Psychology Behind Religion and Myths

In this post, I seek to address the psychology behind myths. I want to understand the psychological reasons of why people believe in religion and myths.

The article, “A Reason To Believe” by Beth Azar, a writer for the American Psychological Association, provides explanations of the psychology behind religion and myths.

http://www.slu.edu/

1. Researchers who study the psychology and neuroscience of religion are helping to explain why such beliefs are so enduring. They’re finding that religion may, in fact, be a byproduct of the way our brains work, growing from cognitive tendencies to seek order from chaos, to anthropomorphize our environment and to believe the world around us was created for our use.

This excerpt from the article explains how we, as society, are taking certain myths in life that don't really make sense and coming up with explanations that have to do with human nature. Researchers are coming up with ways to make chaos in our world make sense and seem reasonable to our lives.

2. Jordan Grafman, PhD, director of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke-------- In general, he believes, the brain uses the same circuits to think about and experience religion as it does to think about and handle any other thoughts or beliefs.

Jordan Grafman explains his opinion that the human brain thinks about and experiences religion in the same way to think about and handle other beliefs. In other words, we use the same parts of our brain when thinking about religion as we do when thinking about other ideas in life. In my opinion, this means that our ideas and beliefs about religion guide our opinions of myths or sayings in society.  

3. “What we’re showing is that our basic cognitive equipment biases us toward certain kinds of thinking and leads to thinking about a pre-life, an afterlife, gods, invisible beings that are doing things — themes common to most of the world’s religions,” says Barrett. this tendency also set us up to believe in an omnipresent God-like concept. Taken together, it’s easy to see how these cognitive tendencies could allow our minds to create religions built on the idea of supernatural beings that watch over our lives, says Atran, director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.

In this excerpt from the article, researchers describe how religion corresponds to the way we look at life and afterlife. They explain how our religious beliefs lead us to our opinions of the supernatural and about who or what we are before life, and what we become when our lives end. When I look at it all together, my views on religion, on myths, on ideas of life, I see how they are all built off one another and that is what these researchers are trying to tell us. 

After reading this article I really thought about the connection between religious views and myths. In my opinion, the social, psychological, cultural and spiritual are all connected. My views on society are based off of my religious and cultural beliefs and quite frankly, I think it is really hard to think about something in a totally different way from a religious perspective and a spiritual perspective because they connect.   

Future Research:

Will there ever be a perfect explanation behind each myth or religion?