Christ’s dictum to love your enemy has always been too hard for most Christians, but they should at least take care not to give others just cause to hate them.

The Psychology of Christianity 2.1

There is a connexion between death and sexual arousal. The sight or thought of murder, or people dying can give some people a feeling of sexual excitement.
George Bataille, Eroticism (1962)

The Religious Instinct
Reason in Belief
Emotion
Suggestibility

There is something strange about Christians objecting so vehemently to such things.

Abstract

Pious Christians like to believe in the religious instinct because God or Jesus speaks in their heart. Christian professionals manufacture this religious sense by suggestion, not to explain religious belief, but to induce weak people to convert, be faithful and ignore skeptics. It is a delusion which can, in some people, become psychotic. Is the religious sentiment love? In the Catholic Church, a nun’s love of Jesus or a young monk’s love of Mary might have a subconscious sexual content. Some Catholic girls fasten upon the confessional as a sexual outlet and dwell over their remorse for their sexual sins—some priests encourage it. A desire to have sex with the priest is not an uncommon result. Sex is a basic cause of people taking to religion. It is not necessary to keep people in it. Religion removes the cause of the sexual guilt in that they are assured it will not stop them from being saved, and they feel greatly relieved.

The Religious Instinct

The human brain is not just a blank slate at birth. Something is already written on it. Kant deduced that the brain was already divided into categories, so there is a data grid written on the slate, with headings to different types of occurrence, that allow us to interpret reality instinctively. There are also pre-written instructions on parts of the slate telling us how to deal with certain events. These are instincts themselves. These instinctive things got there, not by the any act of God, but by evolution.

Just as primitive worms developed a spinal cord and, after almost a billion years, evolved into human beings. The brains of these simple animals also grew. Just as the worm grew limbs, its brain developed its instincts and categories. A mutation in the worm’s genes gave it an incipient structure in its brain, and this made the worm better at surviving, so that all of its offspring had the same gene and the same advantage. Over tens of thousands of years the structure now present in the brain was altered by more mutations. Any that improved the relationship of the structures to real experience again improved the little creature’s survival chances and preserved and multiplied the gene that controlled the structure. The process never stopped, mutations going on to improve the structures until the brains of higher animals became well matched to their natural environment. In a similar way, genetic changes pre-programmed certain behaviours into the creature which became instincts.

An instinct is a behaviour that is innate. It has become part of our genetic make up by evolution. Instinct is not merely a habit, something developed by constant practice in a lifetime. A journalist might write that Roy of the Rovers scored a goal by instinct, but he did it by training. Catholics do not cross themselves by instinct when they see a crucifix. It is a cultural habit. Because people have seemingly always believed in a God or gods, it was supposed that there was an instinct in human nature itself which impelled everyone to believe in gods just as an instinct impelled us to eat or mate. Religion has been called an instinct. Is it?

It must be an instinct that emerges in religious hacks when religion is in decline. The notion of a religious instinct was invented when tens of millions of people in advanced economies abandoned religion, because the old type of argument for religion was being increasingly discredited intellectually. No one heard of the religious instinct in the days when everybody was religious. When religion was under attack from rational skeptics, believers were told to rely upon their “natural feelings” about religion, “the religious sense”, which is as normal and authoritative as reason itself.

Religious writers said that this instinct gave children, brought up without any training for or against religion, spontaneous religious sentiments and beliefs. A skeptic might argue that infants show no signs of any religious instinct. Belief is not instinctive but almost entirely a matter of acquiescence in tradition. Today millions of families even in the USA have brought up their children with minimal religious indoctrination, and they show far less inclination to religion than those indoctrinated in it. But instincts do not necessarily express themselves right from birth simply because they are there. Some do not manifest until some other changes have happened, and, if they do not, sometimes an instinct can never appear, even though it is innate. Such instincts as imprinting will never happen if the duckling is not allowed access to its mother, and then, when it is introduced to her, the baby sees her as a danger. Human babies instinctively swim, hold their breath and cope excellently with water in the presence of an adult up to several months old. A first introduction to water thereafter causes panic and the children have to be taught how to swim. Human males grow beards. It is innate in humans but children do not have beards. Hormonal changes have to occur before a beard appears, and when they do not the beard might not grow at all. Similarly the sexual urge is innate but does not appear until puberty. So the fact that children are not naturally religious is evidence but not proof that religion is not an instinct.

