Does Belief Help Us to Survive?

I don't think religious beliefs are different from any other kind of beliefs: political attitudes, commitments to political parties, or economic ideologies, for example. These are all forms of belief. I think at the base of it is this whole idea that we're pattern-seeking primates. We connect the dots — A connects to B connects to C — and often, they really are connected, and that's called associative learning. All animals do it. It's a biological imperative; we grow new synaptic connections whe