MonDie

Of course all areas of knowledge are important and will be beneficial in the hands of the population at large with few exceptions, e.g. knowledge to make weapons, but let's not therefore conclude on a Dodo bird verdict. Clearly some areas of knowledge will have more benefit per person per hour of study, and however you want to quantify knowledge, there is probably a higher or lower average or median amount of knowledge for different subject matters. I had to include medical science when I realized that a healthier population would probably have better cognitive function and thus more knowledge, but any science that will save lives or makes life easier will arguably increase the amount of time we can spend learning. PS forgive the typos. I rushed. Are you suggesting that geology is under studied because geologists are not glorified in the way doctors, physicists, and engineers are? Maybe people find geology to be a relatively dull when physicists are explaining the origin of the universe and countless television shows depict doctors rushing to save lives in the intensive care unit. What kind of utility would geological knowledge have in the hands of ordinary citizens?

I'm just curious. Given the importance of knowledge to ethical decision making, I thought it would be an interesting question. What area of knowledge would lead to people becoming more efficient and/or making better decisions in the world? Please make your case. Please note that knowledge means scientific knowledge and not any pseudoscience that may happen to be associated with that field. Moderators, feel free to edit my poll choices if you do not like them.

Incidentally, I ran across this research investigating whether the fearless traits exhibited by psychopaths might be attributable to attentional differences. In summary, psychopaths show reduced "fear potentiated startle" (FPS) and reduced amygdala activation when exposed to threatening stimuli. Furthermore, the primary psychopath has low anxiety and low anxiety is also associated with reduced startle. In this instance, the threatening stimuli was a red word preceding a shock. The psychopaths showed normal startle were instructed to push a button indicating whether the word was red or green, but reduced startle when instructed to indicate upper vs lower case or the sequence of letters. Attention moderates the fearlessness of psychopathic offenders https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2795048/ This would appear to suggest that psychopaths would be better at single pointed attention and thus more hypnotizable, and yet it is borderline personality that is associated with dissociative disorders, which are in turn associated with hypnotizability. The two personality disorders might be related, but this attentional difference is apparently specific to psychopathy, and likely the primary psychopaths whose deficiency in fear corresponds to their lower anxiety, anxiety being associated with amplification of the "fear potentiated startle" (FPS) that is blunted in psychopathy. This reemphasizes the paradox that high anxiety may be associated with increased processing of peripheral stimuli even though it is associated with dissociative disorders, which are in turn associated with hypnotizability,

I just wanted to say that I down-voted this post for using a medical syndrome to denote a deficit that is only part of that syndrome.

Dimreeper might have a point. Christianity is the dominant religion in the Western world. We have seen Planned Parenthood clinics harassed, for example, but maybe there isn't as much pro-life or pro-Christian terrorism because a lot of these movements are utilizing the legal infrastructure rather than committing crimes against it. The Christian Coalition and the National Right to Life Committee both fell in the top 10 of the most powerful interest groups in US politics when Fortune magazine released its "Power 5" several years back. Money is power. edit: "Power 25"

I do appreciate TheBeardedDude's effort to add more information, but there is a lot of already available information on the cross societal correlations of popular religiosity. Alas, there are inevitably many lurking variables despite the efforts of researchers to remove the big ones, making the data useless without a hypothesis/theory as to why. That's why I'm looking at the psychology. As to the existing data, here is one that ydoaps mentioned a year or so ago. I don't know why it is no listed on pubmed. Cross-national Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies. http://moses.creighton.edu/jrs/2005/2005-11.pdf pubmed search negative https://search.nih.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=nih&query=cross-national+correlates+of+quantifiable+societal+health+with+popular+religiosity+and+secularism&commit=Search Secularism and popular religiosity are definitely different things. Secularism can be viewed as an appreciation of different perspectives rather than a rejection of all religious ideas. Again, this goes back to the question of whether competing religions actually represent mutually exclusive theories about the transcendent, or whether someone can simultaneously acknowledge some accuracy in various religions while identifying, or affiliating, with the their top choice. Indeed, the idea of integrating religion into healthcare for psychological purposes, as you were advocating earlier, might seem like a secular idea as long as all religious views are represented (if that is possible). However, I watched an Atheist Experience in which they complained that incorporating religion into healthcare could mean forcing patients to reveal their religious views, which could then be used as a basis for discrimination. Apparently discrimination against atheists in a healthcare setting has been previously documented.