Pious but unphilosophical Christians like to believe in the religious instinct because they say that God or Jesus “speaks in their heart”. To be thus convinced there is a God, without evidence or having to think about it, is the manifestation of some power within that is as authoritative as intellect and reason. Christian professionals manufacture this religious sense by suggestion, not to explain religious belief, but to induce weak people to convert, be faithful and ignore skeptics. It is a delusion which can, in some people, become psychotic. God spoke to a Catholic man in South London telling him to murder the congregation or his wife and children would burn in hell. He attacked them with a Samurai sword and severely injured several before he was restrained. The man’s schizophrenia was fed by the religious fantasies the church propagates. Clerics are responsible for it.

Christians often declare, with comic certainty, “I know there is a God”. What they mean is, “I am convinced that God exists”. They are convinced because they have been convinced, not because any such conviction is innate. A clergyman acting through a school, or parents in the home, or a church, suggests in childhood’s earliest and most impressible days that there is a God. In children, the conviction of God is a matter of authority, but thereafter most people never reflect on the basis of their conviction, and so remain children in that respect. When someone reflects upon and doubts the soundness of their conviction, the priest will appeal to the voice within. The clergyman implanted a conviction that God exists, and then asks doubters to believe this conviction is God speaking from within them!

This religious instinct decreases as knowledge and intellectual development increase. The research which Professor J H Leuba (The Belief in God and Immortality), made into the proportion of believers and unbelievers amongst freshmen, sophomores, ordinary professors, and more distinguished professors affords striking statistical evidence of this. As you rise in the scale of age and culture, the believers shrink from eighty to ten percent, the unbelievers grow from twenty to nearly ninety percent.

If you take five hundred farmers in Kentucky and compare them with five hundred university teachers, religious belief will be fairly solid amongst the farmers and absent from at least half the professors. It is a strange mental power that grows feebler as the mind gets more training and practice. Belief is a conviction in the mind which weakens as knowledge improves because it is based upon ignorance. The collective experience of our time shows there never was less religion in our societies, and there never was so much knowledge.

The religious sense also gives contradictory sentiments about religion, and even about God, in each different creed, sect, sub-sect, or phase of belief. Practically all educated men in China have had no religious sense whatever since the days of Kung-fu-tse, and in Japan since Confucianism was introduced into that country. The thinkers of Greece, who meditated on religion as deeply as any body of men that ever existed, held every possible opinion about it. Plato believed in a personal God and personal immortality. Aristotle believed in an impersonal and totally different God and denied immortality. The Pythagoreans and Eleatics believed that everything was spiritual. The Stoics held that even the gods, if there are any, are material. The Epicureans and Skeptics said that all religion was superstition. Roman thinkers and Moorish thinkers were just as divided.

The modern philosophic world is as far as ever from agreement. Educated religious believers frequently differ profoundly from each other about the nature of God, and they differ even more from the ignorant bigotry of the crowd of pious believers. Of course they rarely say so in public, but they do in learned works which used to be written only in Latin so that the sheep could not understand it. Unless some hack draws it to their attention to sell newspapers, the mass of pious believers are not interested what the learned divines think, so they no longer feel it necessary to write in a dead language.

Why should a million cultivated men be totally devoid of a religious sense, and a billion Poor Whites, black descendants of slaves, Mexicans, Moslems, and Polish peasants have it highly developed? Why is it so constantly associated with wilful ignorance and unsophistication, and so constantly dissociated from developed intellect and refinement? Religious convictions and sentiments are chosen, not instinctive, and they are chosen only on the authority of people with vested interests in the outcome, and not on proper examination of any evidence. It is futile to ask anyone intelligent to believe in a religious instinct. It is a fraud.

