The Error of Religious Faith
A Hallmark Sign of Weakness and Degeneration
The Dangerous Folly of Faith
One of the main missions of The Human Animal is to encourage free thinking unfettered by any one of the constructed “truths” running amok in our world today. I hold a staunch conviction that even the deepest, most time-honored beliefs deserve doses of scrutiny. In fact, it is perhaps these deepest and oldest axioms that most urgently demand examination. Thus, I have a clear distaste for the so-called “virtue” of faith. I agree with several atheistic intellectuals including those incorporating the New Atheist Movement, where I view faith as an overall negative force in the world. Historically speaking, there is a mountain of evidence supporting this claim. One need only take a cursory glance at the events of the last five centuries to unearth a magnitude of horrific tragedies predicated upon religious grounds. An endless list of wars, terrorist attacks, torture, murder, ostracism, and exile have all been carried out in the name of religion. Even the most absurd and anachronistic practices in science, technology, and medicine persevered long past their utility based on misapplied reverence reinforced by faith despite the emergence of significant contradictions. If one considers the impact of faithful devotion solely according to these examples, wiping out the human propensity for faith would seem to be the obvious solution.
Faith Cannot be Abolished
Unfortunately, an empirical examination of the psychology of faith suggests that the mere abolition of religious faith is unrealistic, because it fails to address the root of the psychological processes and tendencies that lead to it. The heart of the error committed by these misguided optimists is the assumption that faith itself makes people irrational, and not vice versa. Thus, they tend to believe that people can be “liberated” from their theistic chains through education and conditioning. They believe that once accomplished, the human species with become more rational, benevolent, and productive.
However, psychological conditions preclude such a simple solution. It is much more likely that a huge swath of the human population, possibly even the majority, are actually faith-oriented – and therefore prone to irrational thinking – by their very nature. Propensities toward credulous faith are not solely the result of religious indoctrination and conditioning, although this is one primary contributor to the ubiquity of faith-based mental models around the globe. Rather, it is a biological characteristic rooted in the human psyche. Humans have a fairly low tolerance for uncertainty, especially concerning dire subjects like the inevitability of suffering and death. As it turns out, when humans cannot find explanations and solutions for urgent, anxiety-producing matters, they invent them.
Humanity possesses a unique capacity for suffering and anxiety. Thanks to our ability to understand our mortality, death stalks our consciousnesses like an assassin. Our acute sense of helplessness and vulnerability in both present and future times, along with regretful memories, fuel the fear, guilt, and anxiety that regularly torments us. Such a degree of awareness can very well cripple an individual. In his novella, “Notes From the Underground”, Russian Novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s narrator states that, “to be too conscious is an illness - a real, thorough-going illness”. Indeed, humanity has an intense capacity for psychological torment, made deadly by the fact we are also the only species capable of succumbing to suicide.
How has humanity remedied this illness? In response to the crushing psychological weight produced by this awareness, our species has employed illusory belief systems as a powerful defense mechanism. Not only that, but religions provide “answers” to problems like the meaning of life and true values. They get rid of the hard work and self-doubt that comes with individual thinking, and present its own precepts as dogma already accepted by an established membership. Our inclinations toward them are remarkably persistent. The emergence of widespread devotions to secular ideologies such as socialism and libertarianism corresponding with the decline of religious faith in the United States is evidence of the compulsive need for many individuals to incorporate an extrinsic, prescriptive belief system and moral code which is accepted by other members of the community into their own identity. Through these systems, purpose is found, meaning is identified, and many of the most puzzling philosophical questions are either answered or dismissed as insignificant. Dogmas are established, and when contradictions are found or precepts refuted, they typically not dropped, but rather remolded to fit the new reality.
After all, it is not truth it is after. In fact, the very goal of religion is to conceal it. Thus, it pursues unfalsifiability, and calls it “truth” (This renders it diametrically opposed to science). Even as much of humanity decouples itself from the old theistic superstitions reminiscent of our pre-modern past, it continues to grasp for any “sacred roots” that could keep it from falling into a nihilistic abyss.
The Psychology of the Faithful
The German Philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche once stated, “Those who cannot obey themselves shall be commanded.” So it is that so many individuals willingly submit to pre-packaged religions and ideologies. Many individuals fail to break free of the social constraints that bound them as children. Others successfully free themselves from these fetters, only to collapse in the face of the daunting task of personally forging their unique values and convictions. In both cases, there is an element of defeat. In both cases, their only choice is to forsake their own individuality and assimilate into some tribal hive mind. This act is simultaneously a transgression and punishment against the self. It is the voluntary commitment of the soul –the “philosophical suicide”, of which French philosopher Albert Camus once wrote. Yet these wards and inmates view their prison, their madhouse, as a refuge –they worship their chains. Because even though they have fundamentally crippled their freedom of thought and enslaved themselves to the designs of another, they do not mourn the loss of their freedom. This is because, to them, freedom is condemnation. It is to be hopelessly disoriented in an endless limbo, without reason, cause, or understanding. Without firm confidence in their own being and a lack of critical capacity to navigate the frontiers, they hardly set one foot past their bars before rushing back into their cells.
