This week, when facilitating our group discussion, a particularly personal story one of my group mates shared caught my interest. In reference to Al-Ghazali’s belief that we often believe certain things just because we were raised to believe them as the default, I had asked the group what was one thing they still believed just because their parents had told them about it. Someone then shared with us how her parents had taught her as a child that sticking a piece of paper on her forehead when she has hiccups would cure them, and although she could think of no logical reason for it to work, it did and so she didn’t question it and still uses it. This sparked a further question about the placebo effect: how the mere belief that something will have a certain effect on you, tricks your brain into allowing it to have said effect. I then asked the religious people in the class whether they believe prayer calms their soul because of a genuine connection it forms between them and some divine entity, or simply because they’ve been taught that praying is supposed to calm you down. Obviously, the answer I got was that there was a genuine divine connection, but I remained skeptical. I began to think whether religion was simply a large-scale placebo effect that managed to be so widespread because of the authority people assign to a God or Divine being. For example, if a classmate in kindergarten had told my groupmate about using a paper to cure her hiccups, she may, in her naivety have believed it at the time, but certainly would’ve grown out of the belief as she aged. I wonder if the only reason she continues to use the method is because it was her parents who had told her about it: a source she trusted as all-knowing and assigned a certain level of authority to. Similarly, do prayers only help people feel calmer because they have assigned absolute authority and knowledge to God and since said God has said prayer is the answer to all their problems, it becomes the answer?