A simple experiment comes to mind. If you wore a mask with eyes at the side, would animals not run away as much?
Interesting experiment indeed. The only animals in this region that are small enough, plentiful enough, and brash enough to do this without having to spend several days trying to encounter one are squirrels. Maybe I'll try that one day. Not the squirrels in my yard because they all know me and would not be fooled, but the ones in some other part of the neighborhood.
Of course we have a huge population of "hooved rats," as deer are called on the East Coast. But since we killed off all their predators natural selection has been breeding them for intelligence instead of speed, and they've figured out that city folk aren't going to harm them as long as we're not driving cars. I have (no exaggeration) seen them standing on the curb with the pedestrians, waiting for the walk light to turn green.
My own view on religious belief is that it is a vital part of what it is to be human.
So my wife and I and my entire family are lacking in human vitality?
If science thinks it can just pluck away religious belief without something replacing it, it is wrong.
I can't speak for other scientists or other atheists, but I personally have never advocated for trying to pluck it away. That seems like a really good way to get shot, since literal-religionists are some of the most violent, easily-angered people on earth. I think we're going to have to wait for it to fade away by attrition.
America's Religious Redneck Retard Revival notwithstanding, in many parts of the world Christianity has settled into a genteel sort of wink-wink collection of inspiring metaphors, like urban Hinduism and the Dao. Even in much of Latin America it has lost its iron grip, and in many congregations Judaism has long been a religion of law rather than doctrine. These days it's primarily Islam that is regarded as literally true by (perhaps) a majority of its members. Taken collectively, all of these observations seem to indicate that when a population becomes more educated they begin to (at least unconsciously) understand the difference between metaphor and literal truth.
So what we need is to simply improve and expand education, and let the truth set people free.
