Do you know if you deceive yourself? If you have strong beliefs, do you fight against opposing ideas without wavering? Does your agenda blind you? I highly reccomend to everyone of all ages to read the following articles in the Skeptic's Dictionary.

"Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits." Michael Novak

See the Skeptical Dictionary's entries on the following. I have put them in order of my preference: ad hoc hypothesis, selective thinking, the post hoc fallacy, communal reinforcement, testimonials, self-deception, subjective validation, confirmation bias, control study, Ockham's razor, the placebo effect, cold reading, wishful thinking.

An ad hoc hypothesis is one created to explain away facts that seem to refute one’s theory. Ad hoc hypotheses are common in paranormal research and in the work of pseudoscientists.

Selective thinking is the process whereby one selects out favorable evidence for remembrance and focus, while ignoring unfavorable evidence for a belief. This kind of thinking is the basis for most beliefs in the psychic powers of so-called mind readers and mediums. It is also the basis for many, if not most, occult and pseudoscientific beliefs.

The post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) fallacy is based upon the mistaken notion that simply because one thing happens after another, the first event was a cause of the second event. Post hoc reasoning is the basis for many superstitions and erroneous beliefs.

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" or "plurality should not be posited without necessity." The words are those of the medieval English philosopher and Franciscan monk William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349).

Communal reinforcement is the process by which a claim becomes a strong belief through repeated assertion by members of a community. The process is independent of whether the claim has been properly researched or is supported by empirical data significant enough to warrant belief by reasonable people. Often, the mass media contribute to the process by uncritically supporting the claims. More often, however, the mass media provide tacit support for untested and unsupported claims by saying nothing skeptical about even the most outlandish of claims.

Self-deception is the process or fact of misleading ourselves to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid. Self-deception, in short, is a way we justify false beliefs to ourselves.

The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed from available
data. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon
shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold,
as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much
radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition seven times seven (49) times
as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or fifty times in all. The light we
receive from the Moon is one ten-thousandth of the light we receive from the
Sun, so we can ignore that. With these data we can compute the temperature
of Heaven. The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where
the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation,
i.e., Heaven loses fifty times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using
the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E)^4 = 50, where E is the absolute
temperature of the earth (~300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact
temperature of Hell cannot be computed, but it must be less than 444.6C, the
temperature at which brimstone or sulphur changes from a liquid to a gas.
Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their
part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten
brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point,
or 444.6C (Above this point it would be a vapor, not a lake.) We have,
then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.
-- "Applied Optics", vol. 11, A14, 1972