Writers are also fond of the expression “religious fervour”, used of anyone who is enthusiastic. Men and women hold their convictions with a “religious fervour”, whether they refer to political, economic, humanitarian, or any other convictions, doubtless because the religious are more likely to be fanatics than enthusiasts of other pastimes. The original leaders of the American Feminist movement, Mrs Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Miss Susan B Anthony, were agnostics, but their cause was always said to have been a religion to them. The majority of the most earnest idealists in the reform movements of Europe in the nineteenth century were agnostics or atheists, and naturally held their views with a religious fervour. The readiness of writers to grant a religious fervour to all kinds of campaigners shows that religious fervour is just fervour. The adjective is added because hacks like clichés, just as every appeal on the TV from a distraught person is an “emotional” appeal.

Similarly, the religious hacks constantly count Confucianism, Stoicism and Buddhism as religions, though Confucianism never had a God, Stoicism ignored gods and Buddhists are atheists. In many of the Unitarian churches of America, thousands of people say they are religious, yet reject all beliefs in God and immortality. Yet the psychology of all these people on its emotional side is no different from Christians’.

Anyway, even some early psychologists like Starbuck thought it an instinct, misled by its prevalence in society in the nineteenth century. Others saw it as a sublimation of the sex instinct. Evidence supports this notion, but evidence also supports the herd instinct as an important element in religion. Other evidence suggests that religion provides a father substitute. Religion seems not to be an instinct in itself, but a human habit based on several instincts.

Reason in Belief

The processes of reasoning have little to do with religion. Psychology shows that feelings detemine our beliefs far more than intellect. Reasons for belief are often merely rationalizations. The world seems to believers, in the faint gleams of reality as they have, to be in harmony with their religion. The prosperity of the wicked and suffering of the good will be put right in the next world. Doubt never occurs to them, and reason is a dangerous temptation of the Devil. The majority of believers even in an educated country never reason—never need to reason—about religion. When the preacher adopts an apologetic tone and slays Atheists, Modernists, Protestants, Catholics, or any type of opponent, not one in five hundred of his audience will take the trouble to check his assertions. He speaks for God, so must be right! The stream of religious tradition flows placidly on, bypassing the higher centres of the brain.

A man suffering from paranoia sees malevolence in every action, and no amount of reasoning will sway him. If he is paranoid that his wife is trying to kill him, then if she makes him a bowl of soup, it is poisoned. If she does not, she is trying to starve him. If she sympathises with him, she is trying to hide her intentions, and so on. There is an adequate answer in terms of his paranoia for everything she does. It is reminiscent of all pseudo-sciences that distinguish themselves from real science by being able to explain away anything that does not fit their theses. The explanations sound plausible to uncritical or unwary people. Religions are the original pseudo-sciences.

Christian apologists know this and have an answer for everything, but they also claim that their opponents do the same as them—rationalize an irrational belief. It saves them getting into discussions that they will lose because they have not the intellectual arguments to win. Thus, placed in difficulties by an atheist, they will suddenly accuse them of rejecting religion so that they can be immoral. The tactic is easy enough to recognize, but the apologist is usually playing to the choir, and the choir is the uncritical flock of Christian sheep. Of course, they have no notion of whether their opponent is immoral or not, but for them rejecting their religion is immoral and so they are justified in making the accusation. In fact, atheists are no less moral than Christians, and are therefore psychologically more moral because they are not being moral for the dubious reason of fearing some post mortem punishment. No Christian will examine the immoral history of Christianity for any real information. They would rather look away for fear of losing faith.

Of course, although the affective motivation for believing is dominant, reason does play a part. In particular, it is strong when there is no strong emotional reason for belief one way or another. Scientific beliefs are held on purely rational grounds, at least they are once a hypothesis has been adequately tested and verified. In the phase when an hypothesis is still hypothetical, that is, not properly tested, the proponents of the hypothesis and its opponents admittedly hold their view on less than fully rational grounds. The point, though, is that science depends for ultimate belief on the outcome of the tests in reality. Those that work are shown to be correct.

