“what is it exactly that helps install religious software so deeply and dogmatically into the brain?” Often those who are strongly religious fall into a few categories: (1) They were trained to believe in specific aspects of religion as children; (2) They entered into a very destitute part of their lives (i.e. severe depression, midlife crisis, loss of a job, death in the family, cancer, alcoholism, or other existential problems).
Are there actually any studies on this? It would be awesome if there were.
As for uninstalling such software, it seems like one way to do it would be to teach them rationality without mentioning religion, so that they don’t see rationality as a threat. Hopefully at that point they’ll already have the skills to see that their religion is false, and it will just fall away. Eliezer talks about this in Raising the Sanity Waterline.
Are there actually any studies on this? It would be awesome if there were.
As for uninstalling such software, it seems like one way to do it would be to teach them rationality without mentioning religion, so that they don’t see rationality as a threat. Hopefully at that point they’ll already have the skills to see that their religion is false, and it will just fall away. Eliezer talks about this in Raising the Sanity Waterline.