Bishop Barnes said a scientific education is “a purifying influence” and a “true humanism”.

The Psychology of Christianity 3.1

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)

Psychology and Belief
Sexual Drive, Guilt and Control
Psychology and Apologetics
Theological Problems

Abstract

Why do people believe? The question is one of psychology. Is belief an assortment of psychological delusions, differing from the psychological delusions of other religions only in cultural details? William James explained psychology as looking into our minds and reporting of feelings, cognitions, reasonings. Belief involves these and so is a legitimate subject for psychological enquiry. But one has to take care who is enquiring. A Christian will not give honest inquiry at all but Christian apologetics. Children brought up with no religion at all can be astonished by the bizarre rituals of their religious cousins, something the Christian indoctrinated into these habits from infancy cannot comprehend. Religion 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.

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.

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.

Several studies show that religion is a way of sublimating sexual drive, especially amongst women. 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.

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.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.