Scientists want to find the truth and learn it. Religious people already know the truth and want others to learn it. Scientists alter their beliefs to conform to the facts. Religious people alter the facts to conform to their beliefs.

The Psychology of Christianity 1.2

Why Believe?
A Guide to Life?
Fear of Death
God as Father
Guilt
Belief, Nature and Evolution

Abstract

Why do millions of people want to believe in gods, and what does it do to them? Those are the questions the psychology of religion has to answer. Apologists always overlook any facts that seem to discredit their religious belief, making apology the opposite of scientific enquiry, the art of excusing. Scientific study must be based on testing. Armchair theologizing is not scientific. Sociology and social psychology have to depend on observation, though this can be enhanced by using mass observation, questionnaires and statistics, and individual beliefs can be studied in depth through psychiatry and examination of subjective religious experiences, including the stimulation of religious feeling by drugs and by physical means. The psychology of Christianity in society, particularly in the USA.

Why Believe?

So, belief emerges from:

The existing religious tradition in a society
What the believer was taught about it as a child.

Few people adopt a different religion from the one they were taught. If they do change religion, they adopt another well established religious tradition. Rarely is a new religious expression found, and even less ever get a following. By the age of ten children in religious homes are completely equipped with a set of religious beliefs. For the rest of their lives their beliefs are based entirely upon authority, and their practices follow almost automatically upon their beliefs or are guided by universal custom, and their emotions are the same emotions as their domestic emotions. Having been conditioned into believing the normal traditions of a society, the believer will thenjustify it by:

personal “mystical” experience
rationalization.

Personal experiences count in the psychology of religion mainly when people already believe. Belief in these explanations depends on them being generally accepted. The believer’s belief is fortified because others believe the same things. Religious people like to congregate to demonstrate to others that they believe too and to get the feeling that it is all right to believe because all these others do too. Their beliefs are demonstrably not just their own, and these congregations are an important part of maintaining belief, which is why the professional Christians like their flocks to attend church.

Individual “rational” justification of a belief in God are:

a priori reasoning—yet not one such proof of God stands up to analysis
feeling God’s presence—yet any such feeling is not certainly God, may be no more than the feeling of panic sometimes felt in natural surroundings, otherwise differs in no way from feelings known to be abberations of the mind like paranoia, and can be stimulated by physical means such as electro-magnetic radiation and drugs
the authority of the Church—yet it is simply the communication of a belief by others already with the same belief
the authority of the bible—yet it is simply a belief handed down by earlier believers right back to the time when it was composed as a book of myths meant to uphold the authority of the law so that people would obey it
the need for a supreme moral authority—yet morality is a human phenomenon based on instinct and social imperatives, so God is simply a social invention to secure the acceptance of these social needs
the need for a creator—though Nature needs no supernatural creator but exists in her own right.

Joseph McCabe wrote that, when he was a devout believer, he accepted as fact that an infinite being read and was interested in his every thought, that he was presently going for eternity to a spiritual world, and so on. He accepted these “facts” mainly on authority but partly on personal conviction. These beliefs and the dramatic ritual in which they were embodied, engendered intense emotions in him, but he declared that he had exactly the same emotions later, after he had dispensed with belief, but they were no longer wasted on illusions. That was the only difference.

At the age of sixteen he began to press for proof of the large statements made by religion. Of ten companions (in a monastery) of about the same age not one felt the same critical urge, yet McCabe says he was certainly the most emotional of them all. For ten years he felt that urge. Some of his companions in time felt the prick of it, but either suppressed it or affected to be easily satisfied. McCabe was unable to do either, and, from sheer intellectual urge, without any alteration of character or emotional temperament, he came to discard all religion. McCabe saw it as evidence that emotion in religion was not primary but belief was.

A Guide to Life?

P L Berger and T Luckmann suggested that religion provides three crucial answers to people:

an interpretation of reality
a definition of self
a guide to life.

The believer is not deterred that often religion does none of these except in the imagination. They offer explanations that are adequate for the believer and so they suffice. Religion cannot answer the question: “What is the purpose of life?” It can certainly suggest answers but with no idea whether they are true or not. They are therefore not answers. Science can answer the question sensibly, but no religious person will accept the scientific answer as sufficient even though they will accept utterly unproven religious “answers”. The scientific explanation is that life has one purpose and that is to generate new life. The purpose of living things is to generate other living things, and, generally speaking, not destroy them!

