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Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't

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Slone's book will make the "reflexive" or "intuitive" religious believer uncomfortable, because it defines personal intuition and emotion as parts of ourselves that have been formed in the crucible of the brain's evolution, much like what many people think of as "animal instincts."

Slone suggests that there is a wide gulf between religous philosophers and average believers, and that the latter are predisposed to belief because the kind of brains that produce religious belief are, for other reasons, the kind of brains that helped our early ancestors survive in a hostile enviornment. All of Slone's examples from particular religions that show the contradictions between religious dogma or philosophy and popular expressions of the same religion seem to be a sort of lure to draw religous thinkers into Slone's way of conceiving of an origin of religious thought that need not involve an actual deity at all, which is the really interesting part.

I won't spoil the surprise and say WHAT it is about a well-tuned brain that, accidentally, also tends to produce religious thinking. To find out, read the book!

Because I am both an atheist and someone who is interested in cognitive psychology (I like Steve Pinker's work, for instance), I am inclined to feel that Slone's explanation of run-of-the-mill religous belief makes a lot of sense. I'd like to see these explanations expanded in a later book, and perhaps brought together with other evolutionary theories of the more social aspects of religion.

However, I fully expect people with a large emotional investment in religion to run from this book screaming.

Why do human beings find religious ideas such an appealing explanation for events and why is supernatural attribution so ubiquitous and often more satisfying than naturalistic accounts? Jason Slone goes a long way in answering these questions and the short version is somewhat paradoxical - supernatural beliefs are a natural by-product of cognition.

For anyone read in the literature in this field, you will find many ideas that aren't new - Slone draws heavily on the ideas of Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, and Stewart Guthrie among many others. But the book isn't just rehash and regurgitation as its thesis weaves the ideas into a coherent and refreshing look into religion and how human beings interact with it, generate it, and often use it to understand the world around them.

The main thrust of the book, from which the title is derived, is that the often simple ways religious beliefs contradict or are inconsistent with each other in the minds of believers can offer a keen insight into the nature of religion. To paraphrase an example given in the book: Christians were asked if God was omnipotent and of course they gave the "theologically correct" response of yes. They then were asked about the idea in practice as such how God operates with prayer requests. Their description consisted of a "naturalized" account more in tune with intuition - that God dealt with them one at a time. The key here being that as per the professed theological doctrine, God would be capable of dealing with all prayer requests devoid of any chronological constraints. But that turned out to be inconsistent with the "online" thinking of the prompted conceptualizations. The conclusion that reverberates here is that religion is constrained by cognition, not that cognition is constrained by religion.

Another large portion of the book deals with luck beliefs and how this is related (very closely) with religious beliefs. Slone expounds how luck beliefs are related to the human propensity to attribute things to causes and how even innocuous superstitious beliefs such as uttering "Gimme sevens" before rolling dice can offer clues. He explains how these often arise from the "illusion of correlation" as well as the tendency to blur the lines between psychological and mechanical causation.

The book should definitely be on the short list of to-read for any student of religion as it is full of powerful ideas and is conveyed in a well written, conversational style.

Slone has done what scholars have tried to do for years. He takes a theory about the way religious people behave and think and applies a method that can actually be tested. This, young grasshoppers, is called method. You see Slone is one of the bright new scholars who understands that simply belonging to a "snobby book club" and going in circles talking about "insert big postmodern scholar here" is not scientific, academic, an/or intellectual. Well, it is not intellectual to people that actually are trying to advance a theory of their own. Hell, even a theory of someone else. Slone's explanation of Buddhism is, quite frankly, refreshing. If Cognitive Science has nothing to add to the domain of culture and/or religion, then why are Psychologists, Archaeologist, Linguists, Historians, Evolutionary Biologists, and other "scientists" participating in the new and exciting method? The reason is that we can go beyond recycle and regurgitation. It's called science.

Brilliantly written! Slone has combined intellectual science with energetic communication to make this a must-read for both beginners and religious gurus. He has succeeded in keeping a potentially overwhelming subject matter alive and comprehensible with contemporary theories and an engaging new look at religious followers. Jason Slone has made a valuable contribution to the scientific study of religion.

What Slone investigates with this book, is why people will often hold completely contradictory ideas in their religious beliefs. His premise is that we can study the way people's brains work and then understand religion. Ultimately his work is faulty as a scholar of religion and as a scientist.

First of all, the notion that the brain is adverse to contradictions and paradoxes is a complete Western construct. One doesn't have to look very long in many non-Western cultures to find people who seek out and praise contradictions, who find paradoxes to be disirable. Yet, he never takes cultural differences into account in his research, and thus it is incredibly dubious as scholarship. By universalizing a western conception of how the brain works, Slone is treading on very dangerous ground.

As science, it doesn't work because Slone's predictions just don't hold up to scrutiny. In his examination of Calvinism/Determinism, he basically says that since such ideas don't make sense with the way people live their lives, the belief has waned dramatically. He obviously hasn't actually done any broad religious research. If he had, he would know that Calvinism/Determinism has made a huge resurgence in American Protestant/Evangelical theology over the past decade or so. Scientific proposals should make predictions that stand up over time...and Slone's work fails as science.

Slone claims that the ideas he puts forth are "neo-modern," in that he's a modernist that takes post-modern critiques into account. Yet, after scrutiny, all the arrogant and misguided problems of modernism's past remain. This book should only be read to show the virtues that postmodernism provides (not that it is perfect by any means), and that forcing our conceptions of how the world ought to be on others is a very dangerous activity.

After reading this book, it is clear to me that Slone has many misunderstandings about the religions he discusses. He also shows a strong bias towards cognitive science, but that is understandable since it is he field of study. He uses cognitive science to try to explain things which don't need explaining, because most people already understand what he terms, "Theological Incorrectness". He brings no new information to the discussion, and adds a number of misunderstandings and falsehoods, and I think that this book is a hinderance to the very field of study which it was meant to benefit.