Since William James, psychologists have been much interested in religion: from the concept of some kind of mystical experience, their thinking has evolved to search for the place of religion in the brain with the help of new technologies. What unites religion with neurosis, how do superstitions arise and how are epilepsy, sex and God connected? T&P publishes a transcript of a lecture by pathopsychologist Lyudmila Pyatnitskaya on the psychology of religion.
The lecture was given as part of the Praxis psychological education project.
The psychology of religion deals with the consciousness of religious people: it studies how it is formed and what factors influence it; by the people themselves: their thinking and behavior; as well as religious sects. A very important point is the exclusion of the transcendental principle. This postulate in the psychology of religion says that we do not evaluate whether there is a higher mind or not. We confront ourselves with a fact: there are people who believe, and we study them. To begin to study a believer, you need to understand how he becomes a believer. Theologian James Fowler described seven corresponding stages.
The first is a child under 3 years of age, who develops either trust or distrust in the environment. That is, his faith is limited by trust or distrust.
The next stage is intuitive-projective faith, based on intuition (4–7 years). This is our favorite “I’ll jump over these two steps and something good will happen.” At this stage, the child is intuitive in his faith: he has some ideas about what is good and what is bad, and this is not a formalized doctrine, but his fabulous thoughts about faith.
The next stage is the literal-mythical stage (7-11 years), in which a person begins to study fairy tales or myths and take them damn literally. His faith at this point is based on these literal myths.
Then synthetic-conventional faith happens (11–13 years). This is a conformist faith: at this age we integrate into a group, accept the faith that is in it, and are afraid to leave this faith and group. The most important thing is that some people remain at this stage. Then there will be no age restrictions, and nothing terrible will happen: we will accept the faith that is in our group.
The next stage is individual reflective faith. At this stage, a person thinks: “Is everything so good in the faith that I accepted? Maybe there are some errors in it? He is trying to regain faith in himself: the faith of the group was alien, now he is returning it.
Then a unifying faith happens, in which attempts to resolve the paradoxes of faith and inconsistencies come to naught, and we accept it for what it is. If this happens, then it happens at the age of 30. A person rediscovers myths and legends, but with a double meaning: if a child discovered all this literally, now we see double meanings.
And finally, all-encompassing faith. This is something that no one (or gurus and mentors) achieves. It turns out that it is no longer man who has faith, but faith who has man.
William James
How did famous psychologists talk about faith? I'll tell you about this in chronological order. William James appears first. We owe it to him that he was the first to talk about the connection between religion and man, but he did it more philosophically than scientifically. For James, religiosity was a person's attitude towards the world with a very important component - mystical experience and confidence in the existence of higher powers. What is a mystical experience according to James? If you cannot explain what exactly you experienced, if you felt inner enlightenment, if this feeling was short-term and then disappeared, and at that moment your will turned off - you had a mystical experience according to James. At the same time, inactivity of the will is present only at the moment of experience, but in order to get into it, you need to be very strong-willed and make efforts. James wrote a huge book about all this - The Varieties of Religious Experience. It is about the fact that the visible part is only a part of the existing world; there is also a spiritual part. The true goal of man is harmony with this world, which is achieved through prayer. Religion gives life new value, encourages heroism, gives confidence in salvation and influences the feeling of love. This is a very romantic point of view and more philosophical than scientific.
Psychology of Refusal from Religion
For many people, religion is a core part of their identity, the meaning they find in life, and their social world. It makes sense that changing this crucial aspect of oneself would have significant psychological consequences. Religious people understand that leaving religion can result in increased levels of emotional distress, isolation, and self-doubt. A convinced atheist can see the positive sides of this process, because it is quite possible that a person who decides to renounce religion will acquire breadth of views, freedom of thoughts and spiritual views.
The new study, published in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, is one of the first examples of systematic longitudinal research on this issue. The three-year study's data focused on Protestants. The study did not identify a single pattern of changes associated with the abandonment of religion or changes in religious views. Therefore, the above assumptions of both convinced believers and atheists are true to a certain extent.
Garry Gai and his colleagues at Hong Kong University asked members of a Christian Protestant community, all of whom were Chinese, to fill out psychological questionnaires about six significant events in their lives over the past three years. The questionnaires made it possible to draw conclusions about the personality, values, beliefs and psychological symptoms of the study participants.
About 600 people provided complete information about themselves, 188 of them stopped identifying as Christians at some point in the study. About 82% said they had become atheists, with the rest converting to Catholicism, Buddhism or Taoism. The remaining participants are wondering what religion they now consider themselves to be.
When analyzing the data, the scientists focused on what psychological changes occurred in those who abandoned religion or changed their religious views, and in those who continued to adhere to their original beliefs. It is worth noting that most of the subjects were students; the number of men and women was approximately equal.
