Heathen's Progress 17: The modern believer is not suspicious enough

I'm afraid it's all too common for defenders of faith to start off by piling up a whole load of interesting scientific findings, only to follow up with a plethora of non sequiturs. The question rightly asked is how reliable are the various cognitive mechanisms we use for establishing different kinds of truth? And there seems to be no escaping the simple fact that subjective experience, in all its forms, is a very unreliable detector of objective reality. Despite the comfort Mark Vernon draws from recent research, there is no escaping the fact that the vast bulk of it points in exactly the opposite direction, undermining any confidence we might feel that our intuitive judgments are effective truth-trackers.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series.

Monarchists are from Mars, republicans are from Venus

If you want proof that there is not one universe but a multitude of parallel worlds, you don't need any quantum physics: just read the Letters pages of our national newspapers...

Article in today's Independent

Heathen's Progress 16: Struggling with the question of belief? Homer Simpson's got the answer

Homer's Wager concludes that you have no good reason to believe in God, even if it is more likely than not that he exists, let alone if you are among those of us who think the probability is closer to 6.7% than 67%. And what this shows is that the issue of God's existence or non-existence is not an important one after all.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series.

The Shrink & The Sage: Are we responsible for our actions?

Responsibility is one area in life where philosophy and psychology leave us with the message: do not trust your feelings. You carry responsibility for whatever is within your control, whether you feel its weight or not.

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Heathen's Progress 15: You don't have to be religious to pray … but it helps

Prayer, like many rituals, is something that the religious get some real benefits from that are just lost to us heathens. One reason is that many of these rituals are performed communally, as part of a regular meeting or worship. This means there is social reinforcement. But the main one is that the religious context transforms them from something optional and arbitrary into something necessary and grounded. Because the rituals are a duty to our absolute sovereign, there is strong reason to keep them up. You pray every day because you sense you really ought to, and it will be noticed if you don't. In contrast, the belief that daily meditation is beneficial motivates in much the same way as the thought that eating more vegetables or exercising is. Inclination comes and goes and needs to be constantly renewed.

Latest in the Guardian Comment is Free Belief series.