Skin Deep Non-Believers
There are people, who are skin deep christians, because they have been brainwashed to adhere to the religion in contrast to their innate apistia.
But there are also skin deep non-believers, who have been influenced to attempt or pretend to be such in spite of their remaining innate psychological need for the subjective benefits of believing. A good example is a person's reply, when asked about the belief in a horse shoe at the door bringing luck: "Oh, I don't believe in it. But I am told it works even if you don't believe in it."
This event is either ascribed to Niels Bohr himself or else to him as the one asking:
There are people, who are skin deep christians, because they have been brainwashed to adhere to the religion in contrast to their innate apistia.
But there are also skin deep non-believers, who have been influenced to attempt or pretend to be such in spite of their remaining innate psychological need for the subjective benefits of believing. A good example is a person's reply, when asked about the belief in a horse shoe at the door bringing luck: "Oh, I don't believe in it. But I am told it works even if you don't believe in it."
This event is either ascribed to Niels Bohr himself or else to him as the one asking:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr
"Of course not ... but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it.
Reply to a visitor to his home in Tisvilde who asked him if he really believed a horseshoe above his door brought him luck, as quoted in Inward Bound : Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (1986) by Abraham Pais, p. 210
In most published accounts of this anecdote such was Bohr's reply to his friend, but in the earliest account thus far located, in The Interaction Between Science and Philosophy (1974) by Samuel Sambursky, p. 357, Bohr was at a friend's house and asked "Do you really believe in this?" to which his friend replied "Oh, I don't believe in it. But I am told it works even if you don't believe in it.""