Perhaps surprisingly, there were no significant personality changes among those who abandoned religion or switched to another religious group. Over the course of the study, participants in both groups (those who remained religious and those who converted or became atheists) showed a decrease in extraversion and general agreeableness. In terms of values and beliefs, people who abandoned religion began to talk more about fate. They were more likely than others to be sure that fate controls everything that happens to them, but a person can make certain adjustments to the course of his life. It is quite natural that most of them stated that they did not believe in the existence of God.
The most striking aspect of giving up religion, according to the study, was psychological well-being. About half of the subjects who became atheists showed significantly fewer depressive and anxiety symptoms compared to those who remained religious. The second half of the atheists experienced a sharp increase in these symptoms. However, emotional trajectories varied significantly across participants' personal stories. The clear conclusion was that atheists had sleep disorders much less often than believers.
The main factor in the intensity of the consequences of abandoning religion, according to scientists, is the personal qualities and psychological state of a person before he became an atheist. If he was an extrovert and had adequate psychological resources, giving up his faith could be an opportunity for growth and even greater psychological resilience. Conversely, those who were neurotic and psychologically and physically vulnerable before they stopped believing in God were more likely to experience psychological distress after giving up religion.
“Any theory that claims that everyone who has given up on God goes through the same changes should not be taken for granted. It cannot be said that giving up religion reduces anxiety for absolutely everyone, however, a significant portion of newly minted atheists do experience such changes. In addition, the process of abandoning religion should not be considered as a process similar to the process of accepting religion,” notes the author of the study.
The data collected allowed the researchers to look at the psychological differences between those who remained religious and those who subsequently abandoned religion. The researchers took into account the psychological state of the participants at the beginning of the study. It turned out that future atheists, even before abandoning religion, were less emotionally stable, less committed to tradition and less likely to trust others. They valued independence, hedonism and power more than others.
In the future, the scientists plan to focus on how their findings apply to other religions and people from other cultures. The researchers add that the next study will be longer-term and will focus on how long the psychological effects of leaving religion last and whether it can be considered a transitional moment for some people.
Original article: Christian Jarrett, — What are the psychological effects of losing your religion? The British Psychological Society, April, 2018
Research cited by author: Hui, C. H., Cheung, S.-H., Lam, J., Lau, E.Y.Y., Cheung, S.-F., & Yuliawati, L. (2018). Psychological changes during faith exit: A three-year prospective study. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Advance online publication.
Author of the translation: Eliseeva Margarita Igorevna
Editor: Simonov Vyacheslav Mikhailovich
Key words: psychology, religion, faith, religiosity, philosophy
Photo source: unsplash.com
Available for download:
- Psychological aspects of renunciation of religion
Sigmund Freud
The most ardent critic of religion is Freud. He believed that religion is dangerous because religion does not allow one to think critically, and if a person does not think critically, he becomes intellectually stuck. The danger is that if religion takes responsibility for morality and morality, then as soon as it itself is shaken, morality will shake behind it, and this cannot be allowed. Freud called religion a mass neurosis. But neurosis does not happen out of nowhere. For it to arise, a conflict and a complex are needed, according to Freud. This will be an Oedipus complex, I will explain why. Imagine yourself as an ancient person. You live in Africa, everything is fine, and then suddenly a tree falls on your friend. You understand that, damn it, you are also defenseless, you can die at any second. Living with such fear is monstrous; it is destructive to the psyche. You need to come to terms with ruthless nature. And since we can only negotiate with those with whom we can talk, we will humanize the forces of nature. The image of the father, and with it the Oedipus complex, is immediately projected onto the humanized, formidable and terrible forces of nature. Now we can arrange rituals to appease this god, because we can agree with him: after all, he is essentially a man. On the basis of this complex, a neurosis is formed, and not an ordinary one, but a colossal one - a massive one. Freud said that such a massive neurosis is useful because it protects against smaller neuroses. Mass neurosis is an illusion of calm, an illusion of salvation. You need to get rid of him. Why? Because religion, as I said earlier, is dangerous.
Gustav Jung
Straight from Freud to his student Jung. Jung's most famous theory, the theory of the collective unconscious, fits perfectly into the explanation of religiosity. If the personal unconscious is an oasis of our desires, fears, instincts, then the collective unconscious is an island of archetypes that are built into us from birth. If John Locke believed that we are born like a board, like a tabula rasa, then Jung said that we are born with a set of archetypes in our heads and it is on them that our physical life, mythology, fairy tales, legends and everything else will be built. Jung simply observed that in different fairy tales, beliefs and legends, the same characters suddenly appear, who act in the same way, and the plots are more or less similar. And then there was this concept of archetype that we are born with, which has the same content no matter where you are. Therefore, Jung called religion the unconscious, but not the ordinary unconscious, but the collective. For a religion to work, several archetypes must combine. The archetype of God is a projection of everything sublime, good that is in man, the opposite is the archetype of the devil. As soon as God and the devil begin to fight, religion emerges.
