4 posts
Someone joins a bhajan group with no particular faith and years later finds themselves genuinely devout. The usual explanation reaches for magic or manipulation. The actual mechanism is simpler, well-studied, and has nothing to do with the specific god being sung to.
An atheist father raises a devout son. A staunchly partisan household produces the opposite voter. The popular explanation reaches for rebellion and algorithms. The research points somewhere more specific — and considerably less dramatic.
The horoscope arrived in India from Hellenistic Greece — the founding text is called the Yavanajataka, 'of the Greeks.' But the more interesting number is modern: fewer than half of Indians say they believe in astrology, while 83% fix important dates by auspicious timing.
When empirical frameworks are absent, analytical minds redirect their reasoning towards faith. This post explores how social confinement and neural reward systems make faith intellectually rich and psychologically satisfying, and how cognitive foundations and social ecology contribute to this phenomenon.
