The Self Serving Bias—a tendency overestimate our ability, our sources, your niche in life, attributing good things that happen to your own character, while dismissing the negative to external factors. It can happen to anyone, but through some simple steps one can find reasonable accuracy to their actual abilities, improving their vantage point to show each of us a firmer reality.
This carryover into Christianity is a shoe-in and the writers, founders, and the pulpits of today continue to tap into this basic underdeveloped point of our slowly advancing human psychology. Read more bible, pray more is a death sentence to reason.
Routinely Christians give their conceptual god a free pass, while any negative outcomes of faith are attributed to the fallen world, mere people, freewill, all the way to total acquiescence of “god is in control”. And if god is in control, it’s not the fault of religion or the faithful individual.
This bias paves the way to misinterpretation of the religious result, always calling good what is an obvious poor, contradictory outcome. It is never what it seems to the believer.
Countless studies across the spectrum of disciplines bare this out time and again. Chances are, the indoctrinations of your youth are wrong. If you study religion more than other topics, you are biased and believe the things you know will somehow benefit you—even when they don’t. There’s only one way around it. Honest, self examination and and a variety of sources and disciplines. You are not as right as you think you are, but can be if one can apply some mindful self awareness.
TheCommonAtheist 