Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief

In Materialist Conceptions of God, I wrote about how one can interpret religious claims as hyperstititions, beliefs that become true as a result of you believing in them. Since then, I’ve stumbled on a very simple, practical example of a hyperstition that you can test out in two minutes with a willing partner. It’s the Aikido exercise Unbendable Arm (link goes to a 1 min video). The goal of the exercise is to hold one of your arms straight while your partner attempts to bend it at the elbow. It turns out that for most people, the default intention of “holding your arm straight” by tensing your muscles and resisting your partner is not very effective. What works much better is consciously relaxing your arm while imagining a situation in which your arm happens to be extremely strong and straight through no intervention of your own. The suggestion in the video is to imagine that your arm is a firehose spewing water at a fire; the way it was first taught to me, I had to imagine my arm exte

In Materialist Conceptions of God, I wrote about how one can interpret religious claims as hyperstititions, beliefs that become true as a result of you believing in them. Since then, I’ve stumbled on a very simple, practical example of a hyperstition that you can test out in two minutes with a willing partner. It’s the Aikido exercise Unbendable Arm (link goes to a 1 min video). The goal of the exercise is to hold one of your arms straight while your partner attempts to bend it at the elbow. It turns out that for most people, the default intention of “holding your arm straight” by tensing your