The religious person will prefer an answer like—“We exist to serve God and the purpose of all other life is to serve us”. Human beings are gods over everything else, whether there is a God over us or not. Since no one has yet been able to show conclusively that there is any purpose for a God, the logical position to take is that there is no such thing, and human beings are therefore the only gods! Religious people cannot reason, however, and so cannot see this. That human beings live to serve God and that all other life is on earth to serve us is typical Christian anthropocentrism that makes God the megalomaniac that Christians like him to be.

Neither can other questions such as those of suffering and death be explained by religions. Supposedly they are punishments for some primaeval sin in Christian belief, but how is that even sensible, let alone an explanation, for those who take God to be the epitome of love? Believers just ignore such problems, explaining them away as a mystery. Ultimately therefore, explanations are no longer the main motivation for belief.

A central problem for “good” people, those who are well adjusted sociologically and see the sense of being law abiding, is that all too often bullies, tricksters, chief executives and politicians, succeed by ignoring the law, and get away with it. Religion supposedly answers this by assuring the “good” ones that these evils were punished by God in the after-life, when their own goodness will be rewarded. This is called “pie-in-the-sky” and is a popular expression of contempt, but Christians do not seem to notice, because they believe it. “Explanations” like this can only put clergymen into the same category as the other tricksters, but they nevertheless satisfy the religious.

R H Thouless in 1935 found that religious people were more certain of the truth of their religious fantasies than they were of real live truths! Islamic martyrs will happily blow themselves up content that they will go straight to heaven, even if it is in bits. Christians believe in the same heaven, and used to kill themselves immediately after being baptized, and therefore washed free of sin, because they were certain that sinless people went straight to heaven like the Moslem martyrs. The problem was so serious that one of the makers of Christianity and now a saint, Augustine, had to declare that such suicide was a mortal sin! God must have told him that these poor deluded souls had been going to the perpetual fires of hell not to heaven, which all goes to show that even with religion, you can never be sure. Nowadays, suicide is not a way to heaven for Christians.

Fear of Death

There are pre-disposing psychological factors that religious professionals take advantage of in selling their sacks of unseen goodies.

Fear of death
Guilt
Need for a father substitute

The inference from their promise of life after death has to be that people are scared of death and want to be assured that death is not final nor a final separation from loved ones. It suggests the following observations:

Older people would revive an interest in religion. Indeed, the number of people who wanted to be reassured of immortality increased with age. In one survey, all of those over 90 believed in survival after death.
Religious old people are less apprehensive about dying and even say they are looking forward to it!
People in danger of their lives would be more religious. It has been found to be true of soldiers although it does not reflect in their subsequent attendance at church.
All believers imagine they will revive in a place like the earth but free of stress.

Priests knew from long ago that the basis of belief is fear, and by enhancing it, they will keep the faithful coming to their services. Revivalist preachers are adepts at using it. In every revival movement or cult, the preacher who is most successful at scaring his audience literally witless with threats of hellfire always makes the most converts, has the most fanatical following, and gets the most money collected. In the depths of the Great Depression in the twenties and thirties of the last century, revivalist preachers could collect thousands of dollars from unemployed or hard up workers. And they know the poor fools never learn.

Accepting the finality of death is better than the afterlife belief! Eternal life cannot be pleasant. After a few thousand years you would be insane, unless you have no awareness of the passage of time because time has stopped in heaven. It is what the ancients believed, and might be worse than death because it must be like being conscious in a dead and utterly still and static body, the very thing that those afraid of death imagine. It is not an attractive thought, so, the religious mind-ghouls have offered an afterlife that is much the same as this life, absurd though it might be to anyone who can think. It is an eternal soap opera!

To overcome the fear of death, simply accept that death is final. There is no discomfort in it because it is the most completely anaesthetized state possible, so you feel nothing. You are truly resting in peace, in a sleep deeper than you can imagine. That is what heaven is! You are just like you were before you were born—unaware of anything. The trouble is that most Christians are unaware, long after they were born, of anything that happened in Christian history long before they were born, even though they can, while they are alive, read about it. They will not because their faith will not put up with it.

Fear of death makes horrified believers sign up to Christianity, but there are carrots as well as big sticks, and the carrots are like the sticks—imaginary—so they cost the professional preachers nothing at all, though the poor converts think they are getting something unbelievable. It is! Not only does signing up and attending regularly to cough up the spare dollars save you from hell, it guarantees you a deckchair on a balmy beach in heaven for the whole of eternity. You will not die! To get the reserved place in heaven, you have to agree you are a Christian, cough up regularly, and do as you are told, most especially by recruiting all your more sensible friends.

