(July 1, 2015 at 7:33 am)Tonus Wrote: Cherry picking is a pretty common form of bias that we use in many different ways in our day-to-day life. So it's natural that people will use it even when it's pointed out to them, and have trouble recognizing that they're doing it even then. The brain has a whole raft of ways that it keeps us believing a certain narrative about our lives, and it takes quite a bit of effort to punch through it. Without the ability to stubbornly hang on to that narrative, we'd have very real problems functioning in human society, especially the current one where the amount of leisure time and choices at our disposal are far greater than in centuries past.
I think that anyone who was raised religious and really followed it devoutly and is now an atheist can recognize just how difficult it is to step back and analyze certain beliefs without burying their analysis under an avalanche of biases and fallacies designed to keep them on track. I would even say that for most of us, the decision to let go of god was made before we came up with most of the reasons for it.
Indeed...it took me till just a few weeks ago to finally turn it off, and I'm turning 28 this year. That shit works HARD to defend itself almost in the same way an addiction or mental illness does.
