One of the most noticeable features of Christianity as it is
commonly practiced is the way that the experiential and the emotional trump
logic. Most Christians believe what they believe because it feels right to
them, which is reinforced by tactile experience, such as the “bells and smells”
in the worship experience. The liturgical art, at its best, is a theatrical
production that engages all the senses, surrounding worshipers with beautiful
architecture, icons, music, and incense. The multisensory experience even
includes taste (e.g. bread and wine) and touch (e.g. passing of the peace).
The preaching and prayers are designed to foster spiritual
experiences. They often manipulate emotions – fear, anger, shame, blame, the
need to belong, the need to draw battle lines, and the need to identify,
vilify, and exclude enemies, scapegoats, and anyone who doesn’t fit in. In
order to avoid any sense of responsibility with regard to whatever might be
going on outside their religious bubble, many use religious ideas like “be not
anxious for the morrow” to perpetuate the air tight logic of plausible
deniability.
It’s not farfetched to argue that the main problem with the most
prominent public expressions of religious sentiment is ignorance, or at least a distaste for disconfirming information and a shortage of the kind of insight that could penetrate the veneer of
self-deception. Another take on irrational beliefs though would be to say that those who hold them are stuck in an immature stage of intellectual development.
The severely truncated world of fundamentalism can only be
sustained if the natural human talent for critical thinking is undeveloped, impaired,
dormant, or suspended. The trend in healthy psychological development is generally
toward an increased capacity for abstract reasoning. As children grow up, their
ability to grasp abstract concepts increases. Young children are concrete
thinkers. This is especially evident in very young children who lack a sense of
object permanence. Their
reality is entirely made up of what is immediately present.
Many adults find religion to be a convenient, cozy cocoon that
is entirely made up of what is immediately present and that is perpetuated by filtering
out or explaining away irrefutable evidence. Living in a fantasy world or an
insulated bubble is usually inseparable from defense mechanisms like cognitive dissonance and
psychological patterns of avoidance associated with the herd instinct.
My own life experience is a case study in how growing
awareness and moving through stages of intellectual development fostered increasing
openness and honesty with regard to religion questions. Like many children who
were raised religious, I trusted what adults were telling me and accepted my
parents’ religious belief – until adolescence when I began doubting what I had
been taught. During college I quit going to church altogether.
Later though, as I progressed into adulthood, the thirst for
a sense of the ineffable came to be a stronger need than having an
intellectually sophisticated worldview or than the need for independence that
had led me to question religion during adolescence. Where I went with that was
to regress somewhat, but some of what drove me was a continuation of my natural
movement away from the concrete thinking of my childhood. I needed a way to
come to terms with what I didn’t or couldn’t understand. For this reason, I sought
what I hoped would be a viable adult version of religious faith.
While there was still a strong element of childish
reification, it wasn’t a complete
retreat. Abstract reasoning was a big part of my process in that I developed
inferred understandings – like a child who, having come to terms with object
permanence, infers that her security and wellbeing do not depend on her parent
being immediately present. I filled in the gaps in my universe with a reassuring pragmatist understanding of faith.
I was, on the one hand, retreating from some of the wearying
rigors of abstract reasoning, yet on the other hand, I was advancing toward an
increasing awareness of imperceptible realities and a diminution of swaggering
adolescent certainty. While I was responding to a felt need to reduce the
unease of vaguely suspected truths by clothing them in concrete concepts, I was
more driven by a desire to find a way to honor and accept the indeterminate
nature of life. I latched on to an understanding of faith that was not merely a
synonym for belief but was instead about relaxing my need to comprehend everything
and letting go of what I could not control.
Often, particularly in times of crisis, relying on the
ability to figure things out is a futile pursuit. This can lead to a somewhat
desperate effort to fill the proverbial “God-shaped hole” (a curious notion
that, in the first place, one could know what the creator of the universe is
shaped like and, in the second place, that that shape fits snugly into an empty
space in the human psyche, though perhaps not so strange for those who buy into
the concept of the Imago Dei, the
biblically inspired idea that the image of God is dynamically present within
every living human being rather than idolatrously represented in graven images.
I resonated with the god of the Hebrew prophets, a god that
challenged the tidy truths of polite society, not a logocentric or anthropomorphic god, but instead,
somewhat in the spirit of the Judaic tradition of not pronouncing God’s name,
a god that is too complex and unintelligible to be adequately depicted by means
of concrete terminology or imagery. Eventually, my journey that had begun with
an earnest desire for satisfying answers to my deepest questions led me to
atheism.
Many nonbelievers have rejected religion primarily because
of the way its attempts to explain life and the cosmos are demonstrably false
and often ridiculous. It is easy to scoff at the delusionary “pie in the sky” mentality and at the childishness of the overly concrete ideas and imagery that
abound. Religion, they point out, grew out of a primitive need to explain
things, and obviously, just because there is no readily apparent explanation
doesn’t mean that we should suspend the whole idea of natural law.
But where this often leads is to arguments against religion that
themselves take place very much inside the box of concrete thinking. They take
the “Show me – I’m from Missouri ” approach. And while the
lack of evidence truly is the crux of the matter (in that what’s at stake is
not about whether atheists can disprove the possibility of God’s existence but
is instead the question of whether or not there is sufficient warrant to
believe), such an approach can nonetheless take us in an unproductive direction.
Besides questions about whether debating theists is worth
doing at all, about when it might make sense to do so, and about what we would
be aiming to accomplish, such debates can cause us to overlook the human aspect.
Most of the time, belief is either driven by an emotional fixation, in which
case no amount of logic is going to make any difference, or it is a way of
coming to terms with life’s challenges, in which case what’s on the table is
not the credibility of the claims being made but is instead whether or not the
religious life is fruitful and satisfying.
The psychology of religion is complicated, as the baffling
incidences of intelligent, educated, and sophisticated individuals who hold
quite strange beliefs illustrates. However necessary the battle against
superstition and against pathological avoidance of reality might be, the salient
question is whether being free of religion is an improvement. Is such a life an
attractive alternative to the cozy assurances of faith? Can it offer greater
rather than less emotional richness?
What is the ultimate goal of disputing the falsehoods and
empty promises of religion after all? Shouldn’t it be to promote a more open, enlightened,
free, and prosperous society? Why must the case for secularism and humanism be
so dry and uninspiring? Should we not pursue more rather than less deeply
engaging understandings? It’s not as though we have to posit a supernatural realm
in order to find a sense of wonder. The natural world offers plenty of awe-inspiring
mystery.
Exciting developments on the cutting edge of science (cf. complexity theory and the study of
subatomic particles) stimulate
the imagination, challenge mundane perceptions, and loosen the grip of childish
concrete thinking. The laws of nature are not so wooden after all. Conventional
notions about cause and effect are shattered by breakthroughs initiated by
revolutionary scientific work like Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.
An enlargement of our understandings can foster a renewal of
the humanist identity and facilitate our ability to:
- be comfortable with the unknown and the unknowable
- not have to have an explanation for everything
- be able to accept the existence of what we can infer but can’t touch or see
- move beyond beliefs that are based on as much or more of a need for pat explanations, for certainty, and for the elimination of doubt as that of fundamentalists
- embrace uncertainty
- lead with distinctively human attributes like softness, warmth, and joy
- be optimistic for no other reason than that being positive generates better outcomes than being negative
- celebrate the human ability to dream big, to break out of smallness, and to soar