Too many people abandon their faith only to replace it with faith in nothing. The result is a fundamentally destructive streak of hedonistic nihilism, which, if it does undo its adherents, sends them rushing back into the cavernous bastille of faith more fervently than ever. In fact, in these cases, they not only re-incarcerate themselves but volunteer to be guards themselves. They become institutionalized, zealous believers in the “sanctuaries” that they diligently serve. This can be observed in supposedly “born again” evangelical circles in Christian America, where countless holy fools have been “saved” from vices such as drug addiction and suicidal tendencies. This demonstrates the point that, without a shepherd to guide them, these poor sheep wander aimlessly to their dooms. No doubt then, they view their confines as paradise compared to the horrors beyond them.
The Unwillingly Chained
This is not to say that every disciple of some religion or ideology is a hopelessly obsequious lemming. Environmental influence plays a crucial role in instilling ideological dogma throughout the populace. Social indoctrination practically begins at birth while the child is laying down the most basic foundations of their schemas, or mental structure of knowledge. As a result, the ideological axioms and religious dogma of any child’s environment become firmly rooted in the central spaces of their psyche, becoming the “truth” by which, all other constructed knowledge must then be built around. The intensity of this is heavily determined by the predominance of such ideologies in their environment, which explains why places like the Bible Belt in the American South are so religious despite the intellectual capital of its population. This is why it can be so difficult for even the most exceptional people to remain captivated by illusions. For those so heavily indoctrinated, freeing themselves means stripping away the very cornerstone of their worldview and reconstructing it from scratch, as if squarely confronting the hard truths of life alone wasn't hard enough. It is, no doubt, an arduous task, and one not everyone is cut out for it.
The Social Function of Faith: Social Control
Herein lays the “function” of faith. It would be hard to imagine that such a ubiquitous phenomenon with its grip on the human will could persist across cultures and throughout ages without developing into a social control mechanism. History has shown that it certainly has.
The function of faith in human society can fundamentally be described as the sublation of the individual will to the interests of the collective whole. Humans are pro-social animals and capable of developing complex societies in a chiefly organic fashion. However, this is only possible when the vast multitudes of people have assimilated themselves into the values and goals of the greater collective. It is hard to believe that any organized society could maintain itself when a species generally incapable of comprehending the importance of social cohesion on purely rational grounds was not checked by another safeguard. Faith, in its proper form, acts as a social adhesive in reason’s stead.
The role of clerics, and to a lesser extent secular thinkers, is to shepherd the masses of the faith-oriented so that they function properly in society. Without these guides, the happily beguiled —if they do not degenerate into nihilistic savages or self-destruct — will erect some crude idol in their stead because they are thoroughly conditioned to be followers and yearn for guidance.
In our world, too many people are too inured to abandon the rabbit hole of faith, and many more are likely too ill-equipped to survive the journey out. Therefore, to ensure that their beliefs and convictions remain in harmony with social necessities, it is crucial for the free-thinking minority to carefully shepherd the kneeling herds that make up the great mass of humanity. This means the promotion of religious moderation, which, as neurologist and New Atheist thinker Sam Harris stated in his book, The End of Faith, is made up of a combination of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. A steady flow of secular/ scientific knowledge, coupled with a focus on the extrinsic benefits of religious membership, rather than serious commitments to its precepts, would retain the psychological and social benefits of faith while defusing motives for extremism.
Harris himself would disagree with this prescription, as he notes that religious moderates often work to provide cover for fanatics. His proposed solution is nothing less than the total negation of faith itself. Yet this hardly seems feasible, not in the least due to the aforementioned fact that people will turn even secular political positions into full-fledged quasi-religions, i.e. the Q-Anon conspiracy cult. The spectre of faith in both religious and secular dogmas appears inexorable; thus, the harnessing and tempering of the power of faith seems to be, by far, the most practical course of action.
Liberated individuals with the strength of character to live life, “in the raw” may pity them and think — wrongly — that we should “free” them. They should think again. The path of ideological liberation is one that one must ultimately walk alone. Attempting to force the undertaking would be akin to releasing a domestic pet into the wild. They do not have the skills for a wild and free life; many were not even bred for it. Instead, the enlightened few should make a point to simply try to maintain a positive interpretation faith that promotes docility, productivity, and a blissful sense of contentment among the masses. In this way, they are both protected from themselves and motivated to better their surroundings. There may come a day where humanity reaches a tipping point in the tides of faith, where the multitudes gently abandon their comforting illusions the way a child outgrows their teddy bear. Until then, however, the more enlightened of our kind should pursue whatever interests suit them, unimpeded by religiously motivated missteps, recklessness and destruction.