Religion has played a part in society for thousands of years and there is a debate amongst Psychologists as to which theory adequately explains Religion and what we get out of it. In order to examine this, it will be nessaray to explore the theory of conscious and unconscious thought and to also look at the cognitive theory of a schema.
A schema can best be described as a cognitive framework that helps us to organise and interpret information. (ref) The theorist Jean Piaget introduced the term schema as a mental framework in a child's development on how they construct the world around them, these are the basic building blocks of our intelligent behaviour, in which we use to organise our knowledge. Schemas are considered very important in
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The assumption is that these links are all stored and then we can apply or modify when needed. However, it's important to note the different development stages of how we acquire and apply a schema. Piaget described the child's devopenment to have four stages. (ref) The Sensorimotor Stage from birth to age two is the first stage in where that an infant develops in which they learn how to interpret the world around them by learning how to co-ordinate their sensory and motor skills, it's during this period that the child accomplishes to understands that an object still exists even though it has been hidden, thus causing a first mental repenstation i.e., a schema of the object. (ref) The construction of a schema to place perment objects is important because it is the essential requirement for all later mental activity. All our concepts start from or involve objects in one way or another it's through this recognition of their permanence that is the starting point for the intellectual growth. (ref) The Preoperational Stage from two to seven years is where young children start to think about things symbolically, the key features of this stage are that the child can internalise a word or an object in realising this can stand for something other than itself. The child still has difficulty in seeing the view point of others and can only