Study: Children Raised With Religion Cannot Judge Fact From Fiction

I've said before that, in my view, raising a child in a conservative/fundamentalist religion household is a form of child abuse.  The related irony is that it is the conservatives who are constantly decrying America's supposed decline in the world.  Yet it is the religious conservatives' embrace of ignorance and rejection of science and objective facts - modernity itself - that is helping to dumb down our school curricula and creating a generation of uninformed citizens.  All so that the religious conservatives can avid facing the fact that their religious beliefs are based on myths and ignorance.  The New Civil Rights Movement looks at a new study that found that children raised with religion were at a disadvantage in discerning fact from fiction.  Here are excerpts:

In two studies, 5- and 6-year-old children were questioned about the status of the protagonist embedded in three different types of stories," an abstract published by Cognitive Science, a journal of the professional Cognitive Science Society. "In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine intervention, claims about the status of the protagonist varied sharply with exposure to religion."

Children who went to church or were enrolled in a parochial school, or both, judged the protagonist in religious stories to be a real person, whereas secular children with no such exposure to religion judged the protagonist in religious stories to be fictional. Children's upbringing was also related to their judgment about the protagonist in fantastical stories that included ordinarily impossible events whether brought about by magic (Study 1) or without reference to magic (Study 2). Secular children were more likely than religious children to judge the protagonist in such fantastical stories to be fictional.

The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children's differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories.

The study, “Judgments About Fact and Fiction by Children From Religious and Nonreligious Backgrounds,” was led by Kathleen Corriveau, a Boston University Assistant Professor. . . 

Bottom line: Researchers concluded that "religious teaching, especially exposure to miracle stories, leads children to a more generic receptivity toward the impossible, that is, a more wide-ranging acceptance that the impossible can happen in defiance of ordinary causal relations."

Perhaps this explains why the GOP base so easily accepts that party's policies which are opposed to objective fact and reality.