Frederick Skinner
Let's go further and come to the behaviorists. Skinner believed that religious behavior grew out of superstition, and superstition grew out of the classic behaviorist concept of stimulus-response: every stimulus is followed by a response. To demonstrate this, he conducted a simple experiment with pigeons. A pigeon sits in a pen and gets food every 15 seconds. The pigeon is happy, but for some reason it suddenly begins to suffer from some kind of nonsense: it starts dancing, spinning, shaking its head. For what? It's simple. When one day the food fell out, the dove turned around. And he decided: “Maybe this is somehow connected? I’ll turn around again.” And it fell out again. And he was like, “Wonderful. Maybe I’ll turn around again?” It fell out again because it drops out every 15 seconds. But the dove doesn't know this. A superstition has formed! Pigeons, indeed, had different superstitions: some spun around their axis, others hit something with their beaks. Initially there was superstition, which grew into religious behavior, and religious behavior developed into religious thinking and everything else. Beautiful.
Erich Fromm
Moving further along the chronological spiral and the course of general psychology, we move on to Erich Fromm. He was the first to give a damn about how religion turned out: he was interested in what came of it. He was also the first after James to say that, in fact, someone needs this, because, dear psychologists, your function has been performed by priests for many years. Fromm called religion psychotherapy, but not all confessions, but some. But Fromm also has a certain provocative idea: neurosis = religion. We've already seen this somewhere. For Freud, religion = neurosis, and for Fromm, neurosis = religion. The fact is that Fromm expanded the concept of religion to any thing that we live by, that moves our lives. iPhones are quite a religion, according to Fromm. Or the cult of personality - Kim Jong-un: there is no God, but there is religion. Fromm did not consider all religions to be psychotherapy, but only some of them, because he divided them into authoritarian and humanistic. Authoritarian religions are characterized by obedience, submission to doctrine, loss of independence and, as Fromm said, the greatest powerlessness. Man is powerless before religion, he is completely subservient to it and acts only to feed this religion. There are also humanistic religions. They are characterized by independence, the cult of self-actualization and realization of potential, the right to happiness and freedom, which is not regulated by anything, and, in contrast to the greatest powerlessness, the greatest strength. As you probably guessed, Fromm was a fan of Zen Buddhism. He has a book “Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis”.
Section IV Psychology of Religion
The specificity of the psychology of religion is that it arose at the intersection of several areas of knowledge. The psychology of religion developed at the intersection of philosophy, religious studies, psychology and sociology, from which it borrowed basic principles, methods, and concepts. Without taking into account the resulting structural complexity of psychology, it is unlikely that a comprehensive interpretation of the subject can be given. Attempts by many scientists to relate the psychology of religion to the field of religious studies, psychology or sociology indicate the futility of resolving the issue. Of course, they do not reflect the true interests of science, but the professional orientation of the author.
You have to completely agree with. DUgrinovich that the socio-psychological approach to the study of religious consciousness is the core of the psychology of religion
The identification of the main, central characteristic should not obscure the complex connections between the psychology of religion and other socio-historical and natural scientific disciplines, each of which in its own way defines the face of the psychology of religion. The psychology of religion studies mass religious consciousness, the consciousness of believers, taken in its real functioning, in unity with the behavior of believers, in other words, the psychology of religion studies the regulatory function of religious consciousness, its influence on the behavior of believers, the unity of consciousness and behavior of believers. This is one aspect that I would like to draw attention to.
Secondly, the psychology of religion, the materialistic psychology of religion, clarifies the relationship between mass religious consciousness and the social conditions of life of people, certain social groups, groups of believers, etc. Two aspects should be highlighted here: the psychology of religion, taking into account the social environment, provides a meaningful analysis religious consciousness of believers, the formation of this consciousness. This is a genetic, socio-historical, causal aspect. And the second aspect - the psychology of religion studies the influence of religious consciousness on the behavior of believers, on their religious activities in society. All this allows us to outline the line that separates the psychology of religion from other disciplines that study religious consciousness. For example, epistemological problems are problems of the truth or falsity of religious consciousness, although they somehow go into the psychology of religion, but do not constitute its own central problem. In other words, the psychology of religion clarifies the psychological characteristics of believers, which separate them from non-believers, and what is manifested in their behavior as a whole.
If we explain the psychology of religion and the subject it studies in this way, we can draw appropriate conclusions about the place of the psychology of religion in the system of psychological sciences and in the system of sciences in general, and, therefore, it becomes clear at what level of research the psychology of religion should be studied.