Itoero, I would like to see sources other than wiiislam.net, a site dedicated to criticizing Islam and muslims. If the articles include links to better sources, then please provide those sources. https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/wikiislam.net

Itoero, you need to consider that most muslims are dark skinned. I've heard that that there are more African Americans in US prisons. I do know that this could be accounted for by biased policing: they're more likely to be pulled over, suffer police brutality, etc. Significantly increased use of police brutality against African Americans was among the findings of the recent work by Harvard's Roland Fryer even though the researchers found no difference in the most severe use of force, shooting. On the other hand, it also occurs to me that immigrants usually have lower incarceration rates than the native born. It would be useful to see a breakdown of what their crimes are, to see whether it is consistent with biased policing or even biased law-making. Take for example the French ban on full-face burqas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering

This is a few pages late, but it occurred to me that some people, religious and non-religious alike, often complain about a "holier than thou" attitude among some religious people. I realized there may have been some indirect support for this hidden in all that data. The pupmed reading about primary and secondary psychopathy noted that these "fearless dominance" traits, which are unique to primary psychopathy and not emphasized in the non-religious, are similar to narcissism. Reduced narcissism is also consistent with the the non-religous showing more emphasis on Conscientiousness (and less on Agreeableness) than the typical antisocial person. That is, despite the link of antisocial tendencies (low Conscientiousness) to fearless dominance traits and even narcissistic traits (low Agreeableness), the non-religious aren't that low in Agreeableness and they aren't any lower in modesty, the facet of Agreeableness that is most emphasized in narcissists. It's possible that there is a unique relationship of narcissism to religiosity, but this is being masked by the much stronger relationship of non-religiousness to antisocial tendencies and, incidentally, to narcissism thereby.

I guess the point is that religious thinking does not have to be divisive, but it has become divisive because most people see religions as mutually exclusive - and wrongly in my opinion. Ideas always have areas of overlap, and it is only those external things, the things which those beliefs pertain to, that are distinct from one another. Seeing how no god is directly observable and that Jesus and Muhammad are both dead, the core differences between religions are differences in ideas rather than differences in distinct external things.

I got more caffeine than expected yesterday. Anyway, I've realized that honesty-humility is the likely answer. Neuroticism is a broad factor. There is a three-factor solution called the Big Three wherein Neuroticism basically gets its own factor called Negative Emotionality; the other factors end up sharing: Positive Emotionality (E+O) and Disinhibition (A+C). Neuroticism finally has a split at the six-factor level, which is described by the HEXACO inventory. Apparently honesty-humility is correlated with straightforwardness and modesty. For anyone who's curious, this publication should have a section on the "hierarchical" nature that reviews the breakdown at the two- three-, four- and five-factor levels. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26716761 Actually apes, not monkeys (see above). Religions don't have to be mutually exclusive as if being right or wrong is an all-or-nothing matter, and many Hindus seem to embrace this. The math isn't hard. If you assume that all religions differ in ways that aren't merely superficial, then you can assume that the religion dice have at least as many sides as there are religions, and probably more sides given that no side has been rolled twice. Analyzed this way, the likelihood of any current religion being the 100% true religion has to be less than 50%. The Abrahamic idea that there can only be one messiah has led to what look like irreconcilable divisions based on ideas about whether the messiah has come and who he was. I actually have a solution, not that any traditional Christian would ever buy it. We will only ever know the idea of Jesus or Muhammad, and indeed "believing in" is an action that is performed on the idea within your brain, unlike "kicking" where you can kick a rock and actually kick Gaia, goddess of the Earth, because that rock just so happened to be Gaia. Seen this way, there could actually be overlap between beliefs regarding Jesus and Muhammad to the extent that the ideas of each share commonalities. Whacky, right?

