Learn To Be Psychic In Ten Easy Lessons

From Skeptic Magazines website you can download the document for fun, games, sabotaging "psychic readings" and future reference.
Excerpt from the documents introduction follows below.

Theist Equivocation Of "Grace" Used in Combination With The Strategy of Minimization In Dialog.

Equivocate, from Dictionary.com

–verb (used without object), -cat⋅ed, -cat⋅ing.
to use ambiguous or unclear expressions, usually to avoid commitment or in order to mislead; prevaricate or hedge: When asked directly for his position on disarmament, the candidate only equivocated.

40% Of Scientists Have A Belief In A God? Okay, Which God?

If a believer says that "it is not unreasonable to believe there is intelligence behind our natural laws"
then they should agree that there must be an intelligence behind the intelligence of our natural laws. But isn't that absurd? Its got to stop somewhere, so why don't we stop before we get to Gods.  There is obviously no way to prove which God it is if they are not going to present themselves, so we might as well say, there is no God. If we ask a God to present itself unambiguously to us and it doesn't, isn't that exactly what we would expect if there really wasn't any God? What difference does a God that does not interact make anyway?

"Son of Man" As Jesus From IDQ Deficiencies

While acknowledging that Jesus' usage of the term "son of man" has no consensus, this article shows how the term "son of man" was historically used to refer to mankind or Humans as a category, was never generally considered by the Jewish community to be a descriptive phrase for the Messiah, and therefore seems to be used incorrectly either by Jesus, by the authors and/or translators of the gospels as something like a personal pronoun for Jesus. In any case, presuming the Bible is the Word of God, the term still maps to two real world states fulfilling the criteria for Ambiguous Representation which is an Information and Data Quality (IDQ) design flaw.

Solomon Asch Conformity Experiments

Watch YouTube Video
This article is intended to show how people will conform to peer pressure against their own convictions and in what conditions. It is relevant to the influence exerted in the church community among its members. There is significant pressure in the church to prevent the expression of doubt or critical questioning of the properties of the religion. People would rather conform than go against the group. Since people are evolutionarily tuned to be social animals, the perceived benefit of belonging to the group should outweigh the benefit of dissension. I am grateful to Matthew, one of our readers, for submitting this and his kind sentiment. Click on the Link above to show a short video documentary on them. Click on the Link below to read a short summary from Wikipedia.

Negativity Is Contagious, Study Finds

This is relevant to the role of persuasion and influence in the church community as an impediment to free-will.
This study supports other studies where people are influenced by the group to change their opinion.

The Role of Persuasion and Cognitive Bias in Your Church

This article discusses one of my typical Sundays at church and identifies elements of Principles of Persuasion and Cognitive Bias in it. It is intended to show that Religious Belief is induced and supported by common psychological devices of principles of persuasion and cognitive bias of the type that are used in Politics, Advertising and Marketing. The discussion of Politics, Advertising and Marketing is kept to a minimum because I believe that in those categories, the devices are self-evident. Any book on critical thinking will discuss the use of principles of persuasion in Politics, Advertising and Marketing but will skirt the issue with regard to Religion. To sustain a belief in something for which no evidence exists requires some type of reinforcement. These principles provide reinforcement. They can get you through your "Dark Night of the Soul".

The Role of Persuasion in the Question of the Holy Spirit

This article takes one of the examples in the "Reasonable Doubts about the Holy Spirit" article and explores it further to show that there is no possible way for a person to come to an informed belief based on the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the alleged interference of Satan or the stubbornness of Humans and that the beliefs that we form about ambiguous subjects are results of factors of persuasion in our environment.

Suspension of Disbelief

Changingminds.org is a site devoted to the study of persuasion. A post I discovered today discusses the suspension of disbelief to enjoy a movie or book and how people enjoy this behavior. I think this can be applied to religion to help explain a facet of it.