The psychological characteristics of believers can only be clarified at the level of socio-psychological analysis. General psychology and accompanying and other psychological branch disciplines cannot detect these psychological characteristics of believers, since general psychology abstracts from the meaningful analysis of religious consciousness, as consciousness in general. To understand the characteristics of religious consciousness as a motive for the behavior of believers, we need a meaningful analysis of religious consciousness, i.e. identifying the specifics of religious consciousness and how it relates to reality. The epistemological aspect here is inevitable, and at the same time an analysis of the psychological characteristics of that attitude towards the supernatural, which we designate as belief in the supernatural, is required. It is believed that these two aspects are core in characterizing the particularities of the psychology of believers. This and more is possible only at the level of socio-psychological analysis with the help of social psychology. Therefore, the psychology of religion is a branch of social psychology like ethnographic psychology or other branches of social psychology. Psychology of religion can be considered a branch of religious studies. At the same time, religious studies, or rather its descriptive, comparative-historical section, is an integral part of the psychology of religion. Need in. The religious understanding of social and psychological research is due to the fact that the structure, content, and direction of religious consciousness are closely related to the system of ideas and ideas of a particular religious movement directly.
The issues of the formation and functioning of religious consciousness, its mental prerequisites, the relationship between emotional and rational elements in religious consciousness, their transformation into stereotypes, into centers of spiritual integration of the individual, can only be resolved on the basis of general psychology. The involvement of general psychology is necessary when studying age-related religious psychology. Here it can be argued that the mechanisms of assimilation and consolidation of knowledge and skills are the same, regardless of whether this knowledge is real or not, whether these acquired skills are useful or harmful. But in the formation of an individual in the conditions of a religious environment, some specific processes scurry about. Religious education is built on the primary development and consolidation of an attitude towards an emotional and sensory worldview. Religiosity is built up and subsequently formalized into sanctioned beliefs: childhood fears and other unconscious experiences. General psychology will also have to decide what constitutes a “sense of the reality of the invisible”, “a sense of the divine presence”, unmotivated dates and other similar experiences that feed religiosity; these questions cannot be brushed aside, because the believer’s own experience and experiences are a convincing argument in Believe in its benefits.
In attracting a person to religion, objective reasons are closely intertwined with the subjective qualities of the individual. Social analysis reveals the general patterns of the formation of people’s consciousness and behavior in one direction or another, but it does not explain the reasons why circumstances at the level cause different emotional and volitional reactions in people. Why, among people who live in the same social, cultural and living conditions, some become believers, others become atheists? hear this type of person’s worldview. In its solution, social analysis must come into contact with the analysis of the characteristics of the psychological make-up, the type of nervous system, personal temperament, etc. So, the psychology of religion is very closely related to the psychology of the individual. In the world of the above, the psychology of religion can be explained as a complex scientific discipline that represents an organic unity of principles and methods borrowed from philosophy, sociology, religious studies and psychology, and psychology in the most literal sense. The psychology of religion studies the nature, structure, content, dynamics and functions of religious psychology, i.e. a set of ideas, feelings, moods, habits, traditions, perceived by the mass of believers.
In American psychology of religion, as well as bourgeois empirical science in general, there is a gap, a discrepancy between the level of theoretical generalizations and highly developed experimental practice. This happened under the influence of many reasons. One of them is the contradiction of the tasks set before the bourgeois psychology of religion. On the one hand, the psychology of religion was entrusted with the function of providing a more modern justification for the value of religion in the life of the individual and society. So, the psychology of religion was faced with a task that it could solve only in the spirit of traditional theological speculation, enriching it with psychological theory.
On the other hand, bourgeois society, interested in strengthening religion, demanded certain objective messages about the nature, content, dynamics of religious consciousness. This stimulated the development of empirical research, forced psychology to expand the range of phenomena studied, and improve methods and techniques.
Of course, the gap between the large empirical material that the psychology of religion had and the weakness of its theoretical generalizations is conditional, since the results of specific studies cannot but inform the theory, just as the initial theoretical and methodological premises cannot but explain the representativeness of empirically studied facts .
But, having absolutely recognized the line separating theory from practice in the American psychology of religion, it is possible to identify areas the study of which may turn out to be the most productive for scientific atheism
Based on an analysis of the works of psychologists, the following areas of research into religious consciousness can be identified:
1. The general theory of the psychology of religion includes solutions to the question of the nature, essence of religion, structure, content and functions of religious consciousness. Although American psychologists have established many interesting patterns and components of religious consciousness and they managed to reveal the variety of subjectively significant forms of religion, show the dependence of the religious attitude on the individual-typological and socio-psychological characteristics of the individual, etc., they gave this an incorrect, fideistic in nature interpretation. Therefore, the general theory of American psychology of religion is of interest to us, if I may say so, on the contrary, mainly as an object of criticism.
2 second there is a section on the age-sex psychology of religion, which explores the stages of the formation of religious consciousness in the process of individual growth, features of the structure, content and dynamics of religious ideas, feelings and behavior in various age-sex groups.
American psychological science drew attention to some changes that occur in religious consciousness in the process of ontogenetic development of the individual; they were able to experimentally establish a clear correction between the beliefs of parents and children and, thus, show the importance of family education in the reproduction of religion. The dependence of religiosity on the gender and age characteristics of believers was studied. As studies have shown, children's stereotypes of religious skills consist of a prior understanding of their meaning; children's religiosity is unreflective, authoritarian, imitative, and emotional in nature. In youth and adulthood, religiosity is significantly adjusted by the level of education and the nature of the individual’s social activity. In old age, when intellect and emotions fade, people, according to American psychologists, are not bothered by the subtleties of religious doctrine. Their faith centers mainly on the opinions of God and the afterlife. The cult practice of the elderly takes on the usual stereotypical character.