It is more difficult to cure someone of the religious disease than to infect someone with it. There is a lot of emotional commitment to converting, mostly based on problematic psychology, so, if at a later date, the incipient doubts never addressed get mountainous, leading to a loss of faith, the believer has to face all the accumulated fears they had disguised. It is much like any addiction. Recovery is often hard, and so often never attempted.

To cure a believer, you have to provide them with the courage to face both death and tradition, for these are the mental crutches they need to be able to survive discovering the truth they deny. Saying god does not exist threatens to take the crutch away but the believer simply refuses to hear any arguments like that, and are well armed with priestly fairy tales to keep them hanging on to it. All one can do is to help them when they want to be free. Everyone has to obey the law, but no one has to feel guilt for sin. Sin is no reason to feel guilty unless it is a crime. Help them just feel themselves—natural.

God as Father

Tiny children are protected from the harshness of reality, by caring parents, but eventually, as adults they have to face the world as it really is. If daddy gets killed whether fighting in Iraq, by playing with firearms or by the local fundamentalist nut case, his young child will be told he has gone to heaven, a better place than our’s. In a sense, he has. It is death where there are no longer any worries and pains. An older child might be told the truth, but some people refuse to grow up. Is it the adult who cannot bear the thought of death or the child? People are adult when they accept they are dying. Some will never accept it, and instead live their lives in a childish fantasy. It is honoured with the name religion, and we all have to respect it!

For most children parents offer them rewards for good behaviour, punishments for bad behaviour, and security. People becomed conditioned into needing these, and that this conditioning drives them to need a new protector when they mature and realise their parents no longer offer the protection and the system of rewards they depended on to remain moral. In Totem and Taboo (1913), Sigmund Freud proposed that God was merely an illusory and regressive projection of the child’s earthly natural father:

God, at bottom, is nothing but an exalted father.

Among the papers of William C Bullit, a US diplomat and former ambassador to the USSR and to France, who wrote a psychological biography of Woodrow Wilson, was a paper by Freud specifically about Christians. Men whose passive attitude to their father has not found expression will will find it by identifying with Jesus Christ. It is because Christ fulfilled the same two contradictory desires of such people:

to be completely passive and subservient to the father like a perpetual child,
to model themselves on the father—that is to be themselves masculine, powerful and authoritative.

Psychologists have found that the quality of the actual father-son relationship is a good predictor of religious attitudes. God is sold as a replacement father, an imaginary friend and a minder from the horrors of the reality they are scared to face. Images of God and the relationships with God described in believers’ anecdotes and religious literature resemble attachment relationships in childhood. Expressions such as “God is leading one by his side” and “God is always there when you need someone” support this notion. God is protective, loving, merciful, guiding, warm and forgiving, but also is strong, firm and powerful. A prime psychological function of God, like the child’s parents, is for security:

God may in moments of distress be a comforter to whom the believer can turn for emotional support. Empirical evidence for this is the connection between crises and religious conversions.
God may serve as a secure home for the believer to feel attached to while confident enough to enter the world, but to return and show appreciation by gifts of worship, prayer and praise.

Above all many Christians want comfort from their fear of death. Humans grow to realize they are mortal. They will die, and their parents can do nothing about it, though they seemed to offer such protection in the early years of life. Fear of death is a powerful force for belief. Few people want to die, at least when they are young, and so the greedy tricksters continue to sell the story, quite undisturbed by the fraud squads, that they are personal chums of a supernatural father and friend who can offer the protection from death and the lesser difficulties of life people desperately need.

Adult Christians end up acting like infants. Islam is precisely the same in this respect. Religion identifies God as father and Freud says that is what he is. He is a father for adults who want to remain children in some sense. Christian believers are even urged to be as little children. M E Spiro and R G D’Andrade found that belief systems endure because the private fantasies and images of individuals correspond to cultural traditions passed down by parents to their children. God is obviously perceived as the father but when the mother is the preferred parent, an inclination skewed by oedipal effects, the God figure has more of the mother’s characteristics.

God is the projected love object and positive qualities from the preferred parent are projected on to it—though the attitude to God often remains ambivalent. God tends to be punitive for men, but loving for women, yet women identify with the crucified image of Christ while men identify with the Virgin Mary. The reason for this ambivalence is the dichotomy between the Old Testament image of God as fearful, and the Christian mesage that he is loving. In the Old Testament, God has the image of pure patriarchy, while Christianity leans back a little towards the older maternal feel of the Goddess religions.

