Customer Reviews

The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach (2nd Edition)

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Everyone should own this book. Many people make assumptions about religion, such as its effect on people's moral behavior for instance, without actually taking the time to find out if their assumptions are true. (As it turns out, level of religiousity including atheism is not a good predictor of whether or not someone will engage in helping behavior, or cheat on an exam, for instance.) Instead of repeating prejudices and inventing wild armchair theories, this book describes actual experiments and other research studies concerning a wide variety of topics concerning religion, in an objective, unbiased fashion. One interesting finding is that religious fundamentalists as a group are the most prejudiced toward all minority groups, while atheists are the least so. Is it the fault of religion? Not that simple! The authors explain that since the scores of mainstream Christians on measures of prejudice turn out to be much more similar to the atheists, and since fundamentalists also score very high on measures of authoritarianism, it's authoritarianism that leads to prejudice. However, these particular subtopics are just a tiny sliver of what this book actually covers.

"The Psychology of Religion" has been selected for listing in "Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments: An Entheogen Chrestomathy" http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy

"The Psychology of Religion" has been selected for listing in "Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments: An Entheogen Chrestomathy" http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy