Abstract

The Psychology of Christianity

Science has conquered one field after another, until now it is entering the most complex, the most inaccessible, and, of all, the most sacred domain—that of religion.

E D Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion (1899)

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 25 September 2006

Psychology and Belief

G J Jordan, DD, is the author of A Short Psychology of Religion (1927). When a doctor of divinity writes a book about the psychology of religion, you can hardly be surprised if it is less about psychology than religion. Such a book is likely to be more an apology for the author’s beliefs and traditional methods than an inquiry into why people are religious. Dr Jordan is in this category of Christian apologists.

Sigmund Freud thought religion was a superstition, a projection of our own ideals and constraints on to others, which we then mistake for an objective truth, and begin to pursue it. It makes us no different from a dog chasing its tail. Indeed, the dog has the glimse of a real tail to chase. It is not deluded by an illusion of a tail. The human is chasing something purely imaginary, something entirely in its head. It is an illusion, and religious humans are deluded. Moreover, because they chase an illusion, no one can prove the folly of their pursuit.

Dr Jordan wondered why Christians would continue to chase the same phantom without realising it was a phantom they were chasing? Dr Jordan’s implication is that it is too silly for words, and should be rejected out of hand, but it is the very question his book ought to have been answering. It is the psychology of religion. Christians do not want it addressing, so Jordan declares that the idea of God cannot be contained in such a simple formula as that laid down by Freud and Jung—Jung agreed that God was a projection:

Who is this God? A thought which humanity in every part of the world and in all ages has brought forth from itself and always again anew in similar forms.

It proves Jordan’s book is a fraud. It is typical Christian dishonesty. It is not a short psychology of religion, but an apology for Christianity, and an attempt to muddy the water of psychology.

Is God a projection? Would God go, if all the people who ever believed in Him went? It seems that psychology cannot answer these questions, according to Dr Jordan. “That power belongs to other departments of knowledge.” The Christian apologist depends on the credulous reader not questioning his bland answers, indeed, not even thinking about them. It is a Christian answer so it is good enough. He does not go on to tell us what departments of knowledge have the power to answer these questions, to tell us the truth about God, so we are left with the idea that psychology cannot tell us, but that there is an answer somewhere. He can only be referring to that Christian conviction called “belief”.

Why do people believe? In fact, the question is one of psychology. William James explained psychology, in his seminal book (The Principles of Psychology 1890), as looking into our minds and reporting what we discover there of “feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like”. Belief involves these and so is a legitimate subject for psychological enquiry. But one has to take care who is doing the enquiring. If you depend upon a Christian like Dr Jordan, then you will not get honest inquiry at all but Christian apologetics. Christians are always bent scholars when it comes to anything involving their own beliefs. But Dr Jordan does at least admit that human beings do not have any religious instinct:

The idea of a religious instinct or faculty must be abandoned. The reason is that no such instinct has been revealed in psychological investigation.

G J Jordan, A Short Psychology of Religion

Is belief an assortment of psychological delusions, differing from the psychological delusions of other religions only in cultural details? Not for the believer. God is objective, Dr Jordan tells us, and exists to meet our human needs! If it were not so, religion would indeed cease as soon as people realised it was false, but it continues. The critical reader will again notice a deception here. As soon as any individual realises that religion is false, it does cease for them, but others, still believing, perpetuate it for their own reasons, most wickedly using psychology to indoctrinate a new generation of children and a fresh gaggle of credulous converts. Religion is like a bush fire which dies out where its fuel is exhausted, but meanwhile has inflamed adjacent places. Even so, fires eventually burn themselves out, and religions are no different. Many religions have died. Christianity is anything but monolithic, and some of its less popular sects have died out in the same way. Indeed, it is impossible to see the practice of modern Christianity has any relationship to earlier versions. How many Christians live the Christianity of the apostles? Yet that is all anyone can be sure Christianity is.

Now, don’t you know, we hear from Dr Jordan that the concept of God is no different from the concept of Nature, Goodness, Beauty, and Truth! It is remarkable how utterly dishonest Christian apologists are. No one personifies Nature, Goodness, Beauty or Truth except for poetic effect. None of them have a personality or a brain. God is not personified, He is a person! Christians have a personal relationship with Him. They are His chums, or His Son’s!

The apologist cannot honestly say that God is no different from Nature, Goodness, Beauty and Truth. But he says it, so it must be said dishonestly. Dr Jordan is too clever for it to have been an error. In short, it is a lie. Moreover, whereas, Goodness, Beauty and Truth are abstract nouns pertaining to a quality, Nature is material and massive. God is not like Nature in the least. God is utterly insubstantial. He is imaginary not real. No one has ever been able to demonstrate unequivocally that He exists in reality. He is a psycho-social construct, an idea described to others so that they can imagine it in their own way, and is eventually imagined by a lot of people, who then begin to think He must exist in reality.

Nature exists and you can touch it to prove it. Goodness, Beauty, and Truth exist as qualities that some things in Nature have, and insubstantial things can be imagined to have. God? God is not a quality, but is an imagined superman whose relationship to those who imagine Him is taken to be that of a father to a child. If God is to be compared with Goodness, Beauty and Truth, it is as an abstraction of fatherhood—a notional ideal father. Freudian psychologists are familiar with the idea, but notional fathers do not act independently of the notion and do not answer prayers.

The concepts of Goodness, Beauty and Truth are most likely hard wired into the brain through evolution, and in that sense they are objective for each species, but differ from species to species. Each species evolves to suit its environment and lifestyle, and so it finds Goodness, Beauty and Truth in them, but not necessarily in environments and lifestyles suited to other species, for humans not in those of pigs or rats. But, they exist, even if they are not absolutes, and Nature obviously exists if we do because we are part of it. Dr Jordan admits:

That great system of “The Order Of Nature”… has an essential existence apart from any projections of the human mind.

It certainly has, but God never existed in any of these senses. There is nothing natural or evolved about the concept. Nature has no sacraments. No ceremony of marriage is a necessary precursor to the sexual act. Marriage, like the other sacraments, is a social custom. Christianity, not God has deemed it a sin to be sexually active without marrying. And it is all hypocritical. Many Christians violate such religious customs, even clergymen. Benvenuto Cellini admits in his autobiography to a profligate and murderous life for all his devotion to the church. Any number of popes and prelates have also led profligate lives, with wives and mistresses, and the murder and torture of thousands done at their command, even if the blood was not on their hands. Gangs like the Mafia and their predecessors in the Italian countryside, thought nothing of going straight from mass to murder their enemies. Christians, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox, have unflinchingly killed each other, and rivals like heretics, witches and Moslem, throughout the history of Christendom. Protestants, often in powerful positions, like Bush and Blair, reflect their true convictions in their callous disregard of human suffering, and their life of low self-aggrandizing morality. They seem to think the Christian God approves of such behaviour, and other Christians so rarely dissent, it must be so.

But children brought up with no knowledge of God, do not need the notion, and would puzzle over what this “God” is, and what all His associated ritual does. Neither Jains nor Buddhists proper have a God. Both believe that the universe is subject to an overall order embodying law, harmony, truth and morality, but neither has the infantile idea of a conscious, anthropomorphic God, like Christianity and Islam. Buddhism regards the Buddha as an ideal being, now raised into and merged with Nirvana, but so too is his consciousness, so Buddha is not conscious and cannot answer prayer. The Jains have 24 ideal beings called Tirthankaras or Jinas from which the religion gets its name. All have passed into Moksha, and so have lost their individual personalities just like Buddha, and cannot answer prayers. The Hindus have many gods but also have an overall principle called Rita, which is cosmic order. The Zoroastrians, nowadays the Parsees, have Arta, which is also order. Rita or Arta as an unconscious, non-anthropomorphic divine principle that even God must obey, if you believe there is one, is an advanced notion which has been buried by the patriarchal religions. God is an invention of society, and if society is not continuous, then its inventions cannot be passed on. It is not true of the others. They are inescapable components of the human situation.

Undoubtedly, after a while, in a society that has never needed any such concept as God, some confidence tricksters will invent it, and they will set themselves up as conduits between God and man—at a fee. The salvation scam will be reinvented, and the ones who will believe are the poor and undiscerning, until children get to be indoctrinated and then everyone will have to cast off infantile indoctination, before they can live naturally. In a few generations, the idea of God will have spallated and different groups will be killing each other over their own particular version of it, each utterly convinced God is on their side, and the God of their enemies is a Devil.

Psychology and Apologetics

Jordan justifies placing theology before psychology by claiming “psychology is only the handmaid of theology, the outer court of the temple, and not the temple itself”. It is an explanation that will evidently do for Christians, but any scientist would dispute it, indeed reverse it—psychology is the more basic, and theology will be explained by it. The psychology of religion means the psychological explanation of religious behaviour, and theology is only a part of that. Psychology not theology will explain why someone converted to Christianity.

The Christian apologist will try to isolate why someone converted from the physical mental processes of their conversion. Similarly the apologist will separate the experience of someone who felt the presence of of God from the cause of the presence. In each case, they claim, one is a psychological question, and the other is theological. But a decision, such as to convert, is a mental process, and psychologists can induce the feeling of a presence, judged by many to be the presence of God, by physical means.

It is self-delusion to pretend that religious phenomena are somehow qualitatively different from everyday experiences. Experience uses many aspects of our physical and psychological make up, and most have a continuum of values. Some phenomena are unusual, but do not differ qualitatively from others that are common. It is not scientific and not adequate as an explanation just to assert that there is some qualitative difference to satisfy a dogma.

That is what believers cannot accept, and what they will not accept is that often extreme experiences are actually abnormal ones in the more sinister sense of betraying an abnormally working mind. Damage to any mechanism rarely improves it. Many religious leaders, on the basis of their behaviour, have been on the fringes of insanity, and in modern times, would likely have been certified, but, because tradition has sanctified them, they are considered saints for behaving utterly abnormally and even outlandishly.

Dr Jordan seeks to obfuscate, dividing the “ego”, already an uncertain concept, into the “empirical ego” and the “transcendental ego”. The empirical ego is presumed observable, but the transcendental ego, like most things transcendental, is beyond observation. Even so, these two egos cannot be understood apart from each other! If this be so, it is hard to understand how either can be known at all. They are interdependent and one of them is unobservable so neither can be properly understood. In fact, one is hard pressed to understand how Dr Jordan knows there are these two egos, if one of them cannot be observed. It will be because religious men believe they can observe what others cannot—things like spirits, souls and gods. The transcendental ego obviously falls into this category of things that only clergymen know about.

It is easy to see why Christian clergymen must have these two egos, along with the other immaterial things they must have in their scheme of things. The Christian must have two of everything to do with human life, a physical or material part and a spiritual or immaterial part. Thus Dr William Brown, another Christian apologist, in Science, Religion and Reality, says that without a transcendental ego, the psychological explanation of religious conversion “is an extremely crude theory and cannot certainly be accepted as a fully adequate account of the process”. What he means is it is not adequate for him as a Christian because he needs some hook in the human psyche for God to catch. Neither the hook nor God is necessary or scientific in explaining the hysterical behaviour of revivalist converts, or even those who come into belief through acquiescence.

Dr Brown abandons science in favour of anecdotal evidence. In 92 hours of personal psychoanalysis, his own religious convictions, he felt, were strengthened. So, psychoanalysis does not undermine religion, but rather the opposite. Is he, then, recommending psychoanalysis as a way of strengthening failing convictions, or is he simply dismissing the psychological evidence against belief as inconsistent with his own personal and solitary experience? Christians always cite anecdotal evidence against anything scientific, depending on anyone credulous enough to believe Christianity not being clever enough to understand the scientific method, but easily swayed by an individual story.

The message of Jesus is delivered in parables—told to the gullible as children’s goodness tales, but actually a call to arms to fight the Roman enemy of the Jews—so Christians like simple stories. Christians like individual stories of conversion, and like to tell their own about how Jesus is their personal chum. Science rejects anecdotes as mostly untestable, and valueless when set against a collection of contrary tested data, analysed statistically and formulated into verifiable laws. Christians mainly cannot understand it, and when they can, they reject it as contrary to their belief, which is true irrespective of any evidence against. Dr Brown’s personal experience is fine for him. Nothing will change one’s religious beliefs, especially when one’s living depends on it. But he is, or was, a sick man, once believing fantasies is accepted as an abnormal condition.

Dr Jordan is happy to point out that psychological constructs such as the unconscious, the censor and the complex are hypothetical—they “do not exist in reality, but help us continue our researches until something better is found”—but the transcendental ego is simply an invention to maintain the authority of religion. It is a hypothesis meant to buttress the hypothesis that there is a God, and human beings can survive after they have ostensibly died. It is unnecessary because religious hysterics can be explained without any recourse to God, or to a transcendent ego. That is what Christians do not like, and it is a substantial reason why they have to lie.