Inflammation is a manifestation of the immune response. Inflammation can be induced (through unhealthy foods) or reduced (e.g. with corticosteroid drugs), but it is not part of an adaption to those things AFAIK. The answer will probably hinge on whether the threat produces antigens, but beyond antibodies I'm not sure how either/or the answer will be. The immune system "learns" to produce highly specific antibodies in response to previously encountered antigens, but I'm not aware of any other evolved adaptation that "learns" in the way the immune system does -- one of the "experts" might know of something. You could postulate that a certain amount of natural selection might occur on our cells as we're exposed to different chemical agents, but I highly doubt that this would constitute much of a defense in comparison to the evolved adaptations that evolved to counteract that particular threat.

I'm adding to the peculiar finding for the modesty facet of Agreeableness, especially after noticing that the non-religious and the narcissistic, both less Agreeable, show an opposite pattern of emphasis on the facets of Agreeableness. I already linked this. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2614445/table/T2/ Here are the facet-level loadings for each disorder. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2614445/table/T3/ I noticed that the high-Extraversion, low-Neuroticism disorders (narcissistic and histrionic) are relatively low in modesty given their Agreeableness, whereas the reverse (e.g. schizoid, schizotypal, avoidant, dependent) show relatively high modesty. Indeed, the avoidant personality actually has heightened modesty in spite of the slighlty lower Agreeableness. As it turns out, avoidant personality disorder is the second most common in Asperger's sufferers after the obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (see below). Table 4 of "Psychiatric and psychosocial problems in adults with normal-intelligence autism spectrum disorders" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2705351/table/T4/ The prevalence of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is shocking given that it involves high Conscientiousness or possibly even extreme Conscientiousness, whereas those on the spectrum are generally less Conscientious and the non-religious even less so. With regard to Prometheus' concerns about providing comfort to the dying, he might be intrigued by the relevance to autism. From the above link: Remember this one? Mentalizing deficits constrain belief in a personal god https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3364254/ The empathy quotient, which atheists scored lower on, measures a skill that would be highly relevant to anyone comforting the dying. The mentalizing deficits in autism are not a deficit in their propensity to empathize per se, but a deficit in understanding what somebody else is thinking or feeling and how to respond appropriately to produce the desired response. Remember that autism is highly heritable, so mentalizing skill is likely highly heritable too. It is one of the three domains, but the domains are intercorrelated, for example verbal ability and face reading ability, measured below via the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, a measure of autism that has come to be considered a valid proxy for mentalizing ability. The Eyes Test as a Measure of Individual Differences: How Much of the Variance Reflects Verbal IQ? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3389807/

Consistent with posts on the previous page, I've also seen some of the research correlating religiosity with lower crime. My recollection is that this is mostly petty crimes like juvenile delinquency and mild drug abuse, not serious crimes like murder or rape. Anyway, I'm starting to see evidence for an inverse correlation, at the level of the individual, between religiosity and less antisocial personality, but it might not be as bad as it sounds. First, the evidence. #1: Correlates of psychopathic personality traits in everyday life: results from a large community survey #2: Psychopathic Personality Traits and Environmental Contexts: Differential Correlates, Gender Differences, and Genetic Mediation #3: Five-Factor Model Personality Traits, Spritiaulity/Religiousness, and Mental Health Among People Living with HIV #4: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Relationships Between the Five-Factor Model and DSM-IV-TR Personality Disorders: A Facet Level Analysis As we can see from Table 3 in source #1, the non-religious score higher on the psychopathic personality inventory (PPI-R), but its relationship with the Fearless Dominance (FD) facet does not reach statistical significance. As it turns out, there are two types of psychopaths, the primary and the secondary. The primary psychopath is distinguished by the fearless dominance traits that the secondary does not possess. The secondary psychopath still experiences fear, anxiety, and guilt, but he still takes risks and behaves recklessly. It was long speculated that primary psychopathy was endogenous, or even genetic, because they didn't have the same unfavorable environment that secondary psychopaths did. As source #2 elaborates on, our twin studies have shown equal genetic and environmental loadings for both disorders, but these environmental causes for primary psychopathy remain elusive, whereas many detrimental social environmental risk-factors for secondary psychopathy have been identified. Who knows, maybe primary psychopathy is caused by nutrition or chemicals. Anyway, moving on. As we can see from Table 2 in source #4, consistent with source #1, the same Big Five factors are aberrant in both antisocial personality and being non-religious. However, most research, including my #3, shows that the relationship with conscientiousness is stronger, probably about twice as strong. This means that non-religious people are mainly less conscientious. Perhaps they tend to be more indulgent, not willing to abide by the abstinent prescriptions of religions. Narcissism on the other hand loads almost completely on Agreeableness, so the non-religious might be more narcissistic. However Table 2 in source #3 gives a breakdown of how religiosity loads on each Agreeableness facet, and we can see that the strongest emphasis is on facet A4 Compliance (and A6 Tender-Mindedness if you include these iffy "sense of peace" and "compassion" dimensions). Spirituality/religiousness didn't load significantly on A2 Straightforwardness or A5 Modesty, and it was actually negatively related to modesty. My personal suspicion is that the portrait of the narcissistic atheist worshiping himself has actually came from autistic atheists who lacked social graces (autistic personalities are mainly high Neurotic and low Extraversion). Ironically, this may actually be evidence that religion doesn't reduce crime, for it helps to explain the inverse association of religiosity with criminal behavior with a theoretical framework wherein religion probably isn't influencing personality but rather the reverse. From #3: Furthermore, to the extent that environment does influence personality, the message may be mixed. Source #2 includes potential influences as getting in with the wrong crowd and problems with the law. I suppose that wrong crowd might be a non-religious crowd, but problems with the law could actually reflect a pro-religious bias in our law enforcement and court systems. My speculation is that perhaps religion is actually a double-edged sword, promoting good behavior among religious youth while at the same time promoting bad behavior among non-religious youth by reinforcing the prejudice against them.

