In the context of discussing religion with believers, rationalists are making a grave error when they think they can simply present logical arguments to believers and have them accepted. The people who claim to “know” god are reacting to a visceral feeling which Dr R. A. Burton, MD says is an emotion we don’t control. The feeling we get that we know something for certain is a feature provided by evolution. Nonetheless, mystical experiences divorced from reality have utility, because for many people believing in God is like a placebo. In fact Burton draws this very analogy. The benefit of such a placebo should be recognized and respected, because for billions of people “knowing” their life has purpose is all that gets them through the day.

On the other hand rationalists can deal with the existential abyss of not knowing all the answers. Indeed science is comfortable with the concept that all knowledge is provisional, subject to constant challenge and revision when new facts warrant. Burton advises us to teach children there are no absolutes. He says our genes set us apart from one another, and certainty is biologically impossible to attain.

Burton writes: “The message at the heart of this book is that the feelings of knowing, correctness, conviction, and certainty aren’t deliberate conclusions and conscious choices. They are mental sensations that happen to us.” He says that somehow we must incorporate what neuroscience is telling us about the limits of knowing into our everyday lives. The book is On Being Certain Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, St Martins Press

We all must learn to live within our biological constraints. No religious or scientific knowledge can be certain. But, getting people to go along with the cold hard facts is not easy. For scientists this maxim will be easier to accommodate than for believers.

Some research by The Cultural Cognition Project scientists reveals that arguing with people who are culturally disposed to disbelieve your point of view is actually counter productive and only serves to harden the resistance of believers to examine evidence objectively. This is an involuntary reaction and it happens instantly, the moment a threat against their world view is detected.

Cognition scientists are learning that once a belief is accepted as truth the belief is indelibly wired into the neural network of the brain. Certainty is a common state of mind and difficult to shake but there are ways to bypass resistance.

To be smart about engaging believers we need the help of the scientists at Frameworks Institute. There is more than one way to tell a story—making research understandable to the public is the expertise at Frame Analysis.

About Strategic Frame Analysis™

Since 1999, a rare collaboration between communications scholars and practitioners at FrameWorks Institute has worked to develop a new approach to explaining social issues to the public.

Strategic Frame Analysis™ is a proprietary approach to communications research and practice that pays attention to the public’s deeply held worldviews and widely held assumptions. This approach was developed at the FrameWorks Institute using a multi-disciplinary approach to evaluate the effects of various frame elements on support for social policies. Recognizing that there is more than one way to tell a story, Strategic Frame Analysis™ taps into decades of research on how people think and communicate. The result is an empirically-driven communications process that makes academic research understandable, interesting, and usable to help people solve social problems.

Quite simply, framing refers to the subtle selection of certain aspects of an issue in order to cue a specific response; as researchers have shown, the way an issue is framed explains who is responsible, and suggests potential solutions conveyed by images, stereotypes, messengers, and metaphors. The advantage of strategic frame analysis™ is that it allows the research to document and deconstruct the frames currently in the public consciousness and to understand their impact on public policy preferences. Additionally, it allows us to test and validate, through different disciplines, both the negative frames and the potential positive reframes that can further an issue’s salience. Finally, the effectiveness of the recommendations we make can be demonstrated; while we hope we are “creative” in our approach to communications, our findings are rooted in the social and cognitive sciences. We can explain what works and why it works, and demonstrate this across the research.

For more about framing and FrameWorks’ approach, read our Frequently Asked Questions.

How can you learn more about strategic frame analysis™? Click on the links below to read more about strategic frame analysis™ and how it can be applied to non-profit communications and advocacy.

* Strategic Frame Analysis E-Workshop
* The FrameWorks Perspective
* Seven Stages
* Research Methods
* Resources on Strategic Frame Analysis
See our Products and Tools section to review descriptions of our various research efforts and acquaint yourself with the variety of products produced by FrameWorks.

