NewScientist (No: 3015) | By Graham Lawton | Posted: April 4, 2015
The day I sat down to write this article the news was rather like any other day. A teenager had been found guilty of plotting to behead a British soldier. Fighting had broken out again in Ukraine. Greece was accusing its creditors of being motivated by ideology rather than economic reality. Some English football fans were filmed racially abusing a man on the Paris subway. Admittedly, all of that day's stories were unique in themselves. But at the root they were all about the same thing: the powerful and very human attribute we call belief. Beliefs define how we see the world and act within it; without them, there would be no plots to behead soldiers, no war, no economic crises and no racism. There would also be no cathedrals, no nature reserves, [...]