With regard to overall personality differences among believers, we really have to consider that this can vary significantly depending on the sample. The Big Five personality inventory is a factor-structure of personality that is consistent across cultures and stable across the life span. The three factors that are most strongly related to religiousness are agreeableness (positively), conscientiousness (positively), and openness to experience (mixed depending on location). I recall reading that most findings of a positive association of religiosity with openness came from Europe rather than the US. Five-Factor Model Personality Traits, Spirituality/Religiousness, and Mental Health among People Living With HIVhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2739880/ While I have questions about their measurement (the IWSRI) which includes a subscale on compassion and has no subscale regarding fundamentalism, which they acknowledge would have been negatively realted to openness, I still found their discussion of religiosity versus spirituality enlgihtening. As it turns out, spirituality is consistently related to higher openness, whereas non-spiritual measures of religiosity are more likely to be negatively correlated with openness, particularly the facet of openness to values.

Follow the redirects within the quote boxes for a catch-up on how the the Republican party seems to get more electoral college votes per popular vote percentage. I've come up with a new hypothesis, but first I want to review the math from the latter, Nov 18 post, where I over-complicated the math. The problem is analogous to boxes (states) full of red and blue marbles (votes). If you want to adjust the situation such that all boxes hold the same number of marbles, or such that that all boxes have the same proprotion of marbles, that proportion being the average proportion across boxes, either way you are essentially taking an average across all the boxes (states) and you will get the same result either way. This means you can use the output of the first step, the average "margin of victory" across all states, and ignore my second step. The reason your result will be slightly, slightly different is because my method separated the blue boxes from the red boxes and performed a separate calculation for each. Anyway, the links: Given that the average population of Republican-held vs Democrat-held states did very little to explain the discrepancy in electoral college votes per popular vote percentage in the 2016 presidential election, my hypothesis is the stronger influence of conservative interest groups, the effect of which will tend to be seen in the swing states. Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf The researchers set out to test competing theories of who has the most influence in USA democracy: voters, wealthy citizens (elites), or interest groups. While they actually take the views of wealthy people at the ninetieth percentile of income, this is actually a proxy for being "elite", a group of people whoa re thought to have more political influence thanks to their social status. They also talk about interest groups. Interest groups exert political force via both their monetary resources and their human resources, consisting of individuals functioning as a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Interest groups are thought to bribe politicians with campaign contributions (although McChesney suggested that it's actually the politicians extorting the interest groups), and they engage in other political activities. Fortune magazine puts out an authoritative list of what are supposedly the most powerful interest groups, a list called the Power 25. For some reason the highest scoring groups tend to be conservative groups, e.g. "the National Rifle Association (No. 6); the Christian Coalition (No. 7); and the National Right to Life Committee (No. 10)." Their liberal counter-parts didn't even make the top 25, indicating less political influence. I personally speculate that this stronger influence of conservative interest groups could have some relationship to the fact that Republican-held states tend to lean more strongly than Democratic-held states. Regardless, as the researchers' Table 2 shows, the views espoused by these interest groups have no correlation with the views of average citizens. In fact, it was actually the wealthy elites whose views correlated with the views of ordinary (median income) citizens, and through whom, the researchers conclude, the ordinary citizens have any political influence at all. However, the wealthy are largely a constituency of