Abstract

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)

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 22 April 2002
Wednesday, 25 October 2006

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.

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.

God and Morality

Christians claim that religion is necessary to keep people good, and they maintain this in the face of two millennia of Christian wickedness. Civilized people are able to control their instincts by their intellect, and generally are expected to do so. It is called being moral. Morality is sticking to socially desirable rules even when you would rather not. If they do not, society provides the law to give them an incentive to apply their intellect to their instincts and to become moral, with punishments doled out if they refuse. Animal studies show that instincts not expressed weaken and sometimes just disappear. So people who practice controlling their atavistic urges usually find it gets easier with time.

Religious people think that the social rules and laws are given to us by God in a revelation of some kind. On this basis, anyone who rejected the notion of God would not feel any obligation to remain moral, and would be wicked. Religious people are moral and irreligious people are immoral. It is far from the truth. It sounds valid but is disproved empirically. Careful studies have shown that people who lose their religious belief mainly stay moral, and people who never had any religious belief are mostly moral people. The truth is that religion has been useful to rulers to maintain order in their counties and kingdoms, and so itself is a social construct and is preserved for that purpose. Certainly, any good God that exists must want people to be good and therefore to uphold the rule of law, but the law came first. In fact, the hypothesis of God is unnecessary. The law was devised to help society to function to everyone’s mutual benefit. That is sufficient reason for law to exist.

Men might wish they could fulfil an instinct to club any young woman they fancy and drag her back to the cave by their hair, but society has decided otherwise. Sex with young women without their consent is illegal, and most men have no problem with it. Curbing the instinct might seem hard when young but it gets easier. The churches want to make the rules more stringent and stop any sexual activity outside of marriage, but that is simply to give the pastors and priests power over their sheep. It is going too far. It has been tried and leads to lives of misery, usually for the poor because the wealthy always were able to divorce when they wanted to, church or no church, because bishops allowed anything if the price was right.

People are aware of the need for law and order if society is to work, and feel vulnerable at any sign that order is breaking down. This is the ground upon which the moral argument for God is built. In this argument, there could be no morality unless it came from God. The dualism of the natural world reflected in religion simply has added to it the dualism of the social world—those who obey the law and those who do not. The formulation of social rules is added to God’s functions of making and maintaining the natural world.

The moral argument makes God a lawgiver and a judge, but lawgivers and judges are often perceived as stern and unmerciful people, so the legal God is often a stern and unmerciful god, the god of the Calvinists and Jansenists. It has proved useful, especially in bringing unruly children to order in societies like the Wee Frees’, with threats to them of hell fire, and it is useful to the monstrous revivalists in exaggerating guilt to bring about conversions. This is God the bogey man. Unfortunately it often produces a morbid morality, like that of the Wee Frees, that is, presumably, counter to the original intention. It can produce cruel and insensitive people in a world where cruelty and insensitivity becomes the God-given norm, and anything but good by any reasonable criteria.

Psychologically, this comes about by “the law of reversed effect” whereby excessively strong feelings produce in people’s psyche the opposite of what is desired. It is like the fear of heights. Any normal person can walk along a low wall but many could not walk along a wall of similar width at the top of a skyscaper. Their fear of falling makes them fall though there seems no reason that they should, and their ability to walk the low wall proves it. There is nothing to fear in falling at ground level, so they do not fall. At a height, they think, “Do not do it, you will fall”. The autosuggestion that they will fall enters their head so strongly out of fear, that they do indeed fall if forced to do it. Similarly, the enforcement of goodness by cruel means makes people cruel and that is not good.

The Herd-Instinct and Religion

The mass of religious people throughout the world believe and worship because the rest do. It is a herd instinct. They inherit religious beliefs as they inherit beliefs about good manners, politics and right and wrong—from their parents and peers.

Human beings are gregarious like sheep and enjoy gathering together. Individuals identify with their fellows, their village, their tribe, their country, their religion. They tend to accept easily what their fellows accept especially when it relates to the group identity. It is a source of racial, religious and national intolerance—the latter made acceptable as patriotism. It is the herd instinct. The instinct is that the herd has to be united in response. It is a group survival instinct. Putting criminals into isolation cells was a punishment. Most people do not like isolation. They feel the lack of human company when they are alone, and so feel incomplete. They need to be restored by a group activity—congregating—in church, at football matches, at the cinema and theatre, but then they enjoy gathering in bars too.

