Van Leeuwen (2014) claims religious credences are not factual beliefs. He holds that while factual beliefs alone (i) guide behavior in all relevant practical settings, (ii) support inferences between religious credences and (iii) are evidentially vulnerable; religious credences instead (a) have a perceived normative orientation, (b) are open to free elaboration and (c) are vulnerable to special...

The Big Carrot: High Stake Incentives Revisited This paper provides an empirical demonstration of high stakes incentives in relation to religious practice. It shows that, when both positive (carrot) and negative (stick) incentives are available, the former are more effective than the latter. Specifically, it is shown that beliefs in heaven are much more relevant than beliefs in hell when estima...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of satellite networks (GEM TV and Farsi 1) on the religious beliefs of youth in the city of Farashband. The type of research in terms of purpose, applied and in terms of data collection, was causal-comparative. The statistical population of this study is all the youths of the Farashband city in 2015, which includes 7569 people. The sample ...

Recent articles by Erich Goode (2000) and Glenn Sparks (2001) discussed the relationship between religious and paranormal beliefs. Goode proposes that they share a common foundation of belief in phenomena that are outside conventional science. Sparks is less certain of a relationship between traditional religion and paranormal beliefs. However, both writers agree that there are multiple dimensi...

Social psychologists have often followed other scientists in treating religiosity primarily as a set of beliefs held by individuals. But, beliefs are only one facet of this complex and multidimensional construct. The authors argue that social psychology can best contribute to scholarship on religion by being relentlessly social. They begin with a social-functionalist approach in which beliefs, ...

Religious beliefs play an important role in the study of religious practices and behaviour. Wulff (1997) suggested that there are four basic attitudes towards religion: Literal Affirmation, Literal Disaffirmation, Reductive Interpretation and Restorative Interpretation. Building on this work, Duriez, Soenans and Hutsebaut (2005) constructed the Post-Critical Belief Scale (PCBS). In their work, ...

This study examined beliefs about the causes and determinants of health, illness, and recovery in an opportunistic sample from Malaysia. In all, 371 women and 350 men completed the Health and Illness Scale, a 124-item scale that examined beliefs about current and future health, and beliefs about the causes of illness and recovery. Each of the four subscales of the Health Illness Scale were fact...