Interesting observations were made on the behavior of men and women and differences in their religiosity were noted. Women in all denominations show greater religious activity; their religiosity is more intense, they are more comfortable, they experience less doubt, and their beliefs are more conservative. All this is emphasized by a large amount of empirical material and statistics. Apparently not all conclusions of American psychologists are absolute. In our country, perhaps the picture will be different. But a lot of empirical material and statistical data can be critically used when atheists develop a materialist understanding of this issue.
3. The main attention is paid to pathology, peculiarities of the believer’s consciousness, behavior, as well as the connections of religiosity with other supporters of human life activity. Of course, the pathology of the believer is not. It is different in the West and in our country. However, some processes that are currently occurring in the minds of believers have common features.
First of all, it is necessary to note the progressive withering away of mass religious consciousness. By chance, in recent studies, such a characteristic as the level of scientific thinking was introduced into the concept of the criterion of religiosity. This indicates that religious consciousness is influenced and deformed in its own way due to the spread of scientific knowledge. Psychologists and sociologists note a growing gap between the external manifestations of religiosity and its internal assimilation, that is, the correspondence of the subjective world of the believer to the institutional norms of the one being studied. The center of gravity in religion is increasingly mixed into the spheres of subjective psychology and moral experiences of the individual, with a corresponding decrease in interest in dogmatics. The balance of functions performed by religious organizations is also changing. Participation in the activities of these organizations acquires a more communicative and regulatory meaning for the believer, with a slight decrease in the meaning of the cult. The commonality of changes in this regard in our country and in other countries. The West testifies that it reflects a natural process of progressive secularization of social consciousness, characteristic of the entire modern world.
4The fourth section is “Psychology of pathological religious consciousness.” It includes studies of the psychology of religious mystics, ascetics, saints, dogmatists and other psychopathological forms of religious consciousness. These questions attract the attention of American psychologists. They collected a large amount of biographical material, carried out medical observations, experimental data, etc. This material is interpreted differently by different authors. The level of development of modern psychology and psychiatry allows us to comprehend the issues of religious psychopathology at a qualitatively new level. In solving this problem from a materialistic point of view, the material collected by American psychologists can become invaluable to employers.
5. And finally, the fifth section is applied psychology of religion. This includes the issue of religious upbringing and education, the psychology of cults, religious psychotherapy and pastoral psychology. In the development of data on problems, the connection between psychologists and theologians was revealed. In fact, this section can be called practical theology, since it is designed to equip clergy with effective, psychological means of consolidating and spreading religious consciousness.
Vileyanur Ramachandran
At this stage, psychologists have finished reasoning. They realized that they could look because methods of recording brain activity had become available, and they began to look for where religion fits into the brain. Of course, there is no “god spot” there. Religion is a very complex construct. But there is temporal lobe epilepsy, which more or less concentrated hyper-religiosity. Vileyanur Ramachandran is a very famous scientist, he is now working on mirror neurons and generally believes that they gave birth to our civilization. But he studied temporal lobe epilepsy too. I studied it in simple ways, namely GSR - this is the galvanic skin response of the sweat glands to irritation by a stimulus (a clothespin is placed on the finger). He had a group of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy and healthy people, to whom he showed words that were neutrally charged (for example, poker), sexually charged (for example, orgasm) and religiously charged (for example, god). For the norm, everything is quite primitive: we do not react to normal words, we react more or less to religious words, and we respond well to sex. Patients with epilepsy unexpectedly have the strongest reaction to religious words. This experiment was the first to prove that temporal lobe epileptics are characterized by hyperreligiosity.
Michael Persinger
Then came Michael Persinger, who came up with the “helmet of God,” with magnets built into the temple areas. By turning on this amazing device, Persinger affected people's temporal lobes. Now we'll see what happens to a person when he puts this thing on - this is the editor of Skeptic Magazine and one of the world's leading atheists. Shermer felt a presence; he left his body. Thus, we can say with great confidence that the temporal lobes are to some extent responsible for hyper-religious feelings.
Psychology of radicalism: Strangers among our own
Behind extremists and terrorists there are, first of all, specific people and personalities. What are they? What motivates them? How do they end up in the ranks of destructive organizations? And what is the correct upbringing to give a child so that fate protects him from radical religious movements? We addressed these questions to the psychologist of the Republican Information and Explanatory Group of the Ministry of Social Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan, member of the Association of Psychologists and Psychotherapists of the Republic of Kazakhstan Lola Shakimova.
– Is there a psychological portrait of religious extremists?
