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Definition: People tend to think that there is a logical reason for everything. So when something unexplainable happens, people try to make sense of it themselves.
Connection:  This video shows five different unexplained photographs and the creator of this video tries to provide an explanation for every one of them.

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5 Mysterious Photographs & The Unexplained Stories Behind Them

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Perception and Observation (Reasons for Belief) 

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Perception and Observation (Reasons for Belief) 

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Definition: People often jump to conclusions when they witness something because they let their beliefs mix with their perception.
Connection: Sometimes when people are in a relationship they tend to jump to conclusions when they witness something that could validate their beliefs. For example, if someone's boyfriend is having lunch with another female, the girlfriend could jump to the conclusion that he was cheating on her if she thought he was cheating on her to begin with.
Object: Picture

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By: Kate Bunting, Individual Assignment

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Definition: Political, cultural, and religious causes where people take a stand (using campaigns, social media, etc.) to make people believe in something that is based more on personal belief than scientific evidence.
Connection: This video demonstrates how people use campaigns to keep Ireland from legalizing abortion based on personal religious beliefs.
Object: Video

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Definition: Remembering, interpreting, favouring, and/or recalling certain information/events that verifies someone's belief and denies or ignores all the events/information that does not.
Connection: Election time is a great example of when people use Confirmation Bias. When people are determining their vote, they often favour the information they like about the candidate and disregard the bad information about the candidate. This article explains how Trump supporters favour Trump's political promises and disregard all of his lies and unprofessional conduct.
Object: Article

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Gray Matter

By Daniel A. Effron

Mr. Effron is an associate professor of organizational behavior at London Business School.

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Credit Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

In his first 400 days in office, President Trump made more than 2,400 false or misleading claims, according to The Washington Post. Yet a recent Gallup poll shows his approval ratings among Republicans at 82 percent. How do we square these two facts?

Some supporters no doubt believe many of the falsehoods. Others may recognize the claims as falsehoods but tolerate them as a side effect of an off-the-cuff rhetorical style they admire. Or perhaps they have become desensitized to the dishonesty by the sheer volume of it.

I suspect that there is an additional, underappreciated explanation for why Mr. Trump's falsehoods have not generated more outrage among his supporters. Wittingly or not, Mr. Trump's representatives have used a subtle psychological strategy to defend his falsehoods: They encourage people to reflect on how the falsehoods could have been true.

New research of mine suggests that this strategy can convince supporters that it's not all that unethical for a political leader to tell a falsehood - even though the supporters are fully aware the claim is false.

Consider some examples. When President Trump retweeted a video falsely purporting to show a Muslim migrant committing assault, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, defended him by saying, "Whether it's a real video, the threat is real."

On another occasion, Ms. Sanders admitted that Mr. Trump had made up a story about how Japan drops bowling balls on American cars to test their safety, but she argued that the story still "illustrates the creative ways some countries are able to keep American goods out of their markets." When asked about the false claim that Mr. Trump's inauguration had drawn the biggest inaugural crowd in history, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, suggested that inclement weather had kept people away.

In each instance, rather than insisting the falsehood was true, Ms. Sanders and Ms. Conway implied it could have been true. Logically speaking, the claim that more people could have attended the president's inauguration in nicer weather does not make the crowd any bigger. But psychologically, it may make the falsehood seem closer to the truth and thus less unethical to tell.

To find out if this strategy actually helps get politicians off the hook for dishonesty, I recently conducted a series of experiments. I asked 2,783 Americans from across the political spectrum to read a series of claims that they were told (correctly) were false. Some claims, like the falsehood about the inauguration crowd, appealed to Mr. Trump's supporters, and some appealed to his opponents: for instance, a false report (which circulated widely on the internet) that Mr. Trump had removed a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office.

All the participants were asked to rate how unethical it was to tell the falsehoods. But half the participants were first invited to imagine how the falsehood could have been true if circumstances had been different. For example, they were asked to consider whether the inauguration would have been bigger if the weather had been nicer, or whether Mr. Trump would have removed the bust if he could have gotten away with it.

The results of the experiments, published recently in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, show that reflecting on how a falsehood could have been true did cause people to rate it as less unethical to tell - but only when the falsehoods seemed to confirm their political views. Trump supporters and opponents both showed this effect.

