Tower of Babble (a bunch of baseless babble)

Well the human use of belief in modeling the world in which we act is a very important brain function and it's tied in to other brain functions so that capacity or vulnerablity exists but I think it is short of hardwiring.I think the phenomenon is gullibility and obediance to leadership or what true believers call "faith". I recently read a book by Ann Rule called Everything She Ever Wanted about the crimes and sorry psychology of a sociopath. The thing that was hardest to understand was that her mother supported her and believed in her, finding ways to deny the evidence in order to maintain her "faith" in her daughter. This woman disowned and blamed her grand daughter because she cooperated with the district attorney's investigations of her mother's crimes. I cite this as an obviously extreme example that demonstrates how the human mind will function to maintain a cherished belief.It is my observation that if a belief is emotionally important enough to an individual then there is no way to convince them otherwise. There are always rhetorical evasions that allow them to return to seeing things as they want to see them and the established religions of this world have had a lot longer to develop these rhetorical buttresses of their illogic than science has had to refuted them.
Religions have had much longer to evolve to fit and support and use human psychology than science has. Looking at it like that it becomes easier for me to understand why so many prefer religion to science.The brain is vulnerable to delusion. Another example is the condition where people believe they are dead and bloodless. One case I read about a psychiatrist pricked the patient's fingers to produce a drop of blood. The patient did not respond by seeing through his delusion, but simply stated as evidence that he was correct that it was only a very little blood!lfen

I agree with you that confirmation bias is one of the foundations of illogic on which religion is based and this forum sees almost daily examples of it being used to support beliefs. I don't know how to succinctly specify my ideas on this so I'll just very roughly sketch out where I'm coming from. I'm thinking of the momentum of culture and how it affects the minds (brain content etc.) of members of that culture. Religion has had thousands of years developing its function in human society compared to the the recent few hundreds of years that science has been developing.Religion has greater appeal to the mass social culture as the two have co developed over the thousands of years of civilization. I think it will take many hundreds of years before the influences of science and rationality permeat culture to the extent that religions do today.I say this as I've come to feel it's hopeless to show believers the defects in their reasoning. They will simply find a rhetorical patch around the logic that will allow them to continue to believe what ever unsupported but emotionally appealing belief they have come to embrace.lfen

If this were a valid argument tell me why Christians in the US today overwelmingly talk about Jesus instead of Jeshua? Borrowing stories is not the same thing as borrowing physical objects and even physical objects can get changed, like repainting stolen cars or something.You just learned something important but because it doesn't serve your purpose of trying to find some straw to support a myth that has no evidence to support it and lots of evidence to discredit it you come up with a requirement that is not met in the world.This kind of repetitive rhetorical nonsensical arguing in bad faith is why I've largely given up talking to believers. You only care about rhetorical cuteness and not evidence or facts. You can support any work of myth like the Bible, the Book of Mormon, Lord of the Rings etc. by cute grasping at straws, but what is required is evidence!lfen