The individual thinks that they can better feel themselves in relationship with God when they seek Him in company with others. It is the effect of the herd creating a depth of emotion not felt by most people in private prayer. In a crowd they feel something is more important than they are. It is their instinct that the group itself is, but it gets mistaken for God. So it is that coming together in a group to worship God is satisfying. It is a well rehearsed communal activity that fulfils the herd instinct. The solemnity of the church service also gives a gravitas to the proceedings that people feel appropriate to God’s presence.

Unlike the sex instinct that is a large component of religion, the herd instinct is not normally suppressed but is fulfilled by religious communal worship. Even so the idea of its suppression is not absent from religious thought, and hermits, anchorites and monks rejected human companionship denying themselves another natural instinct to sublimate into useless worship. Thomas à Kempis combines here sexuality and solitude:

Go in and bar your door, and call upon your loved one: “Jesus! Come to me.” Stay in your cell with him. Elsewhere you will not find such rest.

Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Herds have no intelligence of their own, they only have the intelligence of their individual components, yet they can act in a united way. Mob rule is when crowds seem to take on a life of their own, when people in them are carried away by the herd instinct. The herd instinct makes the individuals in a crowd susceptible to respond to the behaviour of others, to do what the crowd does, and this undoubtedly affects religious behaviour. Soldiers are trained to be disciplined and stand firm when the herd instinct dictates that they should flee, and once one does, the others are likely to respond similarly. So, too, in the modern world, instinctive reactions in a crowd are often maladapted to the situation. People ought not to panic in an aeroplane, say, because it makes any danger all the worse. These instances show that intellect and training can overcome the herd instinct when people are wary, but preachers and demagogues make use of it for the unwary.

The herd instinct has evolved for quick responses, when there is no time for every individual to study the situation and decide separately what is best. Even if there were, they would decide upon different actions. The response has to be united, and so the signals are primitive, emotional and often symbolic. Preachers know that people in crowds respond to easily comprehended phrases, primitive and infantile suggestions and emotional allusions. They also respond to others in the crowd, so demagogues and preachers, rather like Dutch auctioneers, plant supporters in the crowd to initiate appropriate responses. The others soon follow.

Psychologists at Harvard did tests on subjects to see how they responded to social pressure. People were asked to judge whether a drawn line matched in length one of three others presented to them. Tested separately people were able to do this simple task accurately. Tested in a group in which all the members except the subject were collaborators with the psychologist and deliberately agreed on a wrong answer, subjects strongly inclined to the view of the herd, and so got the answer wrong. Even when the wrong answer was quite obviously wrong, almost two fifths of participants preferred to agree with the herd than to defy them! Solomon Asch wrote that reasonably intelligent people are willing to call black white to conform with a group. It is the herd instinct.

The suggestibility of crowds is shown by their response to orators whose arguments to any individual would seem risable. Each person in the crowd has more than the oratory to respond to. There is also the approbation or disapprobation of the crowd. Preachers want to get a crowd response and so invite it. To skeptics the constant calls of “hallelujah” sound manic but but to the Christian in the crowd it is a sign of identity with it. Rhythmic clapping, and making the sign of the cross for Catholics serve the same purpose of identity and approval. Mob oratory has two main elements, both common in preaching—affirmation and repetition, as this address by Charles H Spurgeon to aspiring pastors shows:

Go on with your preaching. Cobbler, stick to your last. Preacher, stick to your preaching. In the great day, when the muster roll shall be read, of all those who are converted through fine music, and church decoration, and religious exhibitions and entertainments, they will amount to the tenth part of nothing, but it will always please God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. Keep to your preaching, and if you do anything beside, do not let it throw your preaching into the background. In the first place preach, and in the second place preach and in the third place preach. Believe in preaching the love of Christ, believe in preaching the atoning sacrifice, believe in preaching the new birth, believe in preaching the whole counsel of God. The old hammer of the gospel will still break the rock in pieces. The ancient fire of Pentecost will still burn among the multitude. Try nothing new, but go on with preaching, and if we all preach with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, the results of preaching will astound us. Why, there is no end, after all, to the power of the tongue! Look at the power of a bad tongue, what great mischief it can do, and shall not God put more power into a good tongue, if we will but use it aright? Look at the power of fire, a single spark might give a city to the flames. Even so, the Spirit of God being with us, we need not calculate how much, or what we can do: there is no calculating the potentialities of a flame, and there is no end to the possibilities of divine truth spoken with the enthusiasm which is born of the Spirit of God… Go on! go on! go on! In God’s name, go on! for if the preaching of the gospel does not save men, nothing will.