Theological Problems

Using a typically crude apologetic ploy, quite out of place in a supposedly scientific work, Dr Jordan reiterates that psychology cannot explain religious conversion or whether a claim to know God is true, writing:

Psychology cannot settle the historic problem, “Did Jesus Christ live or did he not?”. Nor can it settle the theological problem, “If he did, was he God incarnate?”.

The way he puts it invites affirmation, and the apologist has his debating point, but there is no reason why a scalpel should be expected to serve properly as a screwdriver or as a chisel. Why should anyone honestly expect psychology or chemistry or yodelling to answer purely historical or purely theological questions. The point is whether history or theology can answer them.

In fact, they cannot! The historical evidence for Jesus remains poor and the conclusion that he lived is equivocal. If he did live, whether he was God incarnate is an historical question with theological assumptions that history cannot answer because the evidence is even poorer that Jesus was actually Christ, a god. Theology begins by assuming that there is such a being as God, and Christian theology begins by assuming that this hypothetical God appeared incarnated as a man subsequently called Jesus Christ. Theology provides no answers. It assumes the answers it wants!

Having assumed something to be true as a premise, it is hardly surprising that the whole gamut of what is built upon it seems to point to a God and Christ. The tyro Christian is introduced to the subject in the middle, and it seems that God and Christ emerge naturally from Christian theology. It is sleight of hand, meant to gull simple, credulous, unanalytical and uncritical people, indeed often children!

A psychological question is whether rogues like Dr Jordan themselves believe in what they preach, or whether they are unmitigated cynics. The prevalence of plainly cynical ministers has probably grown, but the older generations, like Jordan’s, were indoctrinated at an early age, and, despite being intelligent, were unable to throw off their own brain washing. There is less excuse for it these days. Children brought up with no reference at all to religion can be quite astonished to meet their religious cousins and to see their bizarre daily rituals like praying. It is something the Christian indoctrinated into these habits from infancy cannot comprehend. Religion is not something that naturally intrudes into life. It is a social phenomenon, forced on to people by society as a convention, using psychological methods usually from an early age. Christianity is fed infants with their mothers’ milk. They have no choice in the matter. That is indoctrination.

Dr Jordan purports to explain the psychology of religion from a historical standpoint, delving deep into prehistory when men were still apes. It is partly a crude extrapolation from primitive modern societies based on Tyler’s Primitive Culture, but otherwise is conjecture. We read that primitive people just could not wait for the discovery of the idea of the soul before they “began to worship and pray”. No reference is given, and it is impossible he should know it, but what he does know is that Christians will believe it. What is interesting is that Dr Jordan ventures the view that:

Primitive man was always different from the animals in that he found a meaning in his environment and tried to regulate his life accordingly.

He means, apparently, that these ape men were trying to make a religious adjustment to the external world. Walt Whitman changed the emphasis, admiring animals because:

• They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
• They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
• They do not make me sick discussing their duty towards God.

In fact, early men were no different from animals, doing what evolutionary theory says they would do, coping with a difficult world in a practical way. Once their brains developed sufficiently, early men had an evolutionary advantage over other animals by consciously analyzing the world. Self awareness was a great discovery. These humans, we surmise, slowly came to realise they were thinking about the world about them, and then that something inside them was doing the thinking. This is rudimentary philosophy, rudimentary science, and it was building a set of hypotheses that evolved into rudimentary religion! Religion was a crudely scientific attempt to make sense of the world.

Among the first hypotheses made was that each of them contained an entity that thought. They had also realised that they died, and no longer thought, so the entity that thought must have left. They also noted they had a shadow, and a reflexion in water. It must have been the thinking thing. Different people gave it different names, and the words we use for it are “shade”, “ghost”, “spirit” and “soul”. If they had a soul, then it did not seem strange to them that everything they came across in the world also had a soul. So, among the early hypotheses of primitive men was that all physical things had souls or spirits—animism.

Animism explained events, whatever had happened, by attributing motivation to spirits, even that of inanimate objects. A refinement was to attribute them to a magical power. Eventually, as society developed a class structure, so too did the hypothetical spirit world. Ultimately, the spirit world had a king, just as the local tribe, or community had. It was the tribe’s God. When tribes and nations were merged into empires, the gods were subject to an imperial god, God!

Religion offers pseudo-explanations, not true ones, and inevitably the time would come when the religious explanation of things was inadequate. That is when science replaced religion. Now, we have no reason to believe either in spirits or in magic. Science is magic today, and science is religion for anyone intelligent.

Reasons for Belief

In a society in which the idea of God is endemic, people will give different reasons for their belief in Him. J B Pratt (The Religious Consciousness, 1923) says many Catholics base their “faith in the authority of the Church”, in their wish to believe it. He cites George Tyrrell, who was too honest to deceive when he reflected on his conversion to Rome:

I knew dimly that I had not any real faith in Rome—only a great wish that I could believe.

Then looking back on his long years as a Jesuit:

Sometimes, in the deepest depths of my self-consciousness, I believe nothing at all, and am self-deceived in the matter, and the recognition of the manner in which I have all along allowed the “wish to believe” to play upon me rather confirms the melancholy hypothesis.

He movingly expresses how affecting belief can be terribly destructive of life, and can have sad consequences. It is fearing that there is nothing in religious claims, but hiding it, pretending there is and convincing oneself despite contrary instincts that there is. That ends in sadness and regret. Many more people will feel the same way but the power of the thumb screw of faith is such that they dare not show any hesitation for fear of being turned away from the Pearly Gates.

In a survey of Christians, a quarter admitted they believed from authority and habit. The real proportion will be much higher because many will not admit such a poor reason for belief, instead pretending they have come to believe by reason. They give themselves away because they do not have one. Someone who thinks he has proved God satisfactorily from the bible, usually presupposes the truth or even the infallibility of the bible as the work or Word of God, a circular argument.

It would be a good thing if people stopped sometimes to think how much of their religion was due to social influences, and how much to their individual thought.

Dr G J Jordan

Pascal thought belief ought to be by habit because it was easier than remembering proofs and arguments, which is all very well if the belief is unquestionably true by proof and argument, but that is the trouble with belief. More to the point, according to St Cyres, by living habitually as a Christian, its hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo “will stupefy you and make you believe”.

