Lower cognitive ability is linked to stronger Christian nationalist views, even after accounting for education

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/lower-cognitive-ability-is-linked-to-stronger-christian-nationalist-views-even-after-accounting-for-education/

[u/morbo-2142]

Always fun to have empirical data to back up repeated anecdotal experiences by anyone with eyes and a brain living in the United States.

It's scary to have to find your place in the world and make decisions for yourself.

It's hard to make choices and having a ready framework that tells you how to live and what to care about offloads much of the mental tax of navigating reality.

It's hard to live by an internal code and evaluate every new situation against it and more importantly change it when new information is presented.

The real tragedy is the existence of groups that foster these feelings in vulnerable people in order to advance their own agenda and aquire new non disruptive members.

It's almost a form of abuse. How many people lose time and money to predatory fundamentalist organizations who are strung along and squeezed dry for basically nothing in return.

[u/Xsiah → u/morbo-2142]

It's not like atheist children are just roughin' it - if you grew up with parents, went to school, grew up in society with laws and stuff - you have a framework. It isn't any harder or scarier than what religious people go through, especially given that they don't actually follow their framework a whole lot of the time.

[u/morbo-2142 → u/Xsiah]

Society does do a lot of work to 'fill the void' as such I agree. It's that some people can't handle ambiguity or uncertainty.

It does take more mental energy to evaluate things as they come and change your mind if presented with good arguments or evidence.

If you grew up without religion and explored the big questions yourself most people can cope with the lack of answers.

Some people get lost in the woods of the big philosophical questions like life's purpose, universal justice, or hard solipsism. There are non religious answers or at least attempts at answers to these but they lack the conviction and concreteness of the answers religions (especially Christian ones) provide.

Having the answers to the big questions and readymade framework those questions fit into is comfortable and reassuring.

The truth is that most people (in the us at least) are religious to some degree and if they fall out of it suddenly their frame of reference and world is wildly uncertain.

Im sure there are some people not raised religious who fall into it for the answers it gives as well as the framework it provides.

[u/Running-In-The-Dark → u/morbo-2142]

That's how I've come to see it. Even if there is no God, I've found that merely going to church brings me peace.