Cited by R H Thouless, An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion
from M Le Bon, The Crowd

Thouless counted thirty one instances of the same thought repeated in only thirteen sentences. in his book, The Crowd about the psychology of crowds, Le Bon advises revival preachers always to be positive, neither timid or fearful, but “cocksure of their ground” and, like Christ, they must speak with authority. Their preaching “must be directed towards the heart and not the head” and his advice is “get hold of the heart and the head yields easily”. The aim is not to develop thought or invite consideration or to argue at all closely. The core message is simply repeated unchanged in content, in different words and by allusion, so that the crowd cannot fail to get the message—and that is that they need to be saved! Thouless drily comments:

Nowhere in the world have these [techniques of persuasion] been developed in such an extraordinary way as in America.

A description of Billy Sunday preaching against “Booze” near the beginning of the last century sounds alike a modern wild pop band on stage. He crawls, leaps, falls prostrate, bounds about as if on steel springs, “with eyes flashing, face scowling, a picture of hate” (an Illinois newspaper report cited by Thouless) he whirls a kitchen chair above his head, smashes it to the floor, raises the broken remnants up again and threw them into the crowd, which set about smashing them into smaller bits to share amonst themselves. Later, members of the crowd were waving bits of the chair and cheering. More recently the pop bands did the same with a guitar. The psychological technique is the same.

The emotional excitement of such crowds can lead to hysterical behaviour. Once someone breaks down into hysterics, it spreads like a contagion—screaming, jerking of the body, barking, weeping, glossolalia, falling into a faint. Not infrequently spontaneous sexual indulgence too, and it is Christians, sometimes ministers, attending the revival who have reported it. Revivalist preachers have been known to take advantage of it. When young people are in a highly suggestible state, any suggestion made to them can have a positive response! Thouless even reckons that somepeople have been sent permanently mad in revivalist meetings. And the powers that be try to discredit cannabis as dangerous to mental health! Surely revivalist preaching should also be banned. Spurgeon, though he advocated these psychological methods in preach making, regarded the hysteria and immorality they produced as the work of the Devil. Yet modern US Christians like it. Who then is their God?

Those who are more religious than others are more emotional or brood more over religious ideas than others. The same variations of emotional intensity occur in the political world—the Hindu is more fanatical about politics than about religion—and no special psychological explanation is needed of the piety of many of these mass-believers, though it can be seen that religion can be used easily as a political tool of unscrupulous politicians.

Christianity and Sexuality

The question then is whether religion is more than its component parts. Christians think their religion came from God. Where does God come into it if religion can be shown to be a manifestation of the sex urge?

Literally may we say “God is love”—sex love, sometimes in disguise and indistinctly recognized as such, by the lover whose lovesick longings even now create a god to take the place of the undiscovered and much craved human lover.

T Schroeder, American J Religious Psychology 6

Schroeder thought religion was entirely subjective, personal and emotional albeit wrapped up in the doctrinal and ceremonial wrappings of a superbeing. Christianity has taught throughout its history that sex is disgusting, and morally wrong except in marriage. It is the attitude that creates the guilt that drives adolescent people in certain Christian communities to “convert”. The conclusion is that it is essential to the preservation of Christianity, at least as far as the prelates are concerned, and that is why it persists. It must be transparent to everyone, even the thickest among us, that if God made us at all then He was the one who made us sexy. Why then is sex a sin?

Sex is essential to the continuation of the human species. Yet marriage is only a social custom, and Christian marriage has only existed for the last 2000 years. Before that everyone must have been living in sin by God’s own design, according to Christian doctrine. It is absurd. Sex is natural, whether people choose to have their relationship recognized in society by a bit of paper and a magical ceremony or not. God’s primary role in it, if He made us all, was to make us sexual animals, so pious believers in God ought to rejoice at sex, and should say a grace when the have it, as they do when they eat dinner. Sex is not the least bit disgusting, and Christians who say it is are hypocrites when it is obviously God given. The hypocritical Christian leader of the UK encourages girls, though unmarried, to have children by doling out to them ever greater child allowances and easy access to housing while responsible couples are left waiting for years to be housed. His concern is that the UK population is not growing fast enough!