Since Christians have to believe on no grounds at all, the belief being all that they must do to be faithful, they are hopelessly confused by the principles of science. It is all too hard for them, and is another excuse for their laziness in simply believing. They cannot understand that personal feelings, however strong they might be, are irrelevant to science, and are no good basis for believing anything. It is true that scientists age like any other human, and it is harder to change when older, so that older or less flexibly minded scientists might cling on to scientific ideas that are losing out empirically. Even that has no long term effect on science, for that generation will eventually die out, and the new generation will hold to the hypotheses that have succeeded over the older ones. Science has flexibility built in through testing. Religion has not. Quite the opposite. It relies on dogma, and believers are believing ancient and outmoded ideas preserved simply to give a class of priests or pastors a good income and doubtful influence for doing nothing useful.

The emotional craving for some religious fantasy disposes even intelligent people to forget reason. Henry James believed in personal immortality because he said he wanted to believe in it. A former materialist, Robert Blatchford, became a Spiritualist out of an emotional craving to see again a dead wife. Religions make many converts, and bold large bodies of people, in this way. They want to believe.

Thouless betrays his own irrational and unscientific commitment to his religion when he discusses the abandoned psychology of the mediæval Schoolmen. They decided a soul had faculties of will, memory, imagination, and so on, just as the body has arms, legs and a head. The faculties of the soul, unlike the arms and legs of the body are contrary to Ockham’s Razor. There is no way of knowing that the soul has any such faculties, and so they ought not to be invented for theological convenience. Thouless does not note that the soul itself is an entity multiplied unnecessarily. There is no evidence of the soul. It is purely a theological convenience. It makes life after death possible, though life after death is also a theological convenience for which there is no evidence. In fact, God is a theological convenience. He exists to make people go to church and pay for the class of people that run them, the aforementioned class of priests and pastors. Thouless will not face these facts honestly, but then that is typical of Christians.

Christianity can be seen as allegorical or symbolic science! Religion did, after all, begin as a way of explaining things. Things have not changed but the explanations have improved, especially since the scientific method emerged. So Christianity could offer an outline of truth, rarefied and partial, expressed symbolically, and arrived at intuitively rather than empirically, but such as it is now recognizable in the precise discoveries of science. God is the intangioble fabric of space-time, the old gods Uranus and Kronus conjoined, the foundation of Nature in fact. Christ, the Son, is the face of God to people on earth, the sun, a visible tangible central power or force. The Holy Spirit is the field, gravitational or electromagnetic, the inclination of things to the central power, metaphorically applied to humanity as a drive or motivation. Experience of this drive is faith. So, Christians should study science to get to understand their beliefs better.

Emotion

Given the belief through tradition, and its justification, the emotion follows from religious practice whether intense as in a mystical experience or familiar as in the glow of wellbeing had from communal singing. Is the religious sentiment love? There may be masochism in the “love” a pious woman feels for a crucified “son”. Women are much more inclined to suffer the stigmata than men, so they might also imagine themselves suffering in the place of their innocent “son”. In the Catholic Church, a nun’s love of Jesus or a young monk’s love of Mary might have a subconscious sexual content. Some Catholic girls fasten upon the confessional as a sexual outlet and dwell over their remorse for their sexual sins—some priests encourage it. A desire to have sex with the priest is not an uncommon result. In the Middle Ages it led to epidemics of self-scourging. None of it meets the criterion of salvation given by the Christian god which is to love your enemy, but psychiatry finds clues to what it is.

Psychiatrists have noticed the the phenomenon of tranference whereby the strong feeling the subject had for some authority in their childhood, commonly their father or mother, or sometimes some other figure, is transferred during therapy to the therapist. The feelings can be negative but usually are positive, and the act of transference is usually helpful in curing a neurosis. Unfortunately the transference can itself become neurotic with the therapist becoming the object of an erotic fantasy, for example, or being showered with gifts.

Country vicars might consider the presents he has from parishioners as a perk of the job, but his wife must object to him becoming the center of an erotic fantasy, though it happens, and vicars sometimes are flattered by it. He might begin to get worried when the gifts stop being Madeira cakes and become more expensive and frequent. The evangelical TV tub-thumper cannot get enough of it though. He tells his audience to give until it hurts, and they do, of their money and sometimes of their sexual favours. Neurotic transference is just what TV evangelists are aiming for.

