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#720 Patrick McNamara - The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience: Decentering and the Self

The Dissenter

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The Psychological Effects of Supernatural Agents on Anxiety

There's some evidence that because most people think that supernatural agents can read your mind you know like it said that they have full strategic access to your mental contents. If God can watch you constantly then you're going to be on your best behavior so that's one hypothesis supernatural punishment hypothesis about how supernatural agents affect our behavior. There's a lot of evidence that the old Freudian view of supernatural agents in the new atheist view of the way that they supernatural agents can help us control anxiety all that's true however as you point out that's not a full story supernatural agents and much more complex than their effects on human behaviorMuch more complex than that that's just part of the story terror management theory for

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