Some believers base their belief on the need for a creator, a cosmic designer, or a cosmic engineer to keep things going. All have been well analysed, and shown to be inadequate for belief, but it does not deter the believers who must be either ignorant or dishonest about their real reasons for believing. Some feel God’s presence near them or even inside themselves. Some people think they are Napoleon or even God himself, and the idea that God is within you guiding you as his best buddy is near enough to insanity to be worrying.

If the feeling of God’s presence nearby is not a delusion, it is a sensation that has been produced by physical means such as electromagnetic stimulation of the brain. It might be simply an awareness of your own consciousness, such that you sense yourself observing yourself and particularly your place in Nature, your kinunity. It might be a phenomenon caused by the structure of the brain, it having evolved in several distinct phases and into two similar but functionally different halves. In particular, one half seems to be mute but highly instinctive. This instinctive brain might be aware it is being watched by the consciously thinking brain, and, being mute, it can only express it as a feeling. Perhaps some frequencies of electromagnetic radiation stimulate this phenomenon. It does not imply religious belief. Some devout non-believers like Einstein and H G Wells have felt it.

The main factor influencing people’s religion is their parents:

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith.

W R James

Often the mother takes the main role in teaching the children religion. Thus it is that women are responsible for the propagation of Christianity even though they scarcely ever have any position in the churches. Children are taught that God is “the spy in the sky”. He sees everything they do, and tells the vicar or priest who tells their daddy, ensuring that naughtiness is punished. In adulthood, when people ought to know better, wrongdoing continues to generate guilt—the spy in the sky still knows! Guilty people have the remedy of buttering up God, being sycophantic towards Him, praising Him and worshipping Him to mollify Him, in the hope that He will forgive them their sins, and their deckchair in the balmy place in the afterlife will remain secure.

Tests on children show that they have a fairy-tale conception of religion until about six, accepting religious stories as a variety of fairy tale. From then on it is all down hill. From seven to twelve, the idea of God as a super father grows, and with it the orthodox idea of God. From about 13 on, children might develop individual and abstract ideas of God, and begin to doubt what they have previously been taught.

A six year old child climbed on to her daddy’s knee and told him her friend had said there was no Santa Claus. Santa was daddy. Her daddy thought it time she knew the truth and admitted it was so. Santa was a fairy tale. “Oh!” said the intelligent little girl. “Jesus must be a fairy tale too? Mustn’t he?” Dr Jordan, who has been telling this little parable, interjects to say, “This was the child’s first taste of doubt, and it was important to treat it with sympathy and understanding”. The Christian daddy was not to admit that there was no more evidence for Jesus than there was for Santa Claus. He was to say that Santa had only a short story about him in the little girl’s fairy book, but Jesus had a whole book—the bible—of his own! Moreover, this book was “The Truth”!

We all begin to believe in God because our fathers did and then it becomes a habit with us.

Dr G J Jordan

In this way does Christianity pervert truth into lies, and lies into truth, or rather “The Truth”. It lays the foundations, in the minds of the young, of the palace of lies that constitutes Christianity. Jordan adds that when the child gets to the stage of theologizing, they should be given direct instruction. He means the screws of persuasion should be tightened round the child’s mind. They should be indoctrinated in belief.

The real reason for belief is the reward—immortality. Tennyson wrote:

Thou modest man, he know not why
He thinks he was not made to die.

Most people want to live again or do not want to die, and those who do, and commit suicide, are considered to have been mad or desperate, despite the supposed better life beyond. 90 percent of Christians said they want to live again, but Pratt decided, from his surveys, the desire was produced by teaching based on credulity, and then continued untroubled by any critical thoughts of the hopeful believer. Most people are either scared of death or they cannot accept that the world will go on without them somehow being in it. So they get comforted by joining a club that claims members do not die! Christians justify belief saying things like “to know the divine is to know you cannot die”. One Christian said:

I do not like the thought of empty nothingness in the grave.

It shows that the Christian cannot imagine himself dead. He is still conscious while lying dead, even though he is conscious of nothing except an empty nothingness. Death means you are not only unconscious, your brain is defunct. Dead people are not thinking at all, so they are not thinking about an empty nothingness. Christians will speak of the peace they will enjoy in the bosom of God in heaven, but they will enjoy that peace in the grave simply by being devoid of any thoughts at all.

A few people justify their belief in immortality on the grounds of justice. For the ancient Israelites, it was a popular view. Immortality allowed God to bring justice to those who met only injustice in life. It is simply another pious wish. Others say they believe because they need a moral master:

I believe in God because of the need of my moral nature. I need him as a child needs its parents.

We are back to God the Father, but about ten percent of believers admit specifically to this moral slant.

“Conversion” to Christianity

Conversion properly is the act of adopting a different religion from the one you had, not confirming the one you were brought up in. Catholics have a separate and dignified ceremony especially for that. Even to change the Christian sect the believer was brought up in is rare. Most just evolve naturally into their parent’s religious tradition. But some Protestant Christian communities in the US call conversion the youthful acceptance of the religion they were brought up in. Only about a sixth of Christians go through the charade. J B Pratt estimated that 90 per cent of sudden, highly charged conversions occurred to people “brought up in a church or community that taught them to look for it, if not to cultivate it”.

The word conversion occurs only once in the New Testament, and not in its modern US sense. For Plato, conversion was turning the soul to face the Good, the Good equating with the Christian God, but how can anyone, Christian or Pagan, imagine they can face the ultimate good, God without adequate practice. Some mystical, magical and hysterical ceremony cannot prepare someone to meet God. If it were so, God would have explained it when He was incarnated on earth, but the New Testament has no such ceremony. Revivalists try to make a ceremony out of Paul’s mystical conversion. W S Bruce (The Psychology of Christian Life and Behaviour) writes:

Many of the best Christians I have known have told me that, if the Pauline experience was to be called normal and necessary, then they were outside the gate of the kingdom of God.

It is neither normal nor necessary even for Christians. The Christian incarnated God was perfectly clear about what was necessary for salvation, and it was not hysterics. The Christian had to be good to his fellow men—to love them! That is what turning the soul to face the Good is.

So, the modern US Protestant usage is a typical Christian misappropriation of a perfectly good word to add drama to a preconditioned event. W R Matthews (The Gospel and the Modern Mind 1925) writes:

The noble word “conversion” has been degraded by base uses. The so-called converted man is too often nothing more than a person with violent prejudices and a strong conviction of his own saintliness. What is described as conversion may be simply a stirring of unreasoning emotion easily explicable by crowd psychology and mass suggestion.