Sex is not morally wrong and is not disgusting, but is a powerful instinct that has an important role in driving people in to Christianity. Christian characteristics that suggest a connexion with sexuality is that they:

• commit to religion at the time of their lives when sexuality is emerging—conversion often occurs when the sex drive is emerging in adolescence
• express themselves in the language of the sex instinct—mystics particularly, but hymns too, express their sentiments in terms of human sexuality
• disapprove of and suppress sexual behaviour—Christianity attaches great value to chastity
• are inclined to revert to an uncontrolled sexuality, both in groups and individually—religious excitement passes quite easily into sexual arousal and license.

Adolescent conversion emphasises emotions and puts little emphasis on teaching. The teaching, though, in childhood has already hit its subconscious target. It has produced an irrational sense of guilt in the adolescent child. Christians point to instances of mystical or conversion experiences in pre-adolescent children. It would be interesting to know how they could be sure of this. Adolescence happens at different ages in different people. As it is subject to the normal distribution, some children reach adolescence early and some late. It would take a close and continuing medical study to be certain a child was not entering adolescence early. But let it be. No one claims that exceptions do not happen. Everyone who gets lung cancer is not a smoker, and everyone who gets a sense of guilt does not get it over sex. A child might get an overwhelming sense of guilt for wishing a parent dead who actually dies. That could bring about a conversion experience independently of the sex urge. The evidence is that many children feel guilty over sex and that motivates them to convert, and it is indisputable.

Christians counter argue that people remain religious when the sex drive fades. It is a deliberate misreading of the psychology. The argument is that 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 the sense that they are assured that it will not stop them from being saved. That is why they have a great sense of relief and of being pardoned. Their sexual energy might be sublimated into the church, but then other factors become influential such as the false hope of living forever, of self-righteousness, of the necessity to maintain faith if salvation is to be assured. Those factors concerned with salvation and eternal life ought to get stronger as people get older and lose their sex drive. So a piety that was motivated by sexual guilt is maintained for other reasons.

Georges Bataille (Eroticism, 1962) explains that Father Louis Bernaert (Mystique et Continence, 1952) emphasised “the aptness of sexual union to symbolize a higher union”, and that “the phenomenology of religions shows us that human sexuality had a religious significance in the first place”. Bataille adds, “the sacred world did not assume until quite late on the unilaterally lofty meaning it has for the religious man of today”. A Father Tesson, writing in the same volume, argued that sexuality conformed with God’s purpose:

Two forces attract us towards God. One, sexuality, is “written into our nature”. The other one, mysticism “comes from Christ”.

Men pursuing the paths of mysticism often find they are “sullied with the liquid of the carnal flux”, as S Bonaventure put it. It is something mystics consider part of their experience.

A mystical impulse of thought may always set off involuntarity the same reflex that an erotic image would.

George Bataille, Eroticism (1962)

Hindus have sought a mystical experience through sexual excitement in tantrism. With a young, beautiful, and, naturally, devoutly spiritual partner, they pass from the profane and carnal embrace to spiritual ecstasy, being careful not to spoil it by ejaculation! As an example of the mystical style of devotional poetry, Thouless cites this extract:

On my flowery bosom, Kept whole for Him alone, There He reposed and slept; and I cherished Him, and the waving of the cedars fanned Him.
As His hair floated in the breeze, That from the turret blew, He struck me on the neck, With His gentle hand, And all sensation left me.
I continued in oblivion lost, My head was resting on my love; lost to all things and myself, And amid the lilies forgotten, threw all my cares away.

S John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul

Who would recognize it as a religious work and not an amorous one? It is in the language of sexual love, but presented as divine love. It is a love poem, and who knows that it was not written as one?

True piety is earthly love transcendentalized, and the saint is the lover purified, refined and perfected.

G Stanley Hall, The Psychology of Adlolescence

Even Christian hymns often use the language of love. There is a lover, a betrothal and a marriage, all spiritual of course, and immensely attractive to adolescent girls. Cultured young girls like to identify with troubled young poets like Rupert Brooke, Lord Byron, and Lord Jesus, especially presented in this fashion. The experience of S Theresa was:

In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans, and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, now will one’s soul be content with anything less than God. It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it—indeed, a great share. So sweet are the colloquies of love which pass between the soul and God that if anyone thinks I am lying I beseech God, in His goodness, to give him the same experience.

