"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their life" - Leo Tolstoy

Everyday, no matter what hour, in dimly lit smoke filled rooms across America you will find people of all classes and creeds pumping their hard earned dollars into sadist machines awaiting a large cash reward that will most likely never come. Even when confronted with the unpropitious odds, most gamblers will continue to pull the lever and watch the lemons, cherries, or what ever brightly colored icon the casino has dreamed up, start to spin and then slowly come to a rest still hungry for more of the gamblers money. These wagering pleasure seekers justify their actions with an irrational belief, or rather, faith that this one time they are above the odds and “luck” will prevail. It’s not uncommon for a pathological gambler to inform a fellow gambler of the odds, but then truly believe that the mathematical odds don’t apply to themselves because of their good luck. How can this be? How can someone know the rational truth yet decide to ignore it? Why risk loosing your money when money is the one thing your after? Studies have shown that between 5 and 15 million Americans suffer from a pathological gambling disorder. However, this irrational phenomena is not reserved just for gamblers. It can be witnessed in an even worse, and far more dangerous slave to the heuristic slot machine gun, the religious practitioner.

One of the ironies of the western world is that many of the most respected educational facilities are affiliated with religion, some even go as far as to being named after "miracle" working saints. I’m aware that religion, and the ideas presented below, are not held strictly for the collegiate. This contradiction of universal education and religion sharing a unity is present whenever religion is involved in the cognitive process. It insists on basing rationality on an a priori, such as the Bible or Qur'an, and then leaving all decision making to what I call the heuristic slot machine gun. To clarify, two psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman did extensive studies on heuristics, or mental shortcuts. One of the types of heuristics they discovered is that of availability. Availability heuristic involves making predictions, or estimating probability, based on instances and emotional faculties that come to mind with more ease than actually using math for decision making. This is an adaptive trait that evolved possibly to help us save time when making decisions on the spur such as seeing a predator and fleeing the scene because we’re scared, instead of wasting time trying to identify the predator only to becomes its lunch while doing so. This process of decision making is not held only to predatorial situations. For example, you may estimate that many people drive Nissans if most of your friends do. Or you may make predictions on the national divorce rate based on how many people you know who’ve gone through a divorce. The religious mind becomes the heuristic slot machine gun because it not only binds rationality, but it tells people to not even think as far as availability heuristics go and base all rational on what a dated incomplete piece of fiction tells you to, which, in many cases, is like pulling the lever on the machine and watching it fire in the face of humanity.

Our ability to use reason and make sound decisions is dependent on evaluating alternatives and making choices among them. Now, with this considered and studies done by by Herbert Simon the 1978 Nobel prize winner in economics, it is understood that humans use sensible decision making strategies to the existent of their cognitive limitations. This means that even what may seem like a rational choice when looking from your own perspective my still be an irrational decision. This is unfortunately part of being human, however, it’s the part that science tries to help by giving us procedures and strategies to overcome our own cognitive fallacies. When religion comes into play people not only narrow their perspective down to their own subjective experience but they use religion, which is simply one other subjective ideal, as a funnel limiting their perspective and distorting the path to truth. It is in this process that science and religion cannot coexist.

If one chooses religion as the path to ultimate truth you will not be able to find it. One of the many follies of choosing religion is that it’s only a carrier for bounded rationality and the heuristic slot machine gun. It is a dangerous narrowing of the mind through the addictive properties of having your thoughts laid out before you. It is the ultimate example, in and of its self, of a weak inductive argument. Though it is known in the existential and psychological worlds that synthetic truths can be valid, which I will write about later, it is ours who understand the appeal of rationality to strive for a clearer understanding, not settling for a grape jolly rancher when we know that it tastes nothing like a grape at all. This means not settling for the slot machine to aid us in survival when we know that in reality it takes hard work.