The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us.
Thats when you have people that lack a belief in God while also lacking an understanding of Science and the Scientific Method. Its pretty simple to teach the scientific method, and therefore easy to discourage superstition.
"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology.
Lol, yes, of course, it all makes sense now! Instead of believing in palm readers and astrology, they believe that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.....
Yes, because the Evangelical Christians don't even believe in Real Science. The wording here is deceitful, "the irreligious... tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians". Couldn't that be phrased as "Evangelical Christians are less likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than the irreligious". My phrasing makes much more sense, because they already have their belief system, they
can't believe in the paranormal, while Irreligous people
can, and Irreligious does not equal Atheist, at all.
Irreligious: not religious; not practicing a religion and feeling no religious impulses or emotions.
Atheism: disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings
These two things are not necessarily related. Not believing in a specific religion does not mean that the irreligious do not believe in higher/supernatural powers of a sort, how would voodoo dolls work if there wasn't something supernatural?
....Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn't.
Bush went to Yale and we all know that he's a real winner. It also depends on what kind of Education, a higher education in a scientific field will logically lead to less superstitiousness, I don't know how anyone could try to argue that a Physicist is more likely to believe voodoo dolls work than a Christian, both wouldn't believe it.