S Theresa

This penetration through the heart to the entrails with a golden spear is called by the divines a “transverberation”, a fine word, but describing something much more like a woman’s orgasm. Bataille attributes a story to Marie Bonaparte of a woman friend who, aged 15, had a crisis of belief, testing her faith. Then, on her knees before the altar, she had felt the delight of God himself descending into her. Later in life, having experienced normal sexual pleasure with a man, she recognized her mystical experience had been an orgasm. Chaste S Theresa never had normal sex, and so never recognized what her mystical experiences were.

Why does Christianity put so much emphasis on chastity? Paul conceded that marriage was necessary for some but chastity was the ideal. The philosopher L A Feuerbach puts it thus:

Marriage in itself is, in the sense of perfected Christianity, a sin, or rather a weakness, which is permitted or forgiven…

The highest ideal for Christianity was chastity and that was the aspiration of monks and mystics who felt that denial of human love somehow brought them closer to God. Christianity has always had this idea because it came out of Essenism, and the Essenes, at the highest level, rejected human sexuality in their endeavour to be perfect like the angels. Christ himself explained (Mark 12:25) that angels were not sexual creatures, nor should they have been since they had no need of sex as immortals. But sexual abstention was often accompanied by fasting,and that is known to bring on hallucinations when severe.

The corollary of abstention and sexual guilt is that it can break out into violence and licentious or rapacious sexuality. A man took over an Amish school house, evicted the boys and shot eight young girls, killing several. No explanation emerged but the clues are that the man had some sexual hang up and guilt related to young girls. Suppression of his feelings in a deeply Christian community seems to have had this tragic consequence. The Amish must be one of the few Christian sects that actually practice the teachings of Christ. They were outstandingly noble, but redneck America will have considered them wimps.

Carl Jung thought religion was characteristic of an inadequate or unsatisfactory love-life, and so was sexually driven. The consequence is a regression to a child-like state of dependence on parents, in which God is the father, of course. So religion is a form of infantilism encouraged by the Christ of the gospels telling his followers to be as children. It emerges in hymns such as “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” and “I Rest my Soul on Jesus”.

Christian belief requires no analysis. Love of Jehovah, Jesus, Mohammed, or Buddha is the same emotion as was once love of Ishtar or Tammuz or Zeus.

Sexual Drive, Guilt and Control

Western religions sprang from a manifest intention of controlling people when the Persians sent Ezra with his law into Yehud. It has remained ever since as the main platform of social control in society. Religion is intended to condition people into obedience.

S Ostow and B Sharfstein have pointed out that the churches use guilt as a way of controlling people, for its own purposes and for social control, the churches acting for the ruling classes. Ruling establishments are quite aware of this and attend church regularly for the purely cynical reason of being a good example. Royalty are nearly always openly religious, and the Church of England is called the British Ruling Class at Prayer. It is “to encourage the others”. The fact that social control is effected through the mass media, as Marcuse showed, has not been lost on the churches and evangelical gold-diggers.

Several studies show that people are attracted to the Christian promise of forgiveness when they feel overwhelmed with guilt over something whether known or unknown. These people are liable to break down emotionally at evagelical meetings. Half of those thus converted feel excessive guilt and half of them feel genuine relief and joy. Of ordinary converts about 9 percent feel guilt and about 14 percent feel joy.

The sexual feelings of young people brought up in Christian households often make them feel guilty. At revivalist style meetings it is often the young who experience dramatic conversion. Christianity, particularly the extreme Protestant sects, emphasize sin, sex and salvation to herd people into conversion.

Studies show that religion is a way of sublimating sexual drive. In American states where more people agree with the statement, “I never doubt the existence of God”, pornography is more prevalent. Sociologist, Benjamin Edelman, writes that subscriptions to pornographic websites are higher in states with illiberal legislation on sexuality. The American state with most subscriptions per head to pornographic websites is Utah—predominantly Mormon and conservative as it is—and, according to the FBI, Utah has more web searches for explicit content than most other states. The 27 states where “defense of marriage” amendments had been enacted had 11 percent more porn subscribers than elsewhere. Christian piety seems to be associated with a lot of sexual repression.