– The word “extremist” came to us from the Latin language, where it means “extreme,” that is, any radical behavior or worldview. Such a person is distinguished by a hostile perception of the world around him and the people around him. She divides everyone around her into “us” and “strangers”. The extremist classifies those who share his beliefs and position as “his own”; everyone else ends up in the group of “strangers”. In relation to the latter, he develops his own special, specific attitude. He treats them with contempt, shows open disgust and disrespect, and does not mince words. The extremist expects and demands the same attitude towards “strangers” from “his own” and the people around him.
– Most of those convicted of extremism and terrorism were married. Why did the family (as a factor of personal responsibility - work, care, and so on) not help people grow up and become responsible not only to the family, but also to society?
“Unfortunately, when individuals find themselves in a destructive religious group, the first thing recruiters do is turn the adherent away from the family, claiming that the family does not understand him. And he is chosen and special, so he needs to move away from the family. They suggest that he has a completely new family of people chosen just like him. The new family will always accept him for who he is. Will provide him with moral, psychological and even material support. We all know that the family is an important institution for the socialization of personality formation, and the main task of recruiters is aimed at separating the adept from the family. The adept has a new family, on whose opinion he completely relies.
– Does a person have any psychological predisposition to engage in extremist activities? Why do some people easily become radicals, while others don’t see the point in it?
– It all depends on the person, on the level of his suggestibility, that is, suggestibility. How susceptible a person is to influence from the social environment. How developed is his critical thinking? Psychological tolerance to negative influence factors. It also depends on the psycho-emotional state of the person. When a person is troubled by psychological problems, his psychological immunity weakens. He becomes vulnerable, which allows the missionaries to psychologically process him.
– There is a witty joke among sectologists: “Every person has his own guru, the main thing is not to meet him in life.” How relevant is it?
– Of course, it is relevant: every person has his own secret places in the subconscious. Some are fascinated by esotericism and “secret knowledge,” others by conspiracy theories and conspiracies. It happens that such individuals already meet like-minded people in real life. In the best case, two loneliness will meet, in the worst case, you can meet a trained recruiter who knows exactly how to approach a person. Moreover, the psychological soil has been prepared.
If we talk about “gurus”, that is, missionaries, then they are well trained. They are aware of the knowledge of personality psychology, easily start and maintain a conversation and, most importantly, have the skills to psychologically influence the personality of any person. Missionaries scan a potential victim, and when they note that she has an unstable psychological state, they begin to use techniques to influence the consciousness and behavior of the individual. Starting from bombardment with love, ending with methods of substituting concepts of religious beliefs.
Due to religious illiteracy, such people are trapped by missionaries.
– They often talk about religious fanatics. Is there a difference between religious extremists and fanatics?
– Fanaticism is a tunnel of a person’s thinking and behavior, when he becomes fixated on some belief or views, thanks to which he begins to develop his own life principles and behavioral stereotypes. In this he sees the essence of his purpose in the social environment. Sometimes fanaticism can push a person to carry out tragic events. Experienced missionaries can train an adept with extremist views, redirecting him in the direction of fanaticism. Bring him to those behavioral stereotypes that are necessary for missionaries of destructive religious groups.
– One of the troubles of adults is the peculiarities of their upbringing in childhood. This probably applies to everything, both work and personal life. What should proper religious education in the family be like? What would you draw the attention of parents to so that their children do not become extremists in the future?
– Much attention is paid to religious education in our state. Religious studies is taught in schools, where students are given knowledge about religion within the framework of a secular state, and a great deal of preventive work is carried out. The Departments of Social Development in all regional centers of the Republic of Kazakhstan operate a helpline where anyone can consult with experienced specialists on certain religious issues.
Parents should emphasize to their children that we live in a secular state. A secular state is an interfaith agreement of all world religions. Any believer must first of all be aware of his civic position, his belonging to Kazakhstan, his national identity, and pride in his country. He must raise children in the spirit of love for their homeland, respect for loved ones and people around them.
Since 2013, the country has had a hotline 114
, where you can go for questions of religion. Lawyers, theologians, and psychologists advise those who apply around the clock, and also provide psychological assistance to victims of destructive religious activities. The phone is free of charge. You can also call from your mobile number
8 (777) 0000-114.
