We are born devoid of understanding of the world around us, but we begin to learn from the very get-go. We learn from watching other people behave; we learn from what other people tell us–teachers, parents, books, the media; and most important, we [37] learn from our own direct experience. Our young brains find all sorts of associations among objects and events around us, and we come to interpret these associations in terms of cause and effect. Some of the causal links we discover are real, but many others are illusory, the result of the magical thinking that is a permanent feature of our information processing.
. . .
Magical thinking is supplanted, gradually but never totally, by intellectual analysis. Children gradually begin to learn to reason—to go beyond direct experience and examine their interpretations of the experience. Adults teach them how to reality-test, how to distinguish what is “real” and “out there” from what is imaginary, inside one’s head. A crying child who has awakened from a nightmare is assured that “it was only a dream;” it was not reality. Imaginary friends who once seemed so real come to be recognized as the products of one’s own mind. Other beliefs, deeply held in childhood, also fall prey both to reality testing and the disambiguation provided by parents. This is the fate of Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and the Easter Bunny. However, where religion is concerned, reality testing and logical analysis are not only not encouraged in many homes but are actively discouraged.

James Alcock, “What is So Strange About Believing as the Mormons do?” Free Inquiry (October/November 2011, 36-9).