Women score higher than men on all measures of religiosity, and they have been traditionally less able than men to express freely their sexual impulses. Many of the experiences of saints and mystics plainly allude to sexuality. Some girls and young women confess to having vaginal spasms or even orgasms when they receive the wafer called the “Body of Christ” on their tongues at a Catholic mass. The emphasis that Christianity places on chastity might be another indication that religon is an alternative expression of sexuality.

Members of conservative Protestant sects were five times more likely to feel guilt about sex than non-religious people. Members of liberal churches and Jews were only about twice as likely to have guilt feelings about sex. Studies of sexuality, like those of Masters and Johnson, consistently show that strict religious upbringing caused sexual problems in marriage. Religious people have fewer orgasms than the population generally. Pre-marital sex is similarly experienced by fewer devout people than the average—about a half for both men and women.

When sexual gratification is low in marriage, religious people are more likely to remain happy, as if religious devotion substituted for sex, and religious people are consistently more likely to claim to be happily married. Oddly, those with little religious training and those with strict religious training are less happily married than those with a modest amount of religious training. Catholics traditionally are less likely to get divorced and more likely to claim happy marriage, but it might be that religious people feel the need to feign happiness, because those religious groups with low rates of divorce make up for it by having higher rates of desertion and separation. In the UK, until the last few decades it was difficult for working people to get divorced and British Catholics might have resorted to separation as the practical alternative.

A more recent survey (Barna Research Group, 1999) surprised Christians because it found that non-religious people in the US were less likely to get divorced than most Christians, of whom the most likely to divorce were Baptists and born-again Christians. The survey was of a large group (4000) and although differences in percentage terms are small, they are statistically significant. Worst of all were people in non-denominational Protestant churches at 34 percent likely to divorce, followed by Baptists at 29 percent, born-again Christians at 27 percent, and Catholics, Lutherans and non-believers at 21 percent. The average was 24 percent. A 2001 Gallup poll found 46 percent of Americans describing themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians.

Curiously, the ministers of religion of various denominations are sometimes utterly hypocritical. Regarded as men of great religious intensity, they often have a false reputation. They are vibrant with piety in the pulpit, but are dipsomaniacs or keep mistresses in private. Bossuet, the famous Bishop of Meaux, who wrote works of classic piety, had a secret wife. Protestant leaders and preachers of unctuous demeanour have a scent for drinks and dollars. There is no need to mention the blatant hypocrisy of the most prominent TV evangelists. They have more hypocrisy than piety. No other profession so often figures in the press in scandalous connexions, though many more are suppressed, as we have seen recently in connexion with child abuse.

Science and Belief

Curiously, the religious beliefs of physical scientists are not as low as one might imagine, showing that many scientists are willing to adopt double standards. As Will Provine said in 1988, according to Massimo Pigliucci, scientists who go to church have to check their brains at the church door. Psychologists and sociologists, whose own pursuit gives them an adequate non-religious account of life, are the least religious professions. Why natural science does not give an equally good account of life is hard to understand.

According to a survey by A E Bergin and J P Jensen (1990), 72% of the general population claimed religious faith as the most important influence in their lives whereas only 29% of the mental health professionals that were surveyed viewed religious matters as important for therapeutic work with clients.

R H Knapp and H B Goodrich noticed in 1951 that very few successful scientists were produced by Roman Catholic universities in the US, but liberal colleges produced them in profusion. One does not expect prominent soldiers to have graduated from Quaker colleges, or doctors from Christian Scientists colleges. Religious schools will not produce quantities of graduates with views that the school does not hold itself. The church that produces scientists is the Unitarian Church, but it does not produce many soldiers or politicians, suggesting it has high moral values. Episcopalians are rarely scientists but are often soldiers and engineers.

F Bello in 1954 found that, among US scientists, over 20 times as many had no religious beliefs (45%) as the population at large (2%). Less than one percent of the scientists were Catholics compared with 26 percent of the population. Two thirds of the US population professed Protestantism, but only a quarter of scientists. Three percent of the population were Jews compared with nine percent of scientists.

James H Leuba in 1916, set out to test the hypothesis that the more people were educated, the less likely they were to believe in God. In a classical survey, he asked 1,000 American scientists their beliefs and his results confirmed the idea that scientists as a group are much less likely to believe in God than the general public.