the Republican party, as reflected by their tendency to vote Republican. When interest groups are separated into "mass-based interest groups" and "business and professional groups", the views of the wealthy are still uncorrelated with either, whereas ordinary citizens' views correlated +.12 with those of mass-based groups and -.10 with those of business groups. I think this suggests that these business groups are tendentially even more conservative than mass-based interest groups. As it turns out, the business groups are more numerous and exert more influence. Given the powerful influence of the wealthy, who tend conservative, and of interest groups, which may be even more conservative, it would seem that there is more political action toward conservative ends than political action toward liberal ends. When this political action is influence the outcome of elections, its influence will tend to show in the swing states, where it matters, rather than the Republican-held states that lean so strongly as to be of no concern to political action groups and interest groups.

A paradox occurred to me regarding depression and hypnotizability. Dissociatives are highly hypnotizable and therefore should have better concentration. We might infer that hypnotizability will be stronger for dissociative fugue patients given that it is especially strong for DID patients. Furthermore, "highly hypnotizable" people have better focus, sustained attention, and absorption. The paradox is that people in depression usually have worse concentration. Is high hypnotizability a necessary diathesis for pathological dissociation? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27216366 Sustained attentional and disattentional abilities: differences between low and highly hypnotizable persons. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8282921 I will start speculating once again. Dissociation is associated with low serotonin and depressino thereby, but it is also associated with heightened cortisol (from the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis), consistent with its role as an adaption for stress management. It might be more common in psychotically depressed patients who probably exhibit more anxiety with their depression. The anxiety induction might lead to temporarily amplified concentration as the body prepares to respond to the perceived threat. In contrast, patients with the related borderline personality disorder (BPD) often suffer from ADD, but I suspect that the ADD is largely the product of their anxiety. That is, being worried, vigilant, and restless, their attention may be naturally drawn to threatening stimuli, making it difficult for them to focus on non-threatening stimuli.

I have been following this, and I thought I would discuss a few things that were mentioned since I posted last. Dimreeper is talking a lot about contentment, but he has yet to explain why contentment is important or why advancement in our understanding of contentment should not come along with advancement in psychological science. Should we feel content about climate change? Is that good contentment? As for what an atheist or non-religious person might replace religion with, I'm not sure I see what needs replacing. To the extent that religion depends on truth-independent motivations, I see it as a more complicated form of morality. For me, people with good intentions cannot do good without good information, and the spread of information is generally good. My motivations are truth-contingent. If I don't want you to burn yourself, I tell you that the pan is still hot when it is true that it is still hot. It seems that many religious people think this is too simple, that there are too many people with bad intentions to simply tell people the truth. Over complicating morality in this way may lead to all sorts of problems. Not only may good people make bad decisions, but psychopaths might abuse this way of thinking. Psychopaths are the biggest liars of them all, and they do it for selfish reasons. They could easily take advantage of a moral framework wherein the morally right thing to say and the true thing to say are infrequently aligned. Take for example bigots who use Leviticus to force homosexuals into the shadows, or wealthy, elite businessmen who are currently on the top of the economic food-chain and who use the denial of climate change and denial of biological science to oppose regulations that would upset the status quo. A reduction in religion doesn't have to be viewed as a loss. It could in some sense be seen as a move toward a simpler moral framwork. Nothing to replace.

