Study: Children Exposed To Religion Have Difficulty Distinguishing Fact From Fiction

As a kid I hated fantasy. When playing with toy cars I remember correcting other kids who were quick to ‘violate the laws of nature’. Sometimes they would magically sprout wings and fly their toy car out of a sticky situation. It was cheating, plain and simple, basically a form of intellectual instant gratification (although I didn’t actually posses that vocabulary). In the real world you don’t have the luxury of magic. In the real world you actually have to engineer practical solutions according to the laws of nature.

My obsession with realism affected the movies I watched, and the games I played. It shaped me. For example: the model train sets I often built and blueprinted as a kid had to be as realistic as possible, like a miniature version of the real world shrunk down. This forced me to learn about economics, after all, no realistic toy train set is ever complete without a teeny tiny profitable business delivering teeny tiny raw goods to teeny tiny factories.

I don’t know if this knack for realism came about at birth or was a result of the chaotic (but still loving) environment I was exposed to as a kid, but I’m glad to have it. I suspect that this outlier trait partially insulated me from the religious brainwashing that I received at church.

Growing up mormon I felt almost like an alien who had his memory wiped clean and was transplanted into a cult.

At first I just went along with it, embraced it even, reading scriptures every day because it was all I knew. But if you take the teachings literally, the numerous logical fallacies start to become so apparent they can no longer be ignored. Many of these religious fantasies are so arbitrary they could just as easily be swapped out with jack and the beanstalk without anyone noticing.

I kept thinking: how are these kids and adults so gullible?

More recently I have realized just how dangerous it can be to over simplify morality and ignore the proven laws of nature. And while that is beyond the scope of this post, I must highlight the fact that governments (religious and otherwise) have murdered hundreds of millions of people over the course of history as a result of oversimplified models.

I argue that religion is not something to be proud of, rather as the fast food of philosophy it serves as a short term lazy explanation for how the world works.

Not only is religion not suitable for children, but one might even go so far as to describe it as a mental bias left over from our hunter gatherer ancestors, adapted perfectly to provide cohesiveness and meaning during a time of ultrashort average human life spans. Our ancestors lived in small socialist tribes and probably gained a survival advantage by oversimplifying their local and linear world.

Today however, that desire to oversimplify economics, politics, and morality to achieve short term gratification may actually be a mental bias hardwired in our brain, a handicap that we as a species must overcome.