Conservatives, especially religious extremists, seem given over to paranoia and prophecies of doom, and they never learn.
10 Right-Wing Predictions About Obama That Never Came True
Among those implicated: Michele Bachman, Sarah Palin, Joseph Farah, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Larry Klayman, Janet Porter, Wayne LaPierre, Rafael Cruz, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones. These people never lose their audiences, no matter how repeatedly wrong they are.
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On the more cerebral topic of belief in ‘god’.
A post by Robert V.S. Redick:
And a comment by Jesse Bering to one of his own posts, yesterday:
From an atheist’s perspective informed by psychological science, it’s not simply an absence of evidence for God. There is a plethora of evidence of innate cognitive biases that generate the sort of recalcitrant illusions (misattributions of agency, intentions, continuity of mind after death, etc) underlying the commonsense belief in God and the afterlife.
Bering wrote a whole book about this — The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life — one of the best books on reasons to set religious faith aside as a kind mental illusion.
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And from Connor Wood’s “Science on Religion” blog: Trump shows why Rationalia would fail. I haven’t read this completely yet, but it seems to dovetail with a recurring theme in some of my reading, including having just finished Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, where he emphasizes the human need for “imagined orders” including religions, political systems, and money, systems of shared trust among large groups of people, without which large societies could not function. Culture based on purely rationalistic terms (Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s “Rationalia”) would never work, Wood says. Will pursue.
