The over witty notion of a fool who would gladly turn upside down the whole art of astronomy.

Martin Luther on Copernicus

The Psychology of Christianity 3.2

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)

Reasons for Belief
“Conversion” to Christianity

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.

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:

descriptions of the experience are highly conventional
the level of pre-conversion sin is exaggerated
the level of post-conversion virtue is also exaggerated
mostly converion is a response to preaching
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.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.