CATALYST: Religion and religious faith in the
light of the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is when you prevent yourself seeing that your belief is
false or probably untrue. It does not matter if it is true - your attitude to it
is the problem.
Cognitive dissonance is a bad enough problem in the world without religion
giving you an extra reason to engage in it as if there is not enough. Not only
that but religion, particularly Christianity, is the best friend cognitive
dissonance ever had.
You can meet Christians who seem to be open to the truth. You prove to them that
their religion is in error or is man-made. They study the case against it and
though it is airtight they still follow the faith. How can somebody maintain
faith after knowing that it is absurd?
If atheism is true and convincing then how do we explain intelligent thinkers
being Christians?
Psychologists say the Christian might be a hypocrite. He might not really care
about the truth and is in the habit of acting as if he believes absurdities when
he in fact does not. He may be just telling himself he believes but that does
not mean he really believes. The Christian might be exercising cognitive
dissonance where part of him knows his faith is misplaced and the other part
believes. What he is doing is just ignoring his own knowledge of the truth. Or
he might be a hypocrite and also engaging in cognitive dissonance.
If it is true that you need faith in God and religion to find your life has
purpose and this is what ultimately and fundamentally matters, then it is to be
expected that cognitive dissonance will reach its full illogical or evil
potential in the context of God and religion. You would end up wanting to kill
anybody who can debunk your faith successfully because you fear the truth and
you fear the servants of the truth. Some Christians say the Bible God was so
severe against other religions and strict with the one he started for that very
reason. But it still means that they fall under suspicion of cognitive
dissonance themselves.
You may tell yourself that what you feel it is true and that is a sign from God
that it is true no matter what evidences or proofs say. You may tell yourself
that your belief cannot be refuted. This indicates an attitude where you
formulate your belief in such a way that nothing can refute it. For example, eg
when magic or prayer fails you argue that it is working but not in the way you
expect. The result is that you fail to let evidence against your belief talk to
you. It does not sink it. You will end up ignoring such evidence or avoiding it
and only looking for evidence that suits you.
It is certainly true that religion encourages and sets the stage for cognitive
dissonance. But it doesn't follow that any religion thrives totally or mostly on
it. Psychologists usually decide that if members of a mad religion cannot be
reasoned with and seem sincere that they are suffering from cognitive
dissonance. Nobody knows for sure if they are just stubborn and bigoted actors.
And we do know that it is easy enough to act religious out of habit.
Anyway that aside, let us assume that religious people have cognitive
dissonance. The sillier or the more evil their religion is, perhaps the stronger
the dissonance is. You will notice that Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons despite
their religions opposing modern science and modern culture and being generally
difficult deliver a vastly stronger commitment. The sillier and the more out of
touch and arrogant the religion is, the better it is at creating addicts to
escapism. The more it attracts people who want to be escapists. It is obvious
that Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons have a cheek in declaring modern science to
be wrong when they have no relevant scientific education. The arrogance can be
an attraction too. Cognitive dissonance and arrogance both pretend to know what
is in fact not known for sure at all.
Belief in a God that you must please can only encourage and worsen cognitive
dissonance. There is enough to develop dissonance over without that. Also, God
is claimed to be a major and basic belief, far more important than you becoming
a parent or anything like that.
Elliott Aronson says that cognitive dissonance is the
strongest when you feel your concept of yourself as a good person is being
challenged. So if you believe you are a good productive person and you hurt
somebody else you will try to dehumanise them in some way. They don’t deserve
good treatment so you are still a good fair person if you hurt them. This is a
dangerous thing for you are using the idea of deserving which goes with the idea
of being a person to make them not much better than rodents. You are well aware
that you cannot really guarantee getting the consequences you want. Outside
factors let that happen which means God cooperates with you. So your revenge
when it works is not all down to you. Believers in God are saying, perhaps
without realising it, that what they do is more God's responsibility than
theirs. It sanctifies evil. Also, if God is important to you that will trigger
dissonance when you do something to offend him.
Faith is really about acting on God's behalf - you don't just believe, you
believe and exercise belief in action. Faith means that belief and action are
unified. What you do speaks of belief. If you do good, the dissonance gets worse
for you are telling yourself that you are bad if you start to doubt or question
the beliefs.
Religion says that faith is a gift from God and God can put feelings in you and
ideas in your head but only if you consent. This way, your spontaneous religious
feelings and faith seem to have arisen because you have chosen them and
co-operated with God. This is a trick that makes you imagine you believe and
follow religion freely when in actual fact you are not free because you have
been conditioned and because people have reduced your connection to reality and
reduced your power to perceive reality accurately. Those who entice you into
cognitive dissonance will tell you that you are letting yourself look through
the lens that God gives. This is gaslighting - it is trying to stop you
perceiving that the faith is wrong if it is indeed wrong.
Religion, particularly very mystical and magical religion, is training in
cognitive dissonance and thus a force for evil. When religion is good it
facilitates subtle forms of evil and injustice and mental illness so it is never
really good. The results may take decades to come to a climax but they will.
Dissonance is at work in parents who take their baby to church as it has been
found guilty of original sin and thus needs forgiveness from God in baptism.
Their emotions are not right. They should rage against such an accusation. Faith
does not justify accusing the innocent. Where is the proof? Does anybody care?
Thousands of other examples could be thought of.
No wonder hellfire and brimstone preachers act as if everybody else will go to
Hell but them. Jesus gave out about proud hypocrites. Imagine how much worse it
is to imagine you are too brilliant to go to Hell and it is something for others
to worry about! It implies you would send them there yourself if you had the
authority.
