Please correct me where I am wrong

[paulpablo]

From what I've seen, there are many situations that atheists are guilty of just being wrong about stuff, logical fallacies, getting emotional about arguments and letting it get in the way of their conclusions.

Before I go into what fallacies and over emotional arguments I think I've seen on here and on other forums I just want to say why I think religious people are usually more guilty of these things.

Cognitive bias appears to be a feature of the human mind.  Our brains have a whole raft of different ways to help us to make sense of our surroundings and of the things we learn and understand.  Those biases are always at work, and I don't think anyone is ever free of them.  But we can work towards a rational point-of-view on some things if we can identify the biases and strip them away.

I think that the most important thing is to recognize that there is a rational approach to almost any question or topic, and to work to find it.  The most efficient is to identify biases and fallacies, then quickly dismiss them and focus on the question or topic.  But it's very tempting to focus on the fallacies and biases instead, which then becomes a topic of discussion in itself.

I suppose what I said about religious people being more guilty of emotional arguments is bias of myself obviously because I am an atheist.

Is what I'm saying about religious people having more invested in believing different from a theist saying atheists have a lot invested in being atheists?  Theists do sometimes say that atheists are atheists because they enjoy sinning and don't want to stop.

Personally though I don't feel a subconscious desire to sin is preventing me from believing in god, it's more like an comparative observation after looking over the cults and religions of the world, and a refusal to be threatened into joining a cult or religion with threats of hell.