The teen years—adolescence—are when children are most likely to be “converted”, in other words submit to the years of indoctrination they have been subjected to. It is the age when people have to face up to problems of several kinds, sexual development and social integration being major ones, and it is the best time after childhood for religions to be inculcated in people. E D Starbuck investigated conversion by statistical analysis of many questionnaire replies. The process of conversion begins with an inner struggle in early adolescence brought on largely by a gradual sexual awakening, inculcating a feeling of guilt in children brought up thinking humanity is given to sin. He found it was almost inevitably preceded by:

• a sense of incompleteness and imperfection
• brooding, depression, introspection and a sense of sin
• anxiety about their future life and that they had doubts.

Conversion removed all these negatives leaving a sense of relief, a feeling of being pardoned, happiness and certainty. Priests and pastors from childhood teach people to feel guilty over imaginary sins, then by bringing them to Jesus, as they call it, claim to have cured them. It is transparently a scam that mainly tricks people with IQs below average. Why is it allowed?

And what is sin? It began as a contravention of any religious custom, law and taboo, but a matter of social behaviour not inner desires and motivations. It was punished by a system of penalties that gave a motive to people to conform, and benefitted the sacerdotal class when they did not. With the evolution of the gods, they came to know everyone’s transgressions. Offences against them could not be escaped, and people had to live with guilt. Sin became an inescapable crime against the will of a god, the symptom of which was the feeling of guilt. People were naturally driven into temples and churches by guilt, and their need to atone for the sins which caused it. So sin is a religious invention to make people conform and cough up the shekels when they did not. It generates guilt and a feeling of compunction. When people are particularly insecure in adolescence, a morbid sense of sin can be produced by mental manipulation resulting in the break down of the personality. Various types of fanaticism exist chiefly in people compensating for social doubts.

Where there is a morbid sense of sin, there is generally some psychological cause which it is important to discover.

Dr G J Jordan

Yes, and it is entirely avoidable. The ordinary healthy man or woman is not conscious of legions of devils urging him or her to be unfaithful or to get drunk. One has to be firm sometimes, to decline an attraction, to refuse to lie or cheat, but one doesn’t on that account groan and froth at the mouth. The consciousness of sin or of moral struggle, supposedly an important element of the psychology of religion, seems an accompaniment or effect of belief rather than an element of religion. There is no consciousness of sin until you believe in God, or are aware of the connexion. The painful sense of moral struggle is a creation of moralists and spiritual writers. They create the feeling in a few people and then boast that religion meets it. Religion makes it far worse.

When a revivalist, with a powerful glance and vivid descriptions of hell fire, overpowers his audience, blinding their reason while stirring their emotions, his methods are altogether wrong, and the consequences a morbid and unworthy type of religion.

Dr G J Jordan

Children can do wrong but sin is not among the wrongs they can do, because sin is a phony crime. Yet children in religious households get a sense of it, and a clue about what is sinful to their priests, pastors and parents. Generally it just festers in their subconscious until puberty. The subliminal struggle then can lead to a morbid sense of guilt about thirteen in a girl, and about sixteen in a boy. Thus, Starbuck found that:

Among females, there are two tidal waves of religious awakening at about thirteen and sixteen, followed by a less significant period at eighteen. Among the males, the great wave is at about sixteen, preceded by a wavelet at twelve and followed by a surging up at eighteen or nineteen.

Modern youth might come to these peaks at a slightly different, probably earlier age, since the author did the research in the late nineteenth century. In childhood, the act of inculcation is simply indoctrination of people unable to object, but adolescents are likely to question this. Troubled by the underlying guilt, and the growing independence of thought of adulthood, the adolescent eventually reacts by inclining to reject what they have been told as children. They doubt their religious upbringing, increasing their sense of guilt and wrongdoing. This phase is about sixteen in a girl and about eighteen in a boy. Starbuck found that Christians over thirty doubt so infrequently that it can be neglected. He concluded that conversion is a preponderantly adolescent phenomenon—“doubt belongs almost exclusively to youth”.

He had written it up (The Psychology of Religion) by 1899, so those Rasputins of middle America, the Protestant pastors, could use it to guide their manipulation of the minds of America’s young throughout the twentieth century. Their devilish success is shown by it now being de rigeur to be a “born again” Christian, though US Christians do not get any nicer.

Unscrupulous evangelists do not try to persuade by argument but aim to get the young person to break down emotionally. So adolescent conversion emphasises emotions and puts little emphasis on teaching. Childhood teaching—indoctrination—though, has already hit its subconscious target. It has produced an irrational sense of guilt in the adolescent child.

To thoughtful minds, the methods and products of conversion become obnoxious. Frequently it was associated with tears, hysteria and excitement of a doubtful kind, and the converted man was full of prejudices of his own importance and saintliness.

G J Jordan

Emotional propaganda is unfortunately more effective than rational teaching—notably when people have not been warned against it—whatever the objectives, and the Christian churches have always been well aware of this. By the same token, establishing a respect for learning and for intellectualism reduces the possibility that the churches can succeed purely on the basis of emotionality and ignorance.

Particular features of adolescent conversion are:

1. descriptions of the experience are highly conventional
2. the level of pre-conversion sin is exaggerated
3. the level of post-conversion virtue is also exaggerated
4. mostly converion is a response to preaching
5. appreciable behavioural change is often impermanent and usually negligible, mainly being the self-proclamation of Christianity.

They are, of course, “born-again” and saved, and sometimes find a passion for missionizing, no doubt because it is meant to prove to God that they are worthy. The founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, follows this pattern closely. He says he was a terrible sinner but admits his mother never had any worries over him. He wanted to be “right with God” but his employer considered him an exemplary worker. After conversion, he felt saintly and went on to do his life’s work which was saintly, in his case.

Starbuck found that adolescent converts described themselves before conversion in terms that would make a professional criminal blush:

My mind was in a state of great anxiety. The fleshly mind was all aflame, and my guilt was hideous. I felt a hypocrite belonging to a church.

The choice of metaphors here for the mind “fleshly” and “aflame”, suggest the “hideous guilt” was sexual. After conversion, like Booth, they felt saintly, though few indeed become William Booths:

Everything seemed heavenly rather than earthly. Everything was so lovely. I had love for everybody. I walked on the curb rather than walking with ungodly people.