Again, the problem wasn't that people confused fact and fiction; virtually everyone recognized the claims as false. But when a falsehood resonated with people's politics, asking them to imagine counterfactual situations in which it could have been true softened their moral judgments. A little imagination can apparently make a lie feel "truthy" enough to give the liar a bit of a pass.

These results reveal a subtle hypocrisy in how we maintain our political views. We use different standards of honesty to judge falsehoods we find politically appealing versus unappealing. When judging a falsehood that maligns a favored politician, we ask, "Was it true?" and then condemn it if the answer is no.

In contrast, when judging a falsehood that makes a favored politician look good, we are willing to ask, "Could it have been true?" and then weaken our condemnation if we can imagine the answer is yes. By using a lower ethical standard for lies we like, we leave ourselves vulnerable to influence by pundits and spin doctors.

In this time of "fake news" and "alternative facts," commentators worry that people with different political orientations base their judgments of right and wrong on entirely different perceptions of reality. My research suggests an additional concern: Even when partisans agree on the facts, they can come to different moral conclusions about the dishonesty of deviating from those facts. The result is more disagreement in an already politically polarized world.

Blame the human ability to imagine what might have been.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR6 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Trump Supporters Don't Mind His Lies. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | Why Trump Supporters Don't Mind His Lies

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Gray Matter By Daniel A. Effron Mr. Effron is an associate professor of organizational behavior at London Business School. In his first 400 days in office, President Trump made more than 2,400 false or misleading claims, according to The Washington Post. Yet a recent Gallup poll shows his approval ratings among Republicans at 82 percent.

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Definition: When people see the term "all natural" they instinctively think of safe or healthy. However, there are just as many things in the world that are "all natural" that are unsafe and unhealthy.
Connection: This article explains how "All Natural" or organic skincare products are not always safer or better than non-organic or products that are not "all natural". Just because the product is "all natural", does not mean it is better for your skin.
Object: Article

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Emotional Connections (Reasons for Belief)

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Emotional Connections (Reasons for Belief)

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Definition: When people are emotional invested in something, they tend to disregard logic. Emotions make people believe in things based on their personal connection to it.
Connection: This article demonstrates how individuals that believe in a religion, often only believe in the religion because they felt an emotional connection to it instead of basing their belief on scientific evidence and critical thinking.
Object: Article

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For most people, it's not as if I really need to tell them this, but the primary reason why people come to be religious, besides being indoctrinated into it by culture, is for emotional reasons. They may have either had an emotional reaction to a religious hymn, a religious ritual, or the dramatic retelling of a religious story. Religions are all designed in some way to appeal to that awe and mystery we all feel about the world around us through the use of rituals and stories that create a social cohesion among its believers.

I'm not sure how many people are convinced by many of the so-called logical arguments for god. I suppose an atheist could hear them and become convinced, but without that emotional connection to a particular religion, I don't really see how any of them could get an atheist passed deism. What ultimately pushes a person into a religion is an emotional connection with that religion's teachings, their founder, or the rituals associated with that religion. I had one such reaction to Hinduism when I was in Bali a few years ago. I witnessed a Hindu ceremony in which incense was passed around me with some chanting and I felt this amazing wave of relaxation and calmness come over me. It was as if every drop of tension and anxiety in me had melted away. Had I been a spiritual "seeker" that experience may have converted me. And if something like that had happened to me in a Christian context when I was younger, I might have converted.

All human beings, even the most ardent atheists like me, can experience the numinous and the awe of feeling transcendence. The skeptical inquirer knows that this is all just part of the human brain: our conscience allows us these experiences, and religions attempt to make sense of them. What bothers me is when a person tries to use their personal spiritual experiences to argue that the metaphysics behind them is true. That's when they try to use the arguments for god like the argument from design or the cosmological argument in order to make themselves more confident that their beliefs aren't just all in their head.