Guilt

Another psychologicasl hook for the “fishers of men” is guilt—a sense of compunction, regret for wrongdoing. But doing what that is wrong? Well, the professionals do not have to specify anything in particular. They say we are all sinners, even the best of us! And the believers accept it. The shepherds tell their flocks that sin is like a congenital disease passed down from Adam. It is called by the Catholics “Original Sin”, and everyone has it. The effect of it is that the loving Christian God has set you on a steep track down into hell unless you accept the nostrums of the professional soul doctor—have faith, prove it by doing as you are told, and in particular, atone for your sins by making the life of the professional Christian nice and comfortable. They are working terribly hard to get you saved so they deserve to be well paid, even when you are starving. After all, when you die, you will not need those spare dollars, so use them to ensure your eternal rewards! Giving is a universal salve, but the congregations do not seem to notice that the sore must be the churches, if that is where it has to be applied.

So the churches get the financial ointment, and the poor get salvation. It is a great bargain for the professionals. Catholics priests even offer daily absolution from sin for their flocks, so they daily get their sins cancelled out, and feel they are getting something for their money. It is selling indulgencies, but on not quite such an obvious scale. The problem with it is that Catholics are generally more crooked than other religious groups because whatever they do, they can have absolved instantly for a few dollars and a few Hail Marys. The need for personal morality is negated. Society requires people to take responsibility for their own lives to be moral—that is to live in a way that allows society to work. Religion does not encourage proper morality. It destroys it. By allowing Christians to shift responsibility for their own actions to a god—good or bad—the moral benefits of religion are confounded.

J C Flugel in 1945, postulated that religious people project their super-ego on to God. Super-ego is a person’s conscience and therefore corresponds with the degree of guilt felt. It arises out of the moral law impressed by the parents, and the child’s desire to conform with parental authority, and varies according to how successful the process is. Super-ego can be harsh and irrational especially when the parents have been kind but subtly critical leaving the child unsure whether it has conformed adequately. When the parents die, or at least the child is free of them, the pseudo-parent, God, takes their place, and the believer tries to atone to God for unresolved parental conflicts. Effectively the adult remains a child before the pseudo-parent, the divine Father.

Feeding the guilt of the super-ego are natural behaviours such as sexuality and anger. The conscience, already conditioned, wants to suppress these emotions but the source is externalized as the demands of the supernatural parent. The desire to defy the conscience is often externalized in other people or groups of people who are wicked for giving in to these desires. These projections are defence mechanisms allowing an internal conflict, difficult to resolve, to seem to be resolved by external action. God is demanding acceptance of the conscience while Satan tempts the person into yielding. The religious person wants to please God and reject Satan, but God is a universal power for good, and so there is confidence that the outcome will be all right. Pleasing God will allow the person to defeat the Devil, but, not unusually, the worst aspect of the whole is that the people who are seen as Satanic are despised and often persecuted, with utter righteous justification.

Since a prime instinct opposed by the super-ego is sexuality, religious people are often sexually repressed, and fear the expression of sexuality in others, or even the suspicion of it. Thus religious people are often prudish and prescriptive. The correlation between religious feeling and suppression of sexuality is not only Christian, but has been found in various degrees in a study of religion in 80 primitive societies.

Those who claim to be religious but do not attend church too often are usually the worst examples of these phenomena, allowing the pious to claim that church attendance is a good influence, and it is true that pious people themselves are often exemplary citizens. What is not known, but is probably true, is whether these people are good citizens anyway, irrespective of their religion, so that forcing the less pious into church simply increases the apparent criminality of church attenders. In other words, religion has a reputation of being for good people, so good people join and form the backbone of religious groups. It is not that the religion makes them good.

Religiosity, as might be expected from Freud’s ideas, does correlate well with guilt feelings. Those converted suddenly at revivalist meetings are found to have a high incidence of guiltiness. Women, who attend church in greater numbers than men also have a higher incidence of guilty feelings. Since the super-ego is not rational, the irrationality of religious belief tends to support the idea.

Belief, Nature and Evolution

Believers in a supernatural god, oddly enough, often get to their belief because they are amazed by Nature. A revelation comes to them that the world is amazing and seems to reflect a struggle between the harmonious, the beneficent and the beautiful against malevolence, disorder and ugliness. Unless people are depressed or forced to live in horrible circumstances, they think that life is good, but is not perfect. Primitive people see all this no less than advanced people and want an explanation. Spirits, a consciousness behind things, provided it, some of them being good, but opposed by wicked ones.