The skeptic, though presumably not the Christian, can hardly miss the contradiction in the final two sentences, but it seems typical of the self-righteous hypocrisy that all of this is.

Repressed memories and feelings considered fearful or immoral can bring about a “complex”, an usually undesirable behaviour like depression or obsession rooted in the act of repression bringing unhappiness. The cause is an underlying mental conflict. Since it is subconscious, the subject is unaware of it, and when the irrational guilt is removed and the conflict resolved, the cure can look miraculous. This is how conversion usually seems. The prominent psychiatrist, C Jung, interpreted the conversion of Paul in this way:

Although the moment of a conversion seems sometimes quite sudden and unexpected, yet we know from repeated experience that such a fundamental occurrence always has a long period of unconscious incubation. It is only when the preparation is complete, that is to say, when the individual is ready to be converted, that the new view breaks forth with great emotion. S Paul had already been a Christian for a long time, but unconsciously. Hence his fanatical resistance to the Christians, because fanaticism exists chiefly in individuals who are compensating for secret doubts. The incident of his hearing the voice of Christ on his way to Damascus marks the moment when the unconscious complex of Christianity became conscious. That the auditory phenomenon should represent Christ is explained by the already existing unconscious Christian complex. The complex, being unconscious, was projected by St Paul on to the external world as if it did not belong to him. Unable to conceive of himself as a Christian, and on account of his resistance to Christ, he became blind, and could only regain his sight through submission to a Christian, that is to say, through his complete submission to Christianity. Psychogenic blindness is, according to my experience, always due to an unwillingness to see, ie to understand and to accept, what is incompatible with the conscious attitude. This was obviously the case with S Paul. His unwillingness to see corresponds with his fanatical resistance to Christianity. This resistance was never wholly extinguished, a fact of which we have proof in the epistles. It broke forth at times in the fits he suffered from. It is certainly a great mistake to call his fits epileptic. There is no trace of epilepsy in them, on the contrary, S Paul himself in his epistles gives hints enough as to the real nature of the illness. They are clearly psychogenic fits, which really mean a return to the old Saul-complex, repressed through conversion, in the same way as there had previously been a repression of the complex of Christianity.

K Jung, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research,
in Thouless, An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion

In a sentence, the conversion experience is a build up of a subconscious refusal (resistance) to admit a mental inclination, but which is finally broken allowing acceptance of the suppressed disposition. The mental struggle is categorized as moral, intellectual or social, though all are ultimately moral. The intellectual variety is when the moral or social conflict is intellectually rationalized making it seem like an intellectual struggle. The moral struggle itself is when the complex concerns something deemed sinful such as drinking or some sexual matter, masturbation, adultery and so on, and the person wants to be “right with God” because they have been brought up religiously, or right with others out of fear of social exclusion, or out of a fear of a continuous decline into debauchery. The revivalist preacher is keen to terrify the sinner with their sins to force them into submission and converting:

No prayers will mitigate God’s hate and contempt, for he can no longer pity.

Jonathan Edwards

Here is the stern unmerciful God of justice and retribution, the Old Testament God, a million miles from the one the Christian God was supposed to be, and that he taught about Himself when He appeared on earth as His own Son! Yet, apparently, He is the same one.

The social conflict is usually one of loyalties, and can also be expressed as intellectual in some people. The conversion of Paul according to Jung seems to have been of this type. Paul had committed himself to Pharisaic Juadism, but was morally or intellectually impressed by the new unorthodox Jewish sect of Christians. He had, of course, been raised in Tarsus, a gentile city where the dying and rising God was worshipped, and he must have seen parallels between it and the Christian belief that a messiah had died and risen for his people. He had an internalized conflict of loyalties which he tried to suppress and dismiss by persecuting the Christians.

William James had had the hypothesis of subconscious “incubation” when a conflict was trying to resolve itself. Whatever it is called, the grounds for believing it are substantial, and it explains conversions quite adequately itself without any supposed divine activity. Thouless knows this but cannot admit it to his audience of young vicars. He explains that God mostly works by natural laws and not by miracles, though they sometimes might seem miracles. It follows that the Christian can always see God behind any explanation adequately explained without his interference. Thouless needs to sharpen his Ockham’s Razor. The truth is that the hypothesis of God is redundant.

The truth is that the adolescence feels born again because their bodies are indeed going through a metamorphosis that is the human equivalent of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis. In a short time, they pass from being a child to being an adult, experiencing growth spurts and pains, and particularly hormonal changes that brings them to sexual maturity, but with the emotional pain that goes with that too. They enter puberty as a child and emerge from it born again as a mature sexually able adult. The chrysalis is born again as the butterfly. The emotional vampires known as preachers, pastors and priests take advantage of this delicate time, do not give proper reassuring advice, but do the opposite, and suck the independence from innocents babes.

Repression of the sex instinct can lead to a sublimation of it into other channels, but it can also lead to subconscious incubation or festering that can break out in perversion, neurosis or violence. Repression is more common in some puritanical households or through insensitive religious teaching. In people subject to these influences, the consequent internal conflict might be relieved by conversion, but a better relief from it is not to teach children a morbid awareness of sin. They can be taught good behaviour without it.

In primitive and Shamanistic religions, emotionality is aroused by rhythmic drumming and ecstatic dancing, but handling poison snakes, evangelic rantings and excitable hymn singing do the same. The technique really is to heighten suggestibility, and the same techniqie of emotional exhaustion is used in brainwashing. One evangelist declared:

I preach hell because it arouses their fears, arrests their consciences and causes them to reform their lives and habits. I say hell is filling up every day. And where is it? Straight down from here. No more than eighteen miles down!

How this would convert anyone apart from utter dunces in the modern age is hard to believe, yet it works. Dr Jordan knows full well that much of the revivalist phenomena are explained simply enough:

In certain so-called revivals, there are emotional experiences awakened by mass suggestion of a very doubtful kind.

Dr G J Jordan

Certain forms of religious conversion become the recognized thing in some circles. Repetition of shibboleths and fixed phrases, and the confident manner of the preacher, along with the ejaculations and hymn singing of a great congregation, increase the force of suggestibility.

Dr G J Jordan

Mass suggestion and guilt is sufficient to account for the weeping, the screaming, the speaking in tongues, the fainting, and the general hysteria produced, especially among adolescents, and particularly girls. The suggestibility induced is just as likely to leave young people prey to seduction as to conversion, and plenty of church leaders have proved over the centuries—and none more so than today—that they cannot distinguish the two. It is certain that if any science teacher used any such techniques in a school to convert 15 year olds to the theory of evolution, they would be arrested and condemned as perverts. Why is it allowed in Christianity?