A church which in practice says to the vast majority of its worshippers, “Do not think, do not bother about your feelings, simply believe and obey. In that is the highest merit.”, is justly suspected by those who feel their autonomy of character to be a precious thing.
R H Thouless, An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion, 1923

The evangelist does not want his flock to have any autonomy of character. By being born again in Jesus you are meant to lose it. That, “in practice”, is the will of the church or its evangelic priests or pastors—to enslave believers.

But for most of them, their emotions remain steady, all bar the glow of comfort the mass or communion service might give them, and have no unduly religious or sexual meaning. They have the ordinary human emotions of joy, sorrow, hope, fear, reverence, love—though perhaps induced in a religious context, there is nothing peculiarly religious about the emotions themselves. In religious life, the emotions are provoked and sustained by particular conceptions of gods and goddesses, definite beliefs about life and the future, or by the images, ritual, music, hymns, used in the cult.

Christians will look upon Hindus decorating a lingam with due reverence and feel nothing, or nothing but contenpt. Yet the Indian gets no less from it in religious relief or emotion than the Christian gets from a holy communion. The difference is that Indians have the emotional involvement with their own ceremony, just as Christians have with theirs. Each of them knows the significance of their own ritual, is conditioned to respond in a particular way at the appropriate moment, and so responds appropriately. The observer does not and so cannot respond to any ritual which means nothing emotionally to them. The practice of religion is plucking the emotional chords of the congregation.

Posture is an important part of generating the right response in ritual. Kneeling not only signifies submission but produces a submissive frame of mind in the worshipper. Prayers, hymns and so on, act as autosuggestions that preserve the emotional side of belief, the feelings of affection towards God and the crucified son, the feeling of certainty it generates and the feeling of personal involvement with Jesus. The desire as far as professional Christian ministers are concerned, though a crime to the objective onlooker, is that religious emotion becomes an end in itself—it becomes the purpose of religion.

Thouless distinguishes between a sentiment and an emotion, the latter being an inner mental disposition that has evolved to help species cope with certain situations in reality, and the former being an intellectualization of an emotion or group of emotions. Thus love is an emotion that arises as a tender caring feeling towards another displayed in their presence. But the sentiment of love is much less simple, and involves more emotions than tender care in the presence of the loved one. Poets are fond of explaining in their art that love, the sentiment, can be full of pain, sorrow, passion, joy and hope as well as tender care, especially in parting and reuniting with the object of love. Applying these distinctions to religion, it can be judged to be a sentiment, and the feeling religious people have is sentimentality. That is not in itself demeaning, any more than love can be demeaned as a sentiment, but it does reveal that sentimentality in its more common sense easily emerges from religion.

Christianity then is largely sentimentalism. It is like the vulgar, upwelling of affected grief seen at its worst in the UK when Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. It is more generally an affected display of overwrought but feeble emotionalism. Pious US Christians grieve in church over the suffering of Christ, but care barely a fig about the suffering of the world they live in. Inasmuch as they care at all, their donations to the church are their atonement for it. They are like the story told by William James about the Russian Countess who wept in the theatre over the fictional tragedy she was seeing, while her servants waited shivering in the snow to take her home. These Christians enjoy the sense of sadness and tragedy they have in church, and the relief from it when they imagine the ascendant Christ, but, according to the biblical Christ, they must love their enemies, something they fail spectacularly to do—at least to judge by George Bush, his kitchen cabinet of strutting Christians and their redneck evangelical voters. They all bask in self-righteous sentiment like alligators in the sun. They have never heard or do not understand the meaning of the Christian prayer:

Lord, lead me not by the way of sensible consolations.

It is the sensible consolations that they like. They are why they are Christians, and all prayers and niceties of their schoolgirl religion makes them feel unjustifiably good. It does not occur to them that Christ required deeds for salvation, not merely faith, and his own brother confirmed it. It is because their own pastors are happy for them to find Christianity as easy as peasy, to keep them coming and coughing up the greenbacks that allows them their luxurious lives. These Christians are addicted to the mildly sacrifical feeling they get, and for the ministers of the new faith that is sufficient. Their motto is, “As long as they are giving until it hurts, bugger God’s will”.