Their hair might have gotten lighter from the use of chemical products or the heat from a hair straightener. Every trait is potentially influenced by variations in genetics and variations in environment, and our environment is changing rapidly. Your math is a bit shallow mainly because you are only look at the probabilities under the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis would is that some influence is absent, such as artificial effects, epigenetic effects, horizontal gene transfer, or infidelity somewhere along the gene line, or all of these things. You calculate the probability of the observed outcome under both the null hypothesis conditions and the -- aberrant? Let us say aberrant -- the aberrant conditions, and then you use Bayes' theorem to calculate the odds. This is very important. Given enough observations combined together, you will inevitably find that the probability of all of those observations together was very low, and it would be a low probability under both the null conditions and the aberrant conditions.

You also have to take into account that we can't see very much of the universe to begin with. The radius of the visible universe is 14 billion light years because the universe is 14 billion years old - the universe could be much bigger than that. On top of that, the further out you try to look, the further into the past that you will be looking. There could be intelligent life even within that 14 billion lightyear radius that simply isn't visible to us because the light hasn't reached us yet. Alas, this assumes that their technology is limited by the constraints of relativity. We have yet to see whether humans will go extinct, but I've used humanity as an example to generate an hypothesis about why intelligent organisms might tend toward extinction. Humans do less adapting to their environments because they can use their intelligence to do the reverse, to adapt their environments to them, but alas humans are short-sighted. These changes make us better adapted in the short-term, and indeed these technological changes ultimately gave us the extra free-time that led to intellectual progress, but in the long-term this technology upsets the processes of the ecosystem that we originally evolved to. If we make these changes too quickly and cannot address their long-term effects quickly enough, then we go extinct. Thus our own intelligence leads to the extinction of everything on which we depend and ultimately the extinction of ourselves.

Circus Contraption - Ballad of the Coprophage

Dissociative conditions are highly relevant to hypnotism. Dissociative identity disorder (DID) patients and other dissociative patients tend to be "highly hypnotizable". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19197715 Usually occurring during depression and lasting weeks to months, the dissociative fugue patient forgets personally identifying information and begins to identify as someone new. They may even change their manner of speaking. While in the fugue state, she impulsively attempts to start a new life somewhere else, until one day she switches back to the primary personality, suddenly and simultaneously regaining her old memories and forgetting the memories of the alter ego, resulting in an experience informally termed "time loss". Nonetheless the memories of the fugue episode can persist, and she may recover them at a later time. People with dissociative identity disorder (DID), who usually underwent severe abuse as children, will continually alternate between these identities for the rest of their lives. Dissociative fugue and DID are examples of "compartmentalizing" symptoms. Alas, repressed memories remain an elusive and controversial matter among scientists, and DID no less so. http://www.healthyplace.com/abuse/dissociative-identity-disorder/dissociative-identity-disorder-controversy-is-did-real/ I imagine compartmentalizing is related to the way long-term memory works. New, incoming information cannot be embedded in long-term memory unless the subject somehow relates it to old information. It's as if our long-term memories exist as a web, with perception "triggering" a part of that web which leads to an activation of that region of the web. "Trigger" is a term used in PTSD to denote situational themes that remind the patient of the trauma and activate his PTSD thereby. I'll try to create a speculative hypothesis from this. It's as if the DID patient somehow constructs two or more independent webs of memories that have few connections inbetween and therefore rarely activate simultaneously. Hypnosis requires single-pointed concentration, which maybe perhaps could lead the subject to drown out irrelevant or even traumatic information while they focus on that one single thing. Perhaps hypnotizable people are capable of forging distinct states of mind that they can "alternate" between depending on what information they need on hand at the moment. ?

While trying to to categorize proselytizers, I realized that there is a key dimension upon which this phenomenon would rest. Everyone who wants to convert you believes that your conversion will benefit somebody: the converter, the converted, or society at large. This belief may or may not be contingent upon whether the religion is actually true. Given the natural tendency of religions to spread, the contingent beliefs will usually involve that everybody is benefited to some degree when you convert to the religion. Non-contingent motivations may be selfish (this religion favors me and my ingroup), altruistic (I want to share this beautiful thing with you) or moralistic (society needs religion to function). Non-contingent motivations should have a stronger relationship to a tendency to become defensive upon questioning. Alas, even contingent motivations can probably persist after questioning through "what if" reasoning.