For some of the youth, “conversion” has an element of rebellion, in that they feel superior, “holier than thou”, relative to their parents. Converted ones often behave as if they have had a superior experience making their own belief more sincere, and they go around calling themselves “born again”. For Christian parents, it is all symptomatic of the Holy Spirit. That is the danger of it—mistaking hysteria for the spiritual, and ecstasy for the Holy Ghost.

The commitment as Christians of such converts does not match that of people who come to faith in less dramatic ways, but hysterics impress modern US Christians. Wesley converted 800 one December in Newcastle. By February, 76 had reverted, and Wesley dismissed another 60 as unworthy. A pastor told Starbuck that 62 of 92 converts received in a revival lapsed within six weeks. Of the rest only 12 remained Christians. Jordan contrasts this sort of record with 68 converts made from regular Christian activity, of which 41 remained Christians. Psychological surveys show that evangelical meetings effect conversions of about 3 percent of people present. Only about half of the 3 percent are still converted twelve months down the line, and only about one in six of them is a long time convert. That is why they keep returning, and some people boast that they have been converted more than once! These days converts are “born again” and threafter are considered Christians just by professing faith, so conversion has miraculously become very efficient at making Christians.

Realizing the Christian scam is itself a type of conversion—conversion to atheism, people who have struggled with faith for a lifetime have found repose in its rejection. “The new affection is an all-dominating love of truth”. According to the Reverend Baring-Gould, who wrote (The Evangelical Revival):

Jouffrai, the philosopher, a man of blameless life, had been reared in the Catholic faith and had embraced it with fervour. But after a great spirit-quake, he definitely turned his back on Christianity, [and] thenceforth never felt the smallest desire to believe…

Philipp Melancthon, the German Protestant reformer, gave two reasons why he wanted to die. One was to get to heaven and see the Son of God. The other was to be free of “the monstrous and implacable hatreds of the theologians”. He needed no convincing that the theologians with their hatreds would never themselves get to heaven. What a shame they do not get it themselves. In contrast, Dr Jordan considers W H Channing described the true Christian when he wrote it was:

To live content with small means
To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion
To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy not rich
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently and frankly
To listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart
To bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, wait occasions, hurry never
In a word…
To let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common.

Psychology and Religion: Conclusion

If the psychologist can explain all the facts of the religious consciousness by scientific laws then there is no psychological proof of God’s presence and influence in our lives.

Professor J B Pratt

Religion can be explained by normal psychology. If religious people think that is not true, that psychology is inadequate to explain religion, then they must show why they think so. They must offer evidence, but Christians have a great problem with evidence. They do not need it themselves, so find it difficult understanding why anyone else does. Essentially belief is wish fulfilment butressed by certain psychological phenomena that are sufficient for the uneducated and uncomprehending sheep. Christians claim some benefits from religion, and there are some, but they go on to say that therefore it is true. There is evil in the world, explained by the Devil, but broadly it seems pleasant, so it must be made by a benevolent God. That is nice and easy and they can understand it, but it is not true. Evolution makes our relationship with the world a necessity, not God, but it is far too difficult for most Christians to understand. The ones that can understand it are often paid by the religion directly or indirectly, and so will not admit it, or are even paid to present flimsy contrary “evidence” that the sheep lap up, even though it is baseless.

The wish for a God the Father, a father figure for grown up children, and the hope to be a god, immortalized by the supposed afterlife, are wishes that religion claims to fulfil on the basis of an ancient myth, but for which there is otherwise not a jot of proof. That, though, to Thouless is not proof they are not true! And it is not, but it is evidence, and to believe something is true because it has not been proven false would mean that Christians ought to believe many things that are utterly abhorent to them. Islam claims to be a further revelation beyond Christianity, and what proof is there that it is false? if there is none, Christians ought to believe it, if their belief in their own religion is a general principle. It would be better if it were for all religions because then religionists would not be trying to kill each other but would be obliged to accept each other’s views.

Out of loyalty to Christianity, his faith, Thouless, though a scientist, avoids the scientific question entirely. Why is God and the supernatural needed when natural and mental pshonmena can be adequately explained without them? Are we to pander to ignorance?

That much of religious experience comes from the well established phenomenon of autosuggestion, Thouless dismisses because autosuggestions are not necessrily false! Nor are they, but they often are and are far from usually true. Of course, autosuggestion might motivate useful behaviour, and doubtless often is harmless behavior, but sometimes it is unquestionably wrong, or it is if you do not have a warped outlook. Suggesting that children are sinful to make them overwhelmed with guilt cannot be right. Only warped Christians can believe it is. The truth of notions fed to people by suggestion or by autosuggestion in prayers and hymns ought to be impecable, and that truth has to be established before experiments are made on children’s minds. That applies to religion and drugs to control children’s behaviour. Suggestion and autosuggestion explain why people believe. Supernatural reasons are just superfluous.

The sense of something coming from outside, being revealed or given, comes from the incubation of thoughts and feelings in the subconscious. The mind works on things subliminally. Problems can be solved by sleeping on them. Solutions come to the prepared mind. There is a mass of evidence that the subconscious mind deals with problems unknown to the thinker. The same is true of emotional problems and conflicts, and when the subconscious produces a solution, it is often a eureka moment. It seems to come by revelation, and revelation is an appropriate metaphor for it. The difficulties are juggled in various ways in the mind until sooner or later the right pattern presents itself and the solution can be seen. It is called gestalt. Alternatively an emotional tension might be released, as it is in the conversion experience. Either way, the sense of given is because it has emerged from the subconsious perfectly formed. That looks divine. Sometimes the psychology gets distinctly abnormal as in the case of many mystics, and then they hear voices and see visions that seem real.

The supposedly outside origin of religious experiences may reasonably be explained in the same way… Where the mystic postulates God, the psychologist need only postulate the subconscious.

R H Thouless.

The difference between God and the subconscious is that there is evidence for the latter. Thouless will not give up his belief in God but admits that the “givenness” of religious experience is no evidence of Him. Those who believe it are “unreflecting people who do not argue about their experiences at all”.