So it is that good and evil were seen as opposing forces in Nature, but the viewpoint is entirely our own. Human sewage is disgusting to us, but fortunately for us, there are plenty of life forms that love it, and if they did not transform it into something more acceptable to us, we would be drowning in our own filth. So what is horrible for us is wonderful for maggots, worms, plants, rats, pigeons and so on. But we are concerned only with our own good and our own evil, and God has the same outlook as us! He is a big human in the sky, an anthropomorphised god. Yet, if there were any such thing as God, it is impossible to believe that he would think like us in any way. Not, though, according to the religious folk of the world, who largely think God is as simple as they are. They create an image of God that is themselves, and try to force us all to accept it. Bigotry is what should be truly disgusting to humans.

We find the world we experience as good because we have evolved in it, and evolution is the process by which we change over the generations to suit the environment we live in better. If the environment were static, then we would eventually evolve to match it perfectly, but the environment itself is changing so evolution keeps us as well tuned to our environment as it can. Religious people think that heaven is an absolutely perfect place, which means that it too must be static because any change from absolute perfection must be less perfect, and so change is impossible. The Persians of two and a half millennia ago knew this, but Christians have not caught on to it, and think they will be living with their dead friends and relatives just like they used to. Nope! The heavenly world must be fixed for ever, so it will be a bit dull. It might be more fun just to be dead.

The effect of evolution is that the environment generally seems supernaturally suitable for the life that is in it, but the cause of it is perfectly natural. Human beings look upon the natural world and think how marvellous it is, and indeed it is. It is good from our perpective, even if it is not perfect because the environment itself is changing continuously and so we can never be perfectly adapted to it. Evolution provides us with a natural explanation of dualism without having to postulate good and wicked spirits. Yet the inchoate feeling that the world is right for us leads to the rationalization that it has been made for us by a supernatural Creator.

This is the explanation of Paley’s argument from design. Paley surmised that the world was so wonderfully and intricately constructed that it must have been designed. Believers will not consider that no competent designer will design faults into a system, yet the world is not perfect for us, a serious fault in the hypothesis. Evolution explains that the world cannot be perfect becuse it is constantly changing, and the forms of life in it are always several steps behind full adaptation. Life is not made but is born, and successive births naturally lead to species changing in line with the environment without any need for a supernatural designer. Evolution is responsible for what we perceive and feel of the world.

The feeling of comfort most of us experience in the world is a function of the brain that evolved even before conscious thought. Feelings inform us about our circumstances and prepare us suitably without our having to think about them. We feel comfortable in the world because we are adapted to it. We feel hungry when our stomachs are empty. We feel angry when someone troubles us. We feel sexy to motivate us to reproduce. Now, we have evolved thought and can think about these feelings, and understand that they provided for our needs in a pre-conscious way. There is no doubt that other animals have feelings, but they cannot analyse them as we can. So religion is a primitive response to a primitive feeling of gratitude about the world. As there is no one to thank for the gratitude, primitive people thanked God or the gods. So religion is an intellectualization of a feeling, but feelings are a different mental operation from thought and cannot be fully described in words. The difference that remains when religion is rationally explained is enough to keep people believing in God!

Thouless thinks it is natural to make the jump from wonder at Nature to the conclusion of God, but it is the phenomenon that is natural, not God. His justification is that, if the world seems to suit humanity, it is natural that humans should conclude that it was designed for human benefit by some super benefactor. Indeed, it might seem natural in the absence of a better explanation. All religion began as explanations. But since 1859, we have had a better explanation, though believers refuse to accept it. Interestingly, Thouless highlights the evolution point without actually mentioning it when he writes:

Elements in the world… seem, at first sight, to be products of an evil design—the disgusting limbless parasite which shows the same admirable adaptation to its environment as that of the nobler animals…

Thouless judges that some animals are nobler than others, with the human race the noblest of them all, no doubt, but evolution makes no such judgements. Thouless has the correct assessment of it in evolutionary terms. The parasite, however unpleasant it might seem, is as well adapted to its environment as other animals. These others are nobler because they are closer to us, and enjoy the same sort of environment as us, whereas a parasite that lives inside another animal seems “disgusting” to us, though it is perfectly well adapted to its own environment.

Page Tags: Social Science, Psychology, Conscious, Subconscious, Fear of Death, Guilt, Mystical Experience, Belief, Beliefs, Believers, Christian, Christians, Death, Feeling Good, God, Life, Religion, Religious, Thouless

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.