Religious socialization occurs within the immediate family as well as in the broader social context. Previous research has shown that parents’ religiosity matters less for the transmission of religious beliefs in devout than in secular nations, implying smaller costs of religious socialization. In this paper we test which other societal factors affect the transmission of religious beliefs: anti...

A meta-analysis of 63 studies showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity. The association was stronger for college students and the general population than for participants younger than college age; it was also stronger for religious beliefs than religious behavior. For college students and the general population, means of weighted and unweighted correlations...

The world will be harmonious one, the people with different religious beliefs in the world should strengthen close intercultural communication. And the intercultural communication will avoid any different wrong recognition about religious beliefs and respect different religious beliefs from different countries and cultures. Otherwise, it will cause unstable, inharmonious and terrible disaster o...

Baptists trace their origins to early seventeenthcentury English Puritanism with the baptism by immersion of Thomas Helwys and John Smyth in Holland in 1607. Baptists and other dissenters believed the English Reformation had failed to achieve sufficient moral purity and doctrinal integrity. They also resisted the efforts of the Crown to impose uniform religious beliefs and practices through the...

Surely after more than 200 years, psychiatry has become reasonably sophisticated and we can assume that there is no such thing as an unbiased comment. Professor Cooper's attack on Professor Casey for being 'a sincere member of the Roman Catholic Church' 1 is only justified if he also states, as the Editor does, that the other comment comes from Dr Oates, who is a 'representative of the pro-choi...

Most human beliefs are acquired through communication, and so are most misbeliefs. Just like the misbeliefs discussed by McKay & Dennett (M&D), culturally transmitted misbeliefs tend to result from limitations rather than malfunctions of the mechanisms that produce them, and few if any can be argued to be adaptations. However, the mechanisms involved, the contents, and the hypothetical adaptive...

Recent evolutionary accounts seek to explain religious belief and behavior in terms of native cognitive dispositions and culturally transmitted innovations that have persisted because they have adaptive value. Despite the often vitriolic evolutionreligion debate, new evolutionary theories typically avoid challenging the truth of religious beliefs. In this paper we do three things. (1) We descri...