He means that a small degree of reflexion shows that the outcome of these experiences is not always good, so how can God be considered responsible for them. As a minor example, recall the “born again” who loved everyone but would not walk on the same pavement with them. The result is too often pride, smugness, self-righteousness, and the rest of that complex of back-slapping superiority that the Christian god in the bible said condemned people to the back of the queue for salvation because they were not humble! Too bad for their salvation that Christians believe their Satanic ministers and do not read their bibles themselves. Swanking about being saved is not the way to do it. If these experiences were from outside, then they must be—as Spurgeon said about revivalist hysteria—from the Devil. Thouless concludes:

We have no reason for supposing we shall be able to found a satisfactory apologetic on religious experience alone.

It is true that all hypotheses are corrigible and not absolute, but they are based on observable things in reality. Theology and metaphysics are purely speculation, and can only get beyond it by testing their conclusions. They cannot be tested on metareality so the tests have to be their consequences for reality. In other words, they must be tested like anything in Nature on Nature. There is nothing else accessible to us to test anything on. Thouless himself tried an old test of metareality by devising a code and a message in it to carry with him to his grave. His idea was that he would appear to someone and tell them the solution. He has been dead for several decades and no one has yet claimed the prize for solving the coded message. Houdini and others have done the same, but none have been solved. That is a test in reality of metaphysics and of theology and they failed it.

If the explanation is that these alternative realities are not accessible to us then religion is condemned because it claims revelations from them. Otherwise they are pure conjecture with no basis of truth one way or another. On the basic thesis of science that nothing should be accepted unless demonstrated, these other realities cannot be accepted. They might be there somewhere but we cannot know about them so they are irrelevant to our existence. They might be right, but then so might some other alternative and incompatible conjecture. No one can tell, and yet people hate and kill each other over these absurd indistinguishable distinctions. There is no criterion of truth for them. Science has a criterion of truth and there is none better. If the scientific criterion is inadequate for religion then nothing is adequate for it. In such a situation the sensible thing is to opt for the best. That is science.

Evidence might be brought forward against the belief in God but the religious man could reply there was a chance (however small it might appear) that he was right, and on the strength of this chance and by the demands of his passional nature, he intended to regulate his life on the assumption that the religious hypothesis was the true one.

R H Thouless

Thouless is at least honest if this is the basis of his belief, but it ought not to be good enough for a scientist. Scientists do not accept things on the basis of incalculably tiny possibilities, but rather begin with skepticism about such things precisely to exclude the unlikely from pressing into their time and wasting it. Nor should this argument be good enough for anyone religiously inclined because it is a gamble, and not even a good one, and religious folk have always set themselves against gambling as irresponsible and ungodly. A great scientist, Einstein, said God does not play dice, but evidently Christians think He does! Moreover, anyone who nevertheless based their life on this argument with its low possibility of success, ought to be more circumspect about foisting this weakly held belief on to others.

Thouless ends up justifying his unscientific belief on the ground that it rationalises experiences. Yet the experiences discussed in his book are all capable of a full explanation by psychology without any recourse to God. The myth of God might rationalize all of the experiences he discusses but it is not needed and it is no good. He even claims that the rationalization is validated because it explains more than one type of experience:

When different experiences covering a wide range of rationalizations, which are all essentially the same, the probability of error is less.

It is absurd and fallacious. The hypothesis of God explains everything, and at one time when religion was all powerful, it did in practice. Strange that it coincided with the times of utmost misery in the depths of the Dark Ages. God is not an explanation. You might as well say the hypothesis of Humpty Dumpty explains everything. It explains nothing.

If there were extra-human sources of knowledge and superhuman sources of human power, their existence should, it seems, have become increasingly evident. Yet the converse is apparently true. The supernatural world of the savage has become a natural world to civilized man. The miraculous of yesterday is the explicable of to-day. In religious lives accessible to psychological investigation, nothing requiring the admission of superhuman influences has been found. There is nothing… not a desire, not a feeling, not a thought, not a vision, not an illumination, that can seriously make us look to transcendent causes.

Leuba, A Psychological Study of Religion

Any supernatural figure can be invented to do something but it is an invention, not an explanation. Thouless has shown that the facts of religion, whether personal or social, can be explained without needing God. He tries to preserve God by the usual Christian special pleading. His emotional desperation is plain and surely sad for it is not clever desperation. All it demonstrates is the power of religious conviction, usually brought on by childhood indoctrination, to hold people against all reason. Religion is a neurosis that society does not consider pathological, and the reason is that it has obvious political value.

Pros and Cons of Christianity

Christians claim they make people better, meaning more socially adjusted. The evidence on this is mixed, perhaps because it is true only of some people. The church constantly emphasises that its devotees are servants or, properly, slaves of God, and Marx saw in this a deliberate attempt to reduce worshippers’ self-esteem. The aim is to make the believer think of themselves as dependent. Freud saw religious belief as a refusal to face reality, and its substitution for reality of a fantasy means that believers are less sure, more dependent, less adequate and less assertive in real life, whilst being prone to guilt and anxiety. Only in missionary mode do they recover their confidence.

The evidence, however, especially among older people registers benefits too. Regular church attenders often have better physical health and are less suicidal than the average. Partly, this is because they are less inclined to use abusive substances like cigarettes, alcohol and drugs. Mutual support among church members—the community aspect—is also a positive influence of religion. Against these, religious devotion leads to a narrowing of perspective, appearing as authoritarianism and dogmatism.

C W Ellison (1983) considers that spiritual health leads to feeling “generally alive, purposeful, and fulfilled”, but must be accompanied by psychological health. Spiritual Well-being (SWB) is “the affirmation of life in a relationship with God, self, community and environment that nurtures and celebrates wholeness”. Some Christian psychologists are trying to inveigle such non-scientific ideas into therapy, but such as A E Bergin (1991), and E H Cadwallader (1991) caution that the relationship between religion and mental health is complex and mixed, and that religion can be unhealthy.

Nor can greater suggestibility be considered as beneficial. Nor is it beneficial that religious attitudes detract from acceptance of scientific discoveries, a factor perhaps dependent itself on dogmatism and suggestibility. Nor can the feelings of discomfort over sex, and the concomitant feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. Religion serves a social function in keeping people disciplined, restrained and set on longer term objectives rather than immediate gratification, a clear conflict with modern marketing methods. The church offers a long term way of life that people can commit themselves to, but non- or quasi-religious world views, like Adelphiasophism, can do the same with the possibility of less psychological harm, and the absurdity of having to accept ancient and inappropriate rule books like the bible.

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