Read More here:
http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/sfa.html

Groups like Project Reason, FFRF, and the Richard Dawkins foundation have the financial resources to hire Frameworks to design a scientifically sound way to approach communication of the atheist perspective. It should be painfully obvious to every atheist who ever tried to reason with a believer how frustrating and fruitless the effort can be. Even the brilliant (and often witty) efforts of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins,  and our best debaters fail to get through. We need a better plan to engage in dialogue with believers—one that takes advantage of all we have learned about human communication. Plus one that does not simply harden their views.

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“But in any case, to see the parents as simply misguided about the child’s true interests is, I think, to put too generous a construction on it. For it is not at all clear that parents whenthey take control of their children’s spiritual and intellectual lives really do believe they are acting in the child’s best interests rather than their own. Abraham when he was commanded by God on the mountain to kill his son, Isaac, and dutifully went ahead with the preparation, was surely not thinking of what was best for Isaac – he was thinking of his own relationship with God. And so on down the ages. Parents have used and still use their children to bring themselves spiritual or social benefits: dressing them up, educating them, baptizing them, bringing them to confirmation or Bah Mitzvah in order to maintain their own social and religious standing.

Consider again the analogy with circumcision. No one should make the mistake of supposing that female circumcision, in those places where it’s practised, is done to benefit the girl. Rather, it is done for the honor of the family, to demonstrate the parents’ commitment to a tradition, to save them from dishonor. Although I would not push the analogy too far, I think the motivation of the parents is not so different at many other levels of parental manipulation – even when it comes to such apparently unselfish acts as deciding what a child should or should not learn in school. A Christian Fundamentalist mother, for example, forbids her child from attending classes on evolution: though she may claim she is doing it for the child and not of course herself, she is very likely motivated primarily by a desire to make a display of her own purity. Doesn’t she just know that God is mighty proud of her for conforming to His will?

The chief mullah of Saudi Arabia proclaims that the Earth is flat and that anyone who teaches otherwise is a friend of Satan : won’t he himself be thrice blessed by Allah for making this courageous stand? A group of rabbis in Jerusalem try to ban the showing of the film Jurassic Park on the grounds that it may give children the idea that there were dinosaurs living on earth sixty million years ago, when the scriptures state that in fact the world is just six thousand years old are they not making a wonderful public demonstration of their own piety? What we are seeing, as often as not, is pure self interest. In which case, we should not even allow a mitigating plea of good intentions on the part of the parent or other responsible adult. They are looking after none other than themselves.

Yet, as I said, in the end it hardly matters what the parents’ intentions are. Because even the best of intentions would not be sufficient to buy them “parental rights” over their children. Indeed the very idea that parents or any other adults have “rights” over children is morally insupportable.No human being, in any other circumstances, is credited with having rights over any one else. No one is entitled, as of right, to control, use or direct the life-course of another person – even for objectively good ends. It’s true that in the past slave-owners had such legal rights over their slaves. And it’s true too that, until comparatively recently, the anomaly persisted of husbands having certain such rights over their wives – the right to have sex with them, for instance. But neither of these exceptions provides a good model for regulatingparent-child relationships.

Children, to repeat, have to be considered as having interests independent of their parents. They cannot be subsumed as if they were part of the same person. At least so it should be. Unless, that is, we make the extraordinary mistake that the US Supreme Court apparently did when it ruled, in relation to the Amish, that while the Amish way of life may be considered “odd or even erratic” it “interferes with no rights or interests of others” (my italics). As if the children of the Amish are not even to be counted as potentially “others”.

The system is corrupt and stacked against children. Some practices foisted on children are decidedly detrimental to their health and happiness. OCD, anxiety and phobias, sexual incompetence, teen pregnancy, and relegation to a life of menial labor due to inadequate education are only some of the problems that indoctrinated children suffer as teens and adults. The seriousness of the problems varies with children and their circumstances, but the number of children harmed is hard to count and this is an area where serious research must be instituted.

Related articles

• You cannot end the religious indoctrination of vunerable children (endhereditaryreligion.com)
• First international day of protest against hereditary religion (endhereditaryreligion.com)
• Salvation is not a legitimate argument for indoctrinating children (endhereditaryreligion.com)
• Parental rights are not inalianable (endhereditaryreligion.com)
• The effects of early religious training (endhereditaryreligion.com)

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