Suggestibility

Suggestion is important in religious training. Children brought up in religious communities do not, in the main, get taught religion in an academic sense, by reasoned explanation. They receive their belief by suggestion. Suggestion is an important mental process central to psychology. The clearest demonstration of it is the performance of the stage hypnotist who can make hypnotic suggestions to his volunteers and make them do absurd and unlikely things. Suggestion is also central to religion as can be seen from the definition given by Thouless:

Suggestion is a process of communication resulting in the acceptance and realization of a communicated idea in the absence of adequate grounds for its acceptance.

It has a strong resemblence to Kierkegard’s definition of faith:

Faith is the holding of a belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
On Absurdity

People differ in their susceptibility to suggestion—their suggestibility—and that is one reason why some are religious and others are not. Suggestibility varies with age and sex. Children are more suggestible thn adults, which is why clergymen want to get hold of them young, and women are more suggestible than men, which is why there are more women in congregations. Hysteria, practice and crowds increase suggestibility. Military drill puts soldiers into the highly suggestible state of an automaton so that they will respond immediately and unquestioningly to any command of their officers.

Church ritual has a similar effect, as does the revivalist meeting. They induce hypnotic states of varying intensities in the members of the congregation, heightened by the crowd effect and known approval of the others present. The audience might call out in response to the preaching of the evangelist, or the evangelist might deliberately initioate a call and response session. Chanting, preaching, rhythmic hymns, singing, incense, points of light from candles, lamps or torches, and so on all serve to induce an altered state, a mild hypnosis.

In the mildly hypnotized state, the members of the congregation are suggestible so that, when the evangelist tells them to sing along to “I give myself to Jesus”, and then calls out, “Jesus wants you! Jesus is waiting! Come to him! Come! Come! Come to him! Come now!…”, there will be a proportion who will respond to the suggestion that they should come. Psychologically, it is elementary, but psychiatrists are not suggesting that all of this was consciously designed, rather that, over millennia, these are the methods that were found by trial and error to work! They kept the worshippers coming back.

Studies regularly show that people who are religious are more suggestible to hypnosis—that is they will involuntarily do what some authority figure suggests to them. Members of revivalist and evangelical groups have been found to be particularly suggestible. Signs of primary suggestibility such as twitching, jerking and other signs of hysteria are normal in revivalist meetings. G A Coe, an early student of these phenomena, found that people who were suddenly converted at revival meetings were likely to act as automatons under hypnosis.

Father H Thurston has shown that mysticism is socially conditioned. The stigmata, for example, arises in hysterical personalities, but it was never reported before S Francis, though now it has become so common that hundreds are on record. D G Brown and W L Lowe in 1951 showed that in a large group of students studied, extreme Protestant bible students registered high on tests of hysteria. 185 US students who were shown to be hypnotically suggestible were also likely to have had a “religious experience”. It seems that religious experience might be a response to religious suggestion.

Secondary suggestibility is less direct. The placebo effect is the best known example, and, in this context, the effect of prayer. Patients who were regular attenders at church, respond particularly well to placebos. R Liberman thought the reason for the positive correlation of placebo effect and religiosity was conformity and low critical ability. Only three percent of those who visit Lourdes claim any initial benefit, and only a fraction of those are “cured”. This small degree of success is well within the placebo effect.

Prayer is directed at God but can only be effective in any sense when the person praying is appealing for something within their own control. It is because, inasmuch as it works at all, it works by autosuggestion. An example of autosuggestion is the “glow effect”—the impression of warmth from an electric fire with a lamp. The glow from the lamp makes you think the fire is on, and by autosuggestion you feel warm. Similarly, role playing or being made to argue an opponent’s case can influence behavior by making people appreciate someone else’s position. So too can the suggestion planted by prayer. You pray for strength to cope with some difficult situation and you get the strength to cope. Prayers are answered by the subconscious mind.

Faith has a positive benefit here over Couéism making it a more effective way of using autosuggestion for those who believe. The reason is that Couéism can be negated by the law of reverse effort, that which is desired is psychologically barred. The Couéist repeats “Every day in every way I am getting better and better”, but might not be able to overcome the suspicion that it does not work and so get a reverse effect. Faith in an external power makes the method more effective. By having trust in an external power rather than oneself, it is the reverse effect that is barred. Atheistical Couéists should have faith in the power of Nature to heal her own.

