emotions of Christians are much positive than those of atheist.
The negative messages from Christians were less as compared to that of the atheists.
Analytical thinking is believed to contribute to many people going through depressions. Analytical thinking diminishes the capacity of a person in being optimistic about issues and makes a person have positive thoughts in everything because one tends to believe that there is hope at the end of hard times and by doing so, it contributes to the good mental health of someone. The quality of social relationship to the overall well-being of a person. Most of the time, atheists use words that are suggesting that they have decreased happiness. Such words include thinking, reasoning, will give feedback later. As such, this showed that they are not happy or if they are so glad then happiness has been decreased by a particular issue (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012)
There is a psychological difference between believers and non- believers. Religion is key to happiness despite other factors that can make a person happy among the Christian community, and it helps in establishing social networks among the Cristian families. The study shows atheists are not trusted in the most American population, and this has negative impacts on them, and it results in unhappiness among them. Increases in happiness among nonbelievers should parallel increases in the availability of secular social support resources and increased feelings of being respected in society, both of which facilitate increased satisfaction (Shenhav et al., 2012).
The goal of the paper was to address the issue of social connection among the Christian population, their happiness and analytical thinking among the Christians and atheists, believers and non-believers. From the analysis of the research, results have shown that there is a correlation between the social connection and happiness among the population and that the Christians are much connected, and majority are enjoying their lives as compared to the atheists whom majority are not happy because most don’t have a belief which has made them not to be trusted among the American populations.
Article 5
Awe is an emotion combining dread, reverence and wonder that it is inspired by authority or by sacred or sublime. Awe is often inspired by majestic or something compelling
Uncertainty and Belief in Supernatural Agents
Uncertainty is believed to be the foundation of human belief in God. Humans rely on supernatural agents to explain the world when natural explanations are lacking. This tendency should be particularly pronounced when the motivation to explain the world is strong or the ability to do so is weak. Awe mediates between the condition and supernatural control. Feelings of fear improve agency detection in supernatural beings, and the effect is the experience of uncertainty intolerance. Uncertainty tolerance can be straightened with time by those who experience it (Valdesolo & Graham, 2014)
Although supernatural belief might be its most obvious effect, awe should also influence other kinds of decisions that are empirically associated with agency detection and conceptually distinct from a belief in the supernatural. Manipulation of awe influences concepts associated with religiosity for those people who associated themselves in any religion. Humans are encouraged to perceive the world other than random because beliefs are accompanied by negative impacts (Valdesolo & Graham, 2014)
Article 6
There is a significant difference in religious belief and practice, and one of the major factors attributed to the difference is intuitive cognitive thinking as compared to the analytical thinking process. Studies show that there is a negative correlation between believing in God and analytical thinking. There is no effect of analytical thinking in religious manipulations, while other studies show that analytical thinking decreases religious belief. Intuitive cognitive thinking as a positive correlation with religious belief and spiritual practice. Manipulation of intuitive cognitive thinking is believed to have a positive impact on making people believe in something, and it has resulted in many people believing in God (Sanchez et al., 2017)
The studies in this article tend to dispute the results that were done earlier. The negative correlation between analytical thinking and religious belief is supported by meta-analysis and replications in other studies. The meta-analysis between the analytical and spiritual thinking suggests that the results are reliable and from this, we can conclude that that religious believes does not actively moderate the effect of analytical thinking (Sanchez et al., 2017)
Article 7
Studies show that there are two types of thinking styles. The intuitive cognitive thinking process is also called style one is stated to operate naturally with little or no conscious thought that can be involved. The type 1 thinking style is also observed in animals and other emotions and experimental processes. It is believed that this style of thinking is thought to be underlying the religious belief. It has been linked to mind-body dualism, agency, and morality. The analytical thinking process is also called system two, and it is inhuman processes such as deliberate reasoning and has a conscious thought (Finley et al., 2015)
The findings of this study are that the people who favor intentional logical ideas are less influenced by the religious faith that they are exposed to. The negative correlation between the analytical thinking process thought, and the religious beliefs are strong when individuals have been engaged in the analytic system before reporting the religious belief that they hold. Studies by Gervais and Norenzayan have shown that experiencing cognitive disfluency influences the religious faith of people.
The analysis of this articles shows that there is need for more research to be done to establish the extent to which activating more analytic modes of thought influences other measures and explore the extent to which their relationship between the two constructs is driven by stable individual differences versus situational or contextual priming of more analytic modes of thought (Finley et al., 2015)
Article 8
The purpose of the study is to investigate the dimension of social and emotion of intuitive cognitive process as compared to that of analytic thinking. The findings were that moral concerns are directly and positively associated with moral beliefs, and there is some negative correlation between analytic thinking and religious sentiment. No evidence showed that there is a relationship between mentalizing and religious or spiritual belief. From previous studies, it demonstrated that analytical thinking discourages the acceptance of religion or spiritual belief by people. The interpretation behind this is that analytical thinking decreases belief of people because it encourages the people to examine and evaluate data or anything carefully and by doing so it can override the intuitively cognitive belief of the person. The two types of thinking are thought to be competing, and the difference between the two is on the aspects of religious and spiritual belief (Jack et al., 2016)
In study one of this article suggests that the relationship between the analytic thinking and the disbelief may be accounted by the observation on the negative correlation between analytical thinking and the moral concern and the positive relationship between the concern and belief in God or a universal spirit.
Study two suggests that the measures used in analytical thinking and are negatively predicting belief do so because they are negatively correlated with the measure of empathic concern which is positively associated with the belief.
In the study, religious and spiritual disbelief may no longer be predicted by analytic thinking after its negative relationship with measures of empathy is taken into account. The last four studies suggested that extend these investigations by including direct and indirect measures of metalizing to test whether they add predictive power when various measures of empathic concern and prosocial behavior are also taken into account (Jack et al., 2016)
All the articles focused on religion and the idea of belief and disbelief. The intuitive thinking is becoming much convincing about religious beliefs, while critical thinking has many controversies because there are various measures and factors that influence analytical thinking.
References
Finley, A. J., Tang, D., & Schmeichel, B. J. (2015). Revisiting the relationship between individual differences in analytic thinking and religious belief: Evidence that measurement order moderates their inverse correlation. PloS One , 10 (9), e0138922.
Gervais, W. M., & Norenzayan, A. (2012). Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. Science , 336 (6080), 493–496.
Hadaway, C. K., & Marler, P. L. (2005). How many Americans attend worship each week? An alternative approach to measurement. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , 44 (3), 307–322.
Jack, A. I., Friedman, J. P., Boyatzis, R. E., & Taylor, S. N. (2016). Why do you believe in God? Relationships between religious belief, analytic thinking, mentalizing and moral concern. PloS One , 11 (3), e0149989.
Marler, P. L., & Hadaway, C. K. (2002). “Being religious” or “being spiritual” in America: A zero‐sum proposition? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , 41 (2), 289–300.
Sanchez, C., Sundermeier, B., Gray, K., & Calin-Jageman, R. J. (2017). Direct replication of Gervais & Norenzayan (2012): No evidence that analytic thinking decreases religious belief. PloS One , 12 (2), e0172636.
Shenhav, A., Rand, D. G., & Greene, J. D. (2012). Divine intuition: Cognitive style influences belief in God. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General , 141 (3), 423.
Valdesolo, P., & Graham, J. (2014). Awe, uncertainty, and agency detection. Psychological Science , 25 (1), 170–178.
