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Today I'm going to continue with the end of Faith Sessions, chapter 2.

Chapter 2. The Nature of Belief. It is often argued that religious beliefs are somehow

distinct from other claims to knowledge about the world. There's no doubt that we treat them

differently, particularly in the degree to which we demand in ordinary discourse that people

justify their beliefs. But this does not indicate that religious beliefs are special in any

important sense. What do we mean when we say that a person believes a given proposition about the

world? As with all questions about familial events, we must be careful that the familiarity of our

terms does not lead us astray. The fact that we have one word for belief does not guarantee that

believing is itself a unitary phenomenon. An analogy can be drawn to the case of memory, while

people commonly refer to their failures of quote memory. Decades of experiment have shown that

human memory comes in many forms. Not only are our long-term and short-term memories the products

of distinct and dissimilar neural circuits, they have themselves been divided into multiple

subsystems. To speak simply of memory, therefore, is now rather like speaking of experience.

Clearly, we must be more precise about what our mental terms mean before we attempt to understand

them at the level of the brain. Even dogs and cats, insofar as they form associations between people,

...