Saying prayers, singing hymns and praising God all strengthen belief by autosuggestion, especially combined with the herd effect of congregating to do it. So too the use of the Rosary, where the repetition of the Hail Marys is like the repetition of a mantra in eastern meditation, or repeating the word “Om”. Autosuggestion is probably the cause of the few miracles that are genuine. Less than three per cent of miracle cures at Lourdes and such places have any basis at all, and only a very few have been affirmed by investigation. Whether the cures are partial or whole, temporary or permanent, however, autosuggestion seems at the root of them.

One trouble psychologists have found with autosuggestion is that practicing it makes the subject more susceptible to suggestion generally. So they become susceptible to suggestion by others. For clerics and clergy that is an added bonus! The sheep get more gullible through the autosuggestive power of prayer, and therefore more willing to believe and obey the minister. It also means, unfortunately,, that undesirable autosuggestions such as the law of reverse effort also work more effectively since they are a negative type of autosuggestion.

A claim was made only a few years ago that:

Prayers can help patients recover even when they don’t know people are praying for them.

This was reported in respectable journals like New Scientist, and doubtless left skeptics ready to convert. Nicholas Humphrey pointed out that the reported results were even more amazing. So amazing that the only rational interpretation was that they were flawed. The paper reported that 1013 patients were randomized, 484 to the prayed for group and 529 to the control group who received normal care. However some of each group had to be discarded because it took 24 hours to get the prayers organized and in that time they had already been discharged. Subtracting these left 466 in the prayed for group and 524 in the control group.

Prayer Fails Test

A careful study of heart patients, reported in The Lancet, 366, has shown praying does not help to save them recover from heart surgery. In a study, the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, North Carolina, divided 700 people scheduled to have procedures such as the insertion of a catheter into their heart into four groups. Jewish, Christian, Moslem or Buddhist congregations prayed for the patients in a first group. A second listened to soothing music, imagined “peaceful, beautiful” places and received a series of 45-second-long “healing touches” from medical staff. A third group got prayer as well as music, imagery and touch therapy, and a fourth had no special attention of this kind. Prayer made no difference at all. Patients were no more or less likely to die, develop major heart problems or be re-admitted into hospital within six months of their surgery. Some slight benefit came to the two groups of patients who had music, imagery and touch therapy. They were less likely to die after six months.

This means that 18 of 484 patients who were to be prayed for recovered almost immediately, but only 5 of 529 who were not to be prayed for did. This is a significant difference at a high level of statistical meaning (0.001) whereas the result reported that the prayed for group did better than those not prayed for was significant at only the 0.04 level (smaller numbers are more significant). The people in the supposedly randomized prayed for group were evidently less sick than the patients in the control group, and the study was flawed. Or prayer has an inverse clairvoyant effect too! Humphrey leaves it to the reader to decide which is likely, and we can be sure that the religious person will choose inverse clairvoyance.

A third kind of suggestibility is social suggestibility in which people respond positively to views held by authority figures. Many studies show that religious people are more likely to accept such authorities, and change their views to match them. Religious people are generally more submissive and dependent on others, less self-accepting, and less inner-directed. Catholic theology students and novices were shown to be submissive and have feelings of inferiority.

Suggestible people are attracted to the churches, but then the churches’ authoritarianism reinforces their suggestible personality. People who feel guilt and feel inadequate are attracted to the offer of forgiveness by the divine father, and readily accept authoritarian pronouncements in his name.

Since the use of suggestion bypasses normal consciousness, it ought to be used with a great sense of moral responsibility. The suggestible person is being manipulated into doing what they might not choose to do with proper consideration, and it might affect their whole life. No evangelist will feel any sense of guilt over this whether they are convinced they have God on their side or are cynical money-grubbers. Admittedly, churchmen are not the only ones to use psychology in persuasion. Political parties, propagandists and advertisers use it commonly. All the more reason why people should be taught what is going on early in life.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.