“A study published in the July issue of Cognitive Science determined that children who are not exposed to religious stories are better able to tell that characters in “fantastical stories” are fictional — whereas children raised in a religious environment even “approach unfamiliar, fantastical stories flexibly.”
In “Judgments About Fact and Fiction by Children From Religious and Nonreligious Backgrounds,” Kathleen Corriveau, Eva Chen, and Paul Harris demonstrate that children typically have a “sensitivity to the implausible or magical elements in a narrative,” and can determine whether the characters in the narrative are real or fictional by references to fantastical elements within the narrative, such as “invisible sails” or “a sword that protects you from danger every time.”
However, children raised in households in which religious narratives are frequently encountered do not treat those narratives with the same skepticism. “* The Young Turks hosts Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian break it down.
*Read more here from Scott Kaufman / Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/18/children-exposed-to-religion-have-difficulty-distinguishing-fact-from-fiction/
Comments
A myth is a story relating a human to a deity. So it should completely proper to call the holy books, “books of mythology.” That’s exactly what they are. “Myth” has taken on a connotation of falsehood. I’ll stick with you though, whether or not these books are false, they are certainly mythologies.