"That land that I live in has God on its side," Bob Dylan sang in 1963, cynically reprising a go-to justification for war. That is, believers think they're doing the Lord's work—sometimes a dangerous inclination.
Psychologist Nick Epley explores how we attribute beliefs and attitudes to other minds, including those of deities. In ongoing research at the University of Chicago, he and his collaborators are finding that people's own beliefs line up much more closely with the beliefs they attribute to their gods than to those they peg on other people. (These include attitudes about abortion, gay marriage, and the Iraq war.) And if you manipulate people's views, their gods' assigned views change, too. Further, neuroimaging shows that pondering God's thoughts and considering your own both activate the same parts of the brain, areas distinct from those used to guess the views of the average American.