Cognitive psychology of religion
We have reached the cognitive psychology of religion - the most modern direction in its research. Cognitive psychologists decided that at some evolutionary stage, religious thinking for some reason turned out to be the most beneficial for cognition. Here the eternal debate about science and religion comes to a strange point, because at some stage religion was needed for knowledge, they made this postulate the main one: “Religious thinking is perhaps the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems” (Stuart Garty) . A lot of modern research is aimed at understanding how the image of a deity is fixed in the mind, how it works. A principle was derived that is called the principle of fixing a minimum of counterintuitive ideas. The meaning is very simple: we remember what, on the one hand, is intuitive and understandable to us at the everyday level, but, on the other hand, goes beyond the scope of our everyday life. That is, a memorable character must be, on the one hand, ordinary, and on the other hand, very unusual. This raises a question called the Mickey Mouse problem: why is Mickey Mouse not a god? Because this is quite an everyday thing - a mouse in pants, but one that talks. Everyone puzzled over this until the properties of the supernatural agent were experimentally deduced. The supernatural agent is not James Bond, but precisely our deity. It must be incomprehensible at the everyday level, it must have strategic information, that is, know everything about everyone, it must be able to act and motivate the people themselves to act (these are rites, rituals, etc.). Then another question arises: where did the old gods go? They were suitable for this agent position, but disappeared somewhere. Where did Zeus go? The fact is that there is one very important point - the moment of context. Some gods fall out of it. Zeus is no longer in our context and we now look at him as history. Maybe someday our confessions will also fall out of context, but something will replace them.
Continuing to study how a higher deity is perceived, cognitive psychologists decided to look at at what age this happens and how it happens: when a child begins to be dependent on something incorporeal. An experiment was constructed in which the researcher asked children to throw a ball with Velcro, but over their back. Naturally, the children did not succeed. They were left alone in the room, they had to throw this ball, but they didn’t do it well, and they started cheating. But one day the situation changed: they put a chair in this room and put the invisible princess Alice on it. The empty chair turned out to be very important. The funniest thing is that the children were asked: “Do you believe that Princess Alice is sitting here?” They're like, "No!" - and then they stopped cheating. This study shows at what age some dependence on a disembodied observing entity is formed.
Bibliography
"The Future of an Illusion", Sigmund Freud
"Psychoanalysis and Religion" by Erich Fromm
"Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis", Erich Fromm
Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, Raymond F. Paloutzian, Crystal L. Park
"Brain Phantoms" by Vileyanur Ramachandran
Object and subject of the psychology of religion.
⇐ PreviousPage 2 of 3Next ⇒The psychology of religion studies the psychological patterns of the emergence, development and functioning of religious phenomena of individual, group and social psychology (needs, feelings, moods, traditions, etc.), the content, structure, direction of these phenomena, their place and role in the religious complex and influence on non-religious spheres of life of an individual, groups, society.
The psychological theory of religion is formed by: 1) the doctrine of the psychological foundations of religion; 2) a set of provisions that reveal the specifics of religious and psychological phenomena (properties, processes, states) inherent in the individual and the group; 3) revealing the diversity of religious and psychological experience; 4) analysis of the psychological aspects of religious activity and relationships—cult, religious preaching, training, education, communication of believers, etc.; 5) methods of psychological research of religiosity.
Since its inception
The psychology of religion defines the subject of its research as
the inner world
of man, his experiences, his thoughts and feelings.
One of the first introspective approaches
to the Psychology of Religion was proposed by the outstanding American philosopher William
James
.
More recent
research has been forced to recognize
the importance of intersubjective factors
for the study of the psychology of religion.
Such factors necessarily include, first of all, religious doctrine and the system of religious socialization.
Subject
psychology of religion is
the study of the psychological aspects and patterns of religious phenomena.
This necessarily includes both intersubjective and subjective factors.
Subjective
side: The inner world of the believer, experiences, thoughts, feelings, religious experience.
Intersubjective
side: Creed, system of religious socialization, religious organizations, cult and its material attributes, religious behavior, nature of life of religious individuals, communities, hierarchies, leaders, etc.
Methods of psychology of religion.
Research methods - groups (mainly borrowed from physical sciences, natural sciences and sociology) - are decided by the researcher:
1) collection of empirical data. m-la: from f-i - introspection (self-observation) - unverifiable, limited reproducibility, does not take into account anything except consciousness;
2) monitoring the rela. behavior (individuals, groups) – f-I and eat-scientific: complete or incomplete.
3) Experiment (experiments with LSD Stanislav Grof).
4) Study of personal documents – incl. images, etc.
5) Study wedge. cases (history): psychoanalysis and in fr. psychology (Freud, Jung, Fromm, Charcot clinic, etc.).
6) From social media - questionnaires, interviews and surveys - more or less objective, highly informative, possibly mathematical. processing. Sterbak and Lubak - Amer. – the first.
There are more complex methods. Methods for greater objectivity are always used in combination.
4. “Biological” approaches in the psychology of religion.
Theodore Flournoy
(Swiss)
ancestor
biologist.
approach in ps. rel. This meant a number of studies
that appeared
at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries.
, and mentioned, first of all,
American
authors -
Leuba, Starback, Pratt, W. James
.
This trend was opposed to the previous,
exclusively
descriptive psychology of religion
, as representatives of which Flournoy named Vorbrodt, Koch, Sabatier, Runze and others
.
2 principles: 1) The principle
of excluding the transcendental (outside the competence of the psychologist).
2) principle
biologist.
interpretations :
1. psychological approach: organic study of the conditions of rel.
phenomena (weight, height, gender, race) 2. genet. and evol. approaches to research internal.
and ext. rel.
phenomenon (i.e.
considered in the process of formation).