How does the Christian distinguish between the spiritual experiences of people in other faiths? Since William Lane Craig often argues for god using his " Inner witness to the Holy Spirit" charade, I will focus for a bit on his justification. He writes in God? A Debate Between A Christian and An Atheist:

Unless I have some reason to think that my experience of the inner witness of God's
Spirit is delusory, the mere presence of other persons claiming a similar experience in support of counter-Christian claims does not in itself serve to make my belief improper. Moreover, the objection assumes that all religious experiences "seem similar from the inside." That assumption is false, as an examination of the variety of religious experiences reveals. The Hindu experience of one's subsumption in the Whole is a very different experience from Christian experience of God's love. The veridicality of Christian experience thus need not imply that other types of religious experience are not genuine apprehensions of God in certain aspects of His being. (p. 74)

Craig here is claiming to know that the spiritual experiences of Hindus is different from that of a Christian's, and by implication, such would be true of all non-Christian faiths. How he knows this is anyone's guess and he does not attempt to back it up. And according to him, the Hindu's experiences are due to "certain aspects" of the Christian god. But why would the Christian god be giving non-Christians intense spiritual experiences that strengthen their non-Christian faiths and thus take them further from ever converting to Christianity? It makes no sense why god would lead people away from him, if his goal is to draw people near to him. You'd have to believe in a god who deliberately deceives and who therefore, could not be perfect. Otherwise, why wouldn't god use his Holy Spirit to lead the billions of non-Christians around the world who experience the numinous every week to tell them that only through Christianity does one find ultimate happiness?

Craig essentially makes the argument that belief in god is "properly basic" -in other words, a fundamental axiom like existence. I suppose he means his god and not just any god, but I'm not sure. I would agree to the extent that most people are hard wired through evolution to believe in supernatural forces, but the fact that we have a natural explanation for that to me is strong evidence that it's a phenomena that takes place entirely in people's heads.

Craig himself has famously written that his faith and emotional experiences of god take precedence over any possible evidence against it in his apologetic handbook, Reasonable Faith:

Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa. (p. 36)

In other words, "I'm going to believe in my God no matter what!" And Craig recommends other Christians adopt this mentality. Well what if every Jew, Muslim, Hindu and atheist adopted the same mentality? Craig and his minions would never be able to convert them. He apparently wants all non-Christians to be open to the Christian faith, but "not vice versa." That's anything but "reasonable."

Personal feelings of god are evidence of nothing. The only evidence of extant things can be found via reason, science, and the proper use of logic. Emotional experiences to unseen and intangible things are always subjective. And this goes for atheists too. There are some atheists who came to their atheism because of a bad experience with their church or religious leader, or they experienced an emotional personal tragedy. Many Jews became atheists for example after the horrors they experienced during World War II. Although I don't chastise atheists for jettisoning their religion due to emotional reasons, I think we all should base our philosophies and worldviews on where the evidence leads, and not on what makes us happy or what we happened to be raised to believe.

That's one of the reasons why I dedicate this blog to taking on the best arguments theists can offer and to defending atheism from attacks.

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Religious Belief Is Primarily Emotional, Not Logical

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For most people, it's not as if I really need to tell them this, but the primary reason why people come to be religious, besides being indoctrinated into it by culture, is for emotional reasons. They may have either had an emotional reaction to a religious hymn, a religious ritual, or the dramatic retelling of a religious story.

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I chose to evaluate the article "Why Trump Supporters Don't Mind His Lies" by Daniel A. Effron.

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Confusion of Correlation with Causation (Red Fag)

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Confusion of Correlation with Causation (Red Fag)

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Definition: When people determine a cause and effect relationship based on two events occurring at the same time or close to each other. They think that one event is the cause or change in another event.
Connection: Confusion of Correlation with Causation can often occur with 'paranormal experiences'. For example, if someone was playing Bloody Mary and the lights flicked, the person would assume that Bloody Mary caused the lights to flicker.
Object: Picture

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Definition: Using any type of authority or expert (ex. celebrities, doctors, parents etc.) to prove that an argument is true, solely based on the person's word without any evidence.
Connection: This article explains how Donald Trump, the president of one of the most powerful countries of the world, denies the existence of global warming even though there has been extensive research done to prove that global warming, does in fact exist.
Object: Article

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cop 21: un climate change conference | paris

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It's not okay how clueless Donald Trump is about climate change | Dana Nuccitelli

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Dana Nuccitelli: We've come to accept Trump's ignorance, but it's often dangerous