El Pensamiento Crítico y las Creencias Religiosas

The purpose of this article is to analyze the need to apply critical thinking at the moment of assuming a religious belief. Since religious precepts induce in the believer concrete behaviors, it is necessary to reflect critically on the consequences of assuming a belief in general and a religious belief in particular, to fulfill this purpose it is essential to consider the fundamental principles that support critical thinking and contemporary critical pedagogy. An unfounded or uncritically assumed belief is a source of subjectivism, dogmatism and fanaticism that must be avoided. The role of religious leaders and the philosophy of religion in the education of beliefs is briefly reviewed, and the incidence of critical thinking in religious beliefs is determined. It analyzes how certain religious leaders manipulate their followers through whimsical interpretations of the sacred books, many times motivated by the Protestant precept of the free interpretation of the Bible suggested by Luther since the Renaissance period. It values the dialogue that should exist between reason and faith; it promotes critical thinking as a mechanism for educating in religious faith. To conclude, the work proposes guidelines and alternatives for the understanding of religious beliefs. It is a bibliographic and documentary research that as an operational strategy contributed to the observation and the orderly and systematic reflection of the investigated topic, it is aided in the deductive-inductive, inductive-deductive and in the phenomenological-hermeneutic methods.