- Brian O’Mahoney / Sun-Times Media
- Children who undergo religious education are more likely to have a broader view of what’s possible.
The trouble with scholarly papers is that the scholars who write them don’t know how to write catchy headlines. They need to be shown.
HuffPo: “Children Exposed To Religion Have Difficulty Distinguishing Fact From Fiction, Study Finds”
My advice: if you want to be outraged—as so many of us do—stick to the abstract, which keeps it simple. It explains that children five and six years old were told three kinds of stories: “realistic stories,” “religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine intervention,” and “fantastical stories” in which the divine was not invoked.
During World War II, army engineers took as their motto, “The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.” Do we (a) admire their spunk or (b) weep on reflecting that their addled minds must have prolonged the war by years?
Let me add on my own authority that a firm grasp of the improbable is a best friend of any serious mind.