3. comparative approach: d.b.
individual taken into account
differences 4 .
dynam. approach: rel.zh. – a living, changing process. Psychology considers and studies religion as a vital function.
The main thing is to determine its forms, role, conditions of development, varieties and changes.
It is necessary to identify patterns in order to bring psychology closer to natural scientific knowledge.
Rudolf Otto
(1869–1937) believed that
religion is “the experience of the sacred”, its subject
is
the numinous
,
the power emanating from the Divine.
On the one hand, it is mysterium tremendum (Latin - secret frightening), On the other hand, the holy, numinous appears as mysterium fascinans (Latin - secret blinding, captivating, admiring).
The sacred appears in his understanding as an a priori, autonomous category of consciousness; it is the core of religion and constitutes it as a special, autonomous sphere of life. It is based on the “sense of divinity” innate in man.
The sacred divine (numinous) is
an objective reality for Otto.
Otto seeks to emphasize
the irrational aspect of religious experience
, rooted
in human nature itself
, and analyzes the content of the irrational in religion. The deepest essence of religion is a great mystery.
French sociologist and philosopher Emile Durkheim
(1858–1917) took the position
of positivism
ethnographic
data as a factual basis .
He was guided by the principle of sociology
, according to which society is a special reality, including “social facts
.
The idea of the supernatural, of God, is inherent only in some religions, and even more so it is alien to primitive peoples.
This idea appears only at a certain stage of development
, and therefore
is not applicable for a general definition of religion.
He distinguished between
"sacred" and "profane"
areas.
The sacred is produced by society and is endowed with special moral authority and power.
are attributed to him
: forbiddenness, separation
from everything else and
the ability to be an object of love and respect;
it is
a source of coercion, prohibition
and
at the same time an object of worship.
The sphere of the
“profane”
is formed by
everyday life
.
Religion
is
a special form of expression of social
forces that stand above individuals and subjugate them to themselves.
Religion provides an understanding of social reality in mythological form
and tries to translate social relations into understandable language.
E. Durkheim considers
the socio-psychological process of communication
to be the source of religion For its part,
religion
performs a number
of functions
, the main of which are
the creation and strengthening of social solidarity.
Based on
an analysis of the Australian totemic system,
E. Durkheim concluded that
the religious and the social are identical.
"Sacred" things are
symbols of social unity.
Among the Australian natives, the totem serves as a symbol of the clan
.
And
modern society
is religious, even if integration finds expression in national and political symbols.
Based on collective psychology
religion was interpreted by the French positivist philosopher, sociologist and psychologist L.
Lévy-Bruhl
(1857–1939).
He believed that different forms of thinking correspond to different socio-historical types of society.
Primitive thinking is
mystical
and at the same time
prelogical
, insensitive to contradictions and impenetrable to experience.
It is subject to the law of participation.
Participation consists in the fact that thinking everywhere sees various forms of transfer of properties through transfer, contact, transmission over a distance through infection, desecration, mastery.
The prelogical and the logical,
the irrational and the rational, the law of contradiction and the law of participation
coexist
.
But if the prelogical predominates in primitive society
,
then the sector of logical thinking subsequently
expands
.
Along
with custom and language,
L. Lévy-Bruhl
also included beliefs
.
Collective ideas serve as the “foundation” of religious institutions
(and not only them) due to the following properties: they are imperative in nature, transmitted from generation to generation, imposed on individuals, awakening in them feelings of respect, fear, worship in relation to their objects, not depend in their existence on an individual;
they are not the product of intellectual processing. In civilized societies, thinking is capable of analyzing the object of faith rationally and logically, but it is also given in collective ideas:
in modern prayer in a state of ecstasy, a fusion of subject and object occurs.
L. Lévy-Bruhl makes the following prediction: logical thinking can never become the universal heir of pre-logical thinking.
5. Phenomena of religious consciousness in the light of the theory of neurosis by P. Janet. Description and psychological interpretation of the obsession of “demon possession.”
Jean Martin Charcot (1825–1930), exploring mysticism, defined demonic obsessions as a product of hysteria, and considered healing by faith to be self-hypnosis. Similar views were expressed by Pierre Janet (1859–1947), a student of Charcot, the founder of the psychology of mode of action, who studied psychopathology. In his book “Neuroses and Fixed Ideas” (dedicated to relational phenomena), he developed a psychological concept of neuroses, according to which they arise due to functional disorders of the higher functions of the psyche and a loss of balance between higher and lower mental functions. There he also gives a detailed medical analysis of a case of “demon possession,” which he classified as a neurosis and was cured with the help of hypnosis. Observing his patients falling into a mystical state, for example, religious ecstasy, during which the patient was in a crucified position, or possession by evil forces, levitation, the appearance of stigmata: Janet called this state psychasthenia.”
⇐ Previous2Next ⇒
