Why did my mom tell me that feelings are enough to have religion?

[Brian37]

What I don't get is why she used this tactic if emotions are enough for her and she openly admitted it.

Brain researchers tell us that because of the way our brain is constructed, emotion always trumps logic. Every thought that we have goes through an emotional filter. Unlike the fictional Vulcans of Star Trek, our physiology makes it impossible for us to parse any thought purely with logic. There WILL be emotional bias. Short of genetic re-engineering of the human species, there is nothing we can do to change this.

Sucks, huh?

It's not all bad news, though. The scientific method was designed with human limitations in mind. Peer review largely corrects for emotional bias. It works because one person's emotional bias is not the same as another's. The scientific method allows us to collectively police ourselves of emotional bias. It's worked well and allowed us to go on to great achievements.

Religious belief is probably the greatest consequence of our hard-wired emotional bias. I wish we as a community (atheists) did a better job of recognizing and communicating this. It's certainly nothing new. This phenomena was recognized on the alt.atheism internet newsgroup prior to the rise of the web in the early 1990s. You can pummel a religious believer with absolutely unassailable logic against their position and it will have no effect. It's like the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where King Arthur battles the Black Knight.

Arthur: "You are indeed brave, sir knight but the fight is mine."

Black Knight: "Oh, had enough heh?"

Arthur: "Look, you stupid bastard! You've got no arms left!

Black Knight: "Yes, I have!"

Arthur: "LOOK!" Arthur points to the locations on the ground where the Black Knight's severed arms lay.

Black Knight: "It's just a flesh wound!"

This is emotional bias at work. The scene makes for great comedy but the real-life version of it is just as absurd. Emotional bias blinds religious believers into believing absolutely ridiculous things.

Don't start feeling smug, though. You and I are human too and are subject to the same flaws. On this subject (religion), our own emotional biases happen to align with logic and the scientific method. We almost certainly have our own beliefs which don't square with reality.

I wouldn't put it like that. Humans can when they want to keep their emotions in check. But no, we don't always keep our emotions in check. We certainly can value logic when we want to, it is why we have modern medicine, computers and air flight.

It is more along the lines that humans are born with a disadvantage in not having adult critical thinking skills at birth. We build neurological pathways that hold our perceptions of what we think is true, and in that context our perceptions of reality can be flawed. But in terms of other life, not just humans, we can observe other animals also having false perceptions. Like a dog barking at' it's own reflection in a door or mirror mistaking it for another dog.

So basically humans perceptions are notoriously flawed. The old moth to the candle flame analogy. Dawkins, in his book the God Delusion gives us the evolutionary reason we evolved with this flaw. One of his examples went something like this; "The antelope on the African plains doesn't always have time to decide if the swaying tall grass is mere wind, or a lion stalking it, so it more often than not has to make a split second decision to avoid harm."

Our false perceptions as a species can be also why we walk into a glass door we falsely perceive as open because it is squeaky clean. So it isn't always emotions that override our logic. The "emotional" part is more a part of the social norms we get sold from birth, and what we are doing in that case is protecting that which we have grown accustom to.