Religion is notoriously difficult to define, but I think the best approach is to determine its psychological or motivational origins and to determine whether these are good. Firstly, I think religion can prompt interesting questions, but too often promote false satiety in the search for answers. The core ideas of religion revolve around minds rather than physical phenomena. I've judged that the science of minds is distinguished from natural science by the necessary use of introspection, and that mind science has lagged natural science. Psychological science is still in its infancy, and the mind-body problem is still considered philosophy. Perhaps addressing these core religious questions will be the pinnacle of scientific thought. However we might distinguish between healthy curiosity and false satiety. The idea that something came from nothing with God's help seems so intuitively compelling that an excessive battery of questioning is required to finally shake it, and it's perhaps not so good when religious people propogate this silly but contagious idea to further their agenda. Norenzayan showed that religious belief arises at least partly from intuitivie, or system 1, thinking. However his team also showed that theory of mind (skill in reasoning about minds) is required for religious belief. Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.389.9433&rep=rep1&type=pdf Mentalizing Deficits Constrain Belief in a Personal God http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0036880 NOTE: I have seen some evidence that the non-religious exhibit more antisocial personality traits, likely in the form of "secondary psychopathy", but autistics in particular are susceptible to avoidant, schizoid, schizotypal, and obsessive-compulsive personality... not antisocial personality. I think bigger problems arise when religious people work to protect religion even when it is incorrect. Regardless what metaethical paradigms you endorse, accurate information is necessary to ethical decision making. People make bad decisions when they aren't informed and so information should be good, but sometimes religion is maintained through a rejection of this idea. I've come up with a few reasons that might be given for this: the beliefs are pleasurable regardless of accuracy, the beliefs are moral regardless of accuracy, the beliefs maintain ingroup dominance. #1 The beliefs are pleasurable to the believer. The believer could be oneself or others. It seems paradoxical that somebody could knowingly believe something they know to be wrong, but such a person might neglect to question the beliefs in the first place if the beliefs feel good. Either way, either a failure to question or willful ignorance could become problematic. #2 The beliefs induce moral behavior. This most likely applies to others rather than oneself, stemming from a mistrust of others. Knowledge is power, and it can only be judged moral to tell someone lies if that person doesn't have moral intentions. Alas, this is problematic if most of these people really can be trusted, for a good person is rendered less good when he is misinformed. These "moral beliefs" might be as simple as believing that one is watched by God, or as complicated as the unquestioning acceptance of diverse cultural norms. #3 The beliefs promote ingroup dominance. The religious teachings maintain the privileges of certain individuals thought to be above other individuals, such as those labeled sexual deviants or cultural outsiders. Racism may be particularly tied to religion given that religion and ethnicity are both regional phenomena that are correlated thereby. While this motivation is ultimately a selfish one, the desire to be part of a superior group, this person will likely be motivated to invent some reasons why the dominance of their group is moral re:#2. Edit: The caste system upheld by the Vedas is a good example of this. I recollect that it was originally racist as it served to distinguish the light-skinned intruders from the dark conquered people. Numbers two and especially three represent a sort of authoritarianism expressed through religion. As it turns out, religion is correlated with prejudices of all sorts, but another psychological measure called "right-wing authoritarianism" has been found to have an even stronger relationship to prejudice. On the other hand, the "quest" religious orientation, which emphasizes continued doubt and questioning, is anti-correlated with prejudice. I think this make sense in light of the above. An authoritarian wants to tell you what to do, not for you to think for yourself. Thus an authoritarian will dislike it when his assertions are questioned, especially if he secretly knows there is good reason to doubt what he says. Religious people too may, in some instances but not all, express a dislike of questioning. I think this is a sign that some of the above (#1-3) are at work. If religion is not based on the value of questioning, but on a rejection of it to promote authoritarian regimes, then this raises serious questions about whether it is a good thing. While this problem certainly isn't specific to what we call "religion", religious misinformation can have exceptional breadth as followers defend the lengthy mythology which they have chosen to take literally.