Loving thoughts might increase religious belief, and sexy thoughts decrease it.An interesting research study (Förster, Epstude, & Özelsel, 2009) found that asking people to think about sex subsequently improved their performance on analytical tasks requiring attention to detail. Getting them to think about love improved their performance on creative tasks. The underlying theory is that people think about sex in concrete and specific ways involving the present moment which facilitates analytical thinking. On the other hand, people tend to think of love in a more abstract and global way that involves thoughts about the long-term future, which facilitates creativity. Previous studies have found that priming tasks that activate analytical thinking tend to weaken religious beliefs. This raises the intriguing possibility that thinking about sex could weaken religious belief, whereas thoughts about love might strengthen it. If this is true, this might shed some light on why most religions take such a negative view of sex, especially lust without love.
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