Religion trains people in cognitive dissonance through prayer. People pray for
they think it does good. When it doesn't save them from terrible things such as
a crippling depression they may reason that it protected them from worse. So
they try to prevent themselves from seeing that prayer does not work. If it does
not work, they cannot see it.
Prayer is fundamentally immoral because it thrives on and feeds on blindness.
Suppose you sold tap water around the doors as a preventative for cancer. What
if people get cancer nevertheless? Will you tell them that it protected them
from the other cancers they could have got but didn't? Why not? You see how
awful and conniving it would be to do such a thing! Prayer is bad for the same
reason. It is the principle. You cannot condone one thing and not another.
People can only guess that prayer works. It is only their opinion. But they
build too much on that opinion. They may even be enraged against you should you
question the power of prayer. It is dangerous and intolerant of them to take
their mere opinion that seriously.
Cognitive dissonance takes place when a person may flove and hate a person at
the one time. That is why those who talk about loving the sinner and hating the
sin can be accused of hating the person and inciting hatred. Hating the sin
means wanting to see the person hurt for committing sin. Sin is against the law
of God meaning it is intolerable. The person is to be forced to obey by the
threat of punishment and punished if he refuses to obey. Loving the sinner is
nonsense in such a context. Talk about loving the sinner and hating the sin is
just something people say to make themselves look good but do not mean. This
form of cognitive dissonance is very basic in religion. The notion of people
being frail sinners who are loved by God depends on it. So if love the sinner
and hate the sin is wrong then there is no point in worrying about God or
religion. Religion is then based on error and lies and hypocrisy.
Cognitive dissonance in religion is very common. Another example, is how a
person can think that the Bible is written by God and is the perfectly good book
despite knowing that God commanded his people under threat of dire retribution
to murder relatively good people by stoning. The person does this for she feels
that presenting herself as well-meaning despite her reverence for such evil will
get people to accept her. If she ranted that God did right to have those good
people murdered and didn't present herself as a goody-goody adorer of the Bible
she would get the reaction she should get. People would despise her.
Her masquerade as well-meaning should actually enrage people more but human
nature cares more about fitting in and an getting an easy life than it does
about principles of decency. That is why she gets away with it.
Religious people think helping others to drop God and stand firm on their own
inner resources as a way of getting the best they can out of life even in the
middle of suffering is a waste of time. They insist that God is needed. They
arrogantly claim to know that belief in God is beneficial and an essential for
everybody.
Some unbelievers encourage people to trust themselves and their coping faculties
not God. They get disheartened when what they say seems to have had no effect.
Perhaps they are forgetting that denial of the truth is a bereavement stage. The
believers' opposition to the truth and denial of the truth do not prove your
efforts are failing. The person mourns the loss of their religious faith and
denial is one of the stages of grief. It is a stage they have to go through
before they can approach the truth and process it.
Remember, it is the priests and teachers or whatever that are accountable for
their pain - not you. They have been really hurt by their religion. That hurt
needs to be acknowledged and worked through.
Denial can co-exist with acceptance of the thing denied. That might be why it
hurts many so much. Denial is an attempt to try and get rid of the pain by
ignoring it or refusing to face it.
In my experience, losing faith in Catholicism was very painful and I still found
myself acting Catholic and forbidding anybody to question Catholicism in my
presence long after my faith had vanished. The faith had gone but the habits of
faith had not. I did not have the self-confidence to be happy about my mind
telling me that Catholicism was not credible or healthy. I needed help.
People encouraging my faith were hurting me not helping me. When I read a
philosophy book that dismantled all the excuses for belief in God despite his
standing by and letting evil sometimes have free rein I felt validated in my
unbelief. I felt relieved. I had won the comfort that none of my family or
friends or me could ever be damned to Hell forever by the Christian God simply
because he is a cruel man-made fiction. It is better to go out of existence at
death than to maybe live forever in Hell no matter how small the chance of that
happening is.
Christians say that you need to act against forces that threaten innocent life
such as abortion or the family such as LGBT. They say that if nothing is done
all babies could die and all families be ruined. That is a denial that God will
intervene and thus an affirmation that he will only work through us. So what do
they want God for? It is obvious they are using God as a crutch and a
contradictory one at that! If God is God then if the families are all ruined
then he let it happen so it is his will! It is then not really man that has
destroyed marriage but him for he is the creator of all and thus responsible for
all. If you want to believe in God but don't, it is to be expected that you will
try to tell yourself that your best efforts to do good are God's effort. You
don't want to think that God will do something if we do nothing even though
doing something is what God is for!
People should be aware of the problem of cognitive dissonance and examine
themselves. Only when they find it in themselves can they try to be free from
it. Only then can they recover from it. The more religious a person is the
stronger it will be - that person needs psychological and professional help.
People who don't believe in the supernatural are capable of cognitive
dissonance. But people who do believe in the supernatural are at a bigger and
more dangerous risk. They have something that the unbeliever in the supernatural
has not got, they have something extra with which to create cognitive
dissonance. For example, Ann is dying of cancer. Her husband gets a priest in
who says God told him that he will miraculously heal her. The priest does the
healing but Ann simply worsens. The husband might reason, "The priest did heal
her but then Satan interfered and miraculously inflicted illness on her." With
the supernatural, any bizarre logic is possible. And there is nothing anybody
can do to prove the husband wrong. That empowers his dissonance and there is no
reason to believe that he will ever get out of it. The most powerful and
addictive cognitive dissonance needs belief in the supernatural.
To conclude, we are all prone to cognitive dissonance but by telling us that
faith is God's gift from him telling us to believe in the Christian religion and
that faith can be right though it seems wrong at times the Christian religion is
a catalyst for religious cognitive dissonance. The Christian ends up failing to
care about herself or others enough to be a servant of undiluted truth.