Edward Larson, a science historian, and Larry Witham, a Washington Times reporter, attempted to replicate Leuba’s study as closely as possible in an article called “Scientists are still keeping the faith” published in Nature in 1997. Larson and Witham did not feel compelled to mirror the original research that closely, but they considered the same number of scientists, divided among biologists, physicists, and mathematicians, and got their sample from the same source used by Leuba, the directory published in American Men (and Women) of Science.

The result was that scientists have not changed their opinion much. Physicists have supplanted biologists as the leading group of atheists, but pretty much the same percentages were found by Leuba in 1916. Larson and Withan’s conclusion is that scientists “kept their faith” after 80 years, a peculiarly Christian way of reporting the outcome. Scientists have a much lower probability of believing in God than the general public, and it is this that has remained unchanged throughout the past 80 years. The percentage of believers in human immortality decreased from 51% to 38%. While 34% of Leuba’s interviewees had answered that they would like to be immortal in some sense, only 10% of modern scientists did.

Considering that science was a minority profession all those years ago but now is a common profession, its extension into the general population might heve been expected to dilute the skepticism of the average scientist, but it has actually kept the same or increased. Leuba himself thought more education would increase skepticism, but it seems to be increasing gullibility to judge by the popularity of astrology and the hysteria over UFO abductions. Interestingly, Larson tells us that Leuba’s findings were one of the sparks which started Williams Jennings Bryan’s crusade against the teaching of evolution in the 1920s, which culminated in the infamous Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925. So his own research provoked a reaction against Leuba’s own hypothesis. That scientists’ beliefs have stayed generally unaffected by all this is a tribute to them.

In 1934, Leuba separated scientists into ones noted for their originality and success, and journeymen practical scientists. Half of the journeymen believed in God compared with a third of the prominent ones, and two thirds of the journeymen believed in immortality compared with just over a third of the famous ones. It is surprising enough that a third of deep thinking successful scientists still believe in God and life-after-death, and it shows what a psychological grip these fancies have even on great thinkers, but the trend is neverthless clear. The deeper the scientific thinker, the less likely they are to be enslaved by nonsensical beliefs. Leuba also studied psychologists and found that famous psychologists were the least religious of all, only one in seven believing in God, comapred with one in three journeymen psychologists.

A Roe in 1956 studied the religious views of 64 “eminent” scientists. he found that none came from Catholic families, a few had a Jewish background but most were of Protestant background. Despite their upbringing, 61 said they were not interested in religion and were not involved with it. The other three were active in a church!

So, about half of common-or-garden physical scientists surprisingly are Christians, but eminent ones rarely are. Christianity is logically incompatible with science, and Christians only convince themselves the two are compatible, in some sense, with weaselly explanations intended to justify their own actions, notably when they decide science is a better career option that being a coalminer or a lorry driver. Michael Argyle and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, in The Social Psychology of Religion, confirm that the low level of belief among eminent scientists is because “the scientific or scholarly approach to the world” is “incompatible” with “a religious world view”.

The particularly low rating of Catholics among scientists seems to be due to several factors, one of which is that Catholics are more inclined to be taught that science and Catholicism conflict. G E Lenski reported in 1963 that a third of Catholic graduates said science was in serious conflict with church teaching, double the percentage of Protestant graduates. The Catholic Church is authoritarian and hierarchical, Catholics being told that authority is the basis of belief not investigation. The outcome, J Kasa found in 1969 was that Catholic medical students were less concerned with exact analysis and using higher abilities than others but sought a sure outcome and to avoid mistakes.

In the general domain of intelligence, studies show that religious conservatism is inversely proportional to intelligence. Several studies have shown that Baptists and Catholics are less intelligent than Episcopalians and Jews, but Catholics and Baptists come from poor and large families, so there is a class division at work. Curiously, for Catholics, it seems possible that a factor in low intelligence is breeding, in that the more intelligent males in poor societies choose to be priests and have few children or none. Over many centuries, the overall IQ of the Catholic population could have fallen.

R Hassinger, author of a book on Catholic education, found that sectarian schools had a lower quality of students, faculty and educational programmes. E C Lehmann Jr studied almost 3000 graduates in the USA and reported in 1972 that those who conformed religiously placed less value on intellectual creative and scientific achievement.

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