Radix Fidem Blog

Having a powerful spiritual awareness does not automatically redeem the fallen intellect.
I belong to a couple of religious discussion forums. Yes, it’s worth it. Sometimes. Most of the time it’s pretty harmless, not very helpful. Too often it’s repulsive idiocy. I’m including myself in that, because surely feelings are mutual. This is not a matter of who’s right or wrong; I’m trying to explain why there is so much debate among Christians.
Never mind theology. This is purely clinical psychology of religion, from one who walks inside and is fully aware of what outsiders see. The most important fact: We are utterly certain this stuff really matters. Never mind whether you think it does; our religious belief grips us more strongly than mere superstition and sentiment. If you don’t grasp that, there’s no point in reading any farther, pretending you’re going to understand. The content is not what’s at issue, but the power it holds over us.
You will not see me discounting the power of religious belief for any other religion, primarily because I’ve experienced it with my own. Yes, I could share with you the flaws I see in every system I don’t already accept, but I see flaws in my own in-groups, too. And if you’ve read here much, you know I can see my own face of folly in the mirror, as well. I don’t take myself that seriously.
Far too many Christians do take themselves too seriously. But that’s only one problem. Even most of my fellow born-again believers suffer from a blindness to their own cultural mythology. I’ve pounded that pulpit here often enough, but I’m offering a clinical explanation why sectarian division is utterly natural. I’m assuming you understand religion is ubiquitous in humans, in part because everyone has the ability to seize upon something which seems to help them face the world, such that even rejecting all religion is itself a matter of faith — a commitment to things for which there is no obvious concrete proof. (Logic alone is not proof in that sense.) This is part of the clinical lore, a necessity for understanding humans at large.
Getting as close as I can to clinical terms, whatever takes place in the spirit of a person is separate from the intellect. The whole point of religious community is bridging that gap. Nor does religious experience remove character and personality. It will most certainly reverse some bad traits, because those traits were good ones turned inside out. I’ll leave it up to you to discern which way is which, but most of us know what we like about how some folks treat us, and what we don’t like about other treatment. A religious conversion does not sweep all that away. On purely psychological grounds, even the most dramatic conversions only cover a certain amount of the soul. A solid biblical example would be Saul of Tarsus (AKA, Apostle Paul). He surrendered fully to his new understanding of God, but spent no less than three years exerting full effort to reconsidering everything he had learned in light of this change. He had to rewrite his entire PhD education.
Over the centuries since that day, a certain amount of mythology Saul discarded crept back into those whom he tried to teach this new religion. In relative terms to outsiders, the whole debate was some pretty narrow hair-splitting differences between Judaism and Christianity, if all you see is trappings of religion. The real difference is not readily apparent, largely because it works in places where human language doesn’t. Any genuine transforming experience of any religion tends to exceed the capacity for verbal explanation. Heck, even falling in love does that. So most of the religions of the world recognize the importance of parabolic and symbolic language. The real difference is not in the symbols, but in what they come to mean at that non-verbal level. What Paul was fighting, clinically, was dragging people back into a form of religious expression which interfered with genuine progress.
On human terms, he lost that battle to a large degree. The majority of Christians today suffer from some measure of hypocrisy on the same terms Jesus meant it in reference to the Jewish religious leaders — claiming to be the sole representatives of God while fighting His plainly stated purposes. While Paul’s former work as enforcer was no longer an option to those he abandoned, his former team mates found even more effective ways of recapturing those who fled the reservation. If someone was going to claim the name of their God, it was necessary to force them to use it properly, so Gentiles who claimed Christ had to become Jews, because it was not possible to make them stop using the Jewish God’s name. They sent out some very talented and charismatic preachers, against Paul’s notorious lack of such talent, highly schooled in rhetoric and verbal manipulation. But in some sense, they succeeded only partially.
That is, what they managed to shoehorn back into the churches was not so much of Jewish religious assertions, but the same epistemological corruption which caused them to leave behind their own ancient Hebrew roots. Rather than repeat all that means here, let’s just notice the clinical effects. That same disputatious nature of doing religion took over the churches. Whatever normal human variabilities those new Christians carried into their new religious was magnified by the additional religious belief intellectual details mattered. Read the New Testament narratives from the viewpoint of a scholar of Antiquities, and you can see what Paul and his fellow Apostles asserted was a very narrow selection of orthodoxies compared to the stuffy Scholasticism just a few centuries later. Further, the original New Testament teachings were intentionally imprecise and largely parabolic, versus the heavy duty systematic theology of later times.
Lest it sound like I’m trying to justify my own brand of Christianity against all others, I ask you to notice this one thing: When any religion relies too much on intellectual processes, you get more and deeper controversies over what constitutes orthodoxy. The question is spirit versus intellect, a distinction clearly visible in clinical psychology. To the degree questions are cerebral, they must of necessity give rise to conflict as the natural expression of human variability. If you are one of those Utopians who insist humanity can be made uniform by careful management, such a religious assertion is part of that problem. No two of us could possibly think alike; not even monozygotic twins do that. It’s not religion itself which puts men at war, but human nature using religion as an excuse.
When you see religious infighting and sectarian divisions, that’s just human nature at it’s finest. It really is no reflection on the religion itself. Whatever justification any Christian uses for following one sectarian path or another, even when they claim it’s “the original” path, it’s not the result of spiritual experience. All of that comes too easily when there is no spiritual experience at all. Thus, I am hardly surprised when someone, who may well have experienced the same spiritual transformation, clings to some of the most alien ideas I’ve ever seen. Having to face that sort of tiresome crotchety pontification is, unfortunately, par for the course. Frankly, it’s bad religion to expect otherwise.
For much the same reason we do it in secular things, I have to wade through a lot of sewage to find nuggets of gold in religious discourse and discussion.