Joseph McCabe

“ A clergyman—whether acting through the government in the school, or through parents in the home, or through clerical influence on the press, or directly in church—plants in you from your earliest and most impressible days a conviction that there is a God. In children, obviously, such a conviction is a matter of authority. Most people remain children in that respect and never reflect on the ground of their conviction. ”

“ Half a century ago, when anthropology was imperfect, it was possible to hold that every branch of the human race believed in a God or gods. We have seen that this is quite false, but, while the belief lasted, the explanation of it was supposed to be that there was an instinct in human nature itself which impelled all men to believe in gods just as an instinct impelled all birds to mate and to build nests. ”

“ The clergy, as everybody knows, regard sexual feeling as the greatest cause of abandonment of religion; and I wonder if any would be so bold as to say that when young women in their twenties put an end to their sex-saturation by marriage they become less religious. It is, surely, rather the reverse. On the other hand, a very large acquaintance with Rationalist families convinces me that, when their daughters reach the stage of sex-development and repression they very rarely feel any new disposition toward religion. ”

“ The next fallacy that we have to dismiss is the very common idea of writers on religion that there is a special urge or instinct or sense in the human breast which compels men and women to be religious. So frivolous are some of these serious and profound writers on religion that they only invented or discovered this religious instinct at a time when the general experience of the world entirely refuted it. No one heard of the religious instinct in the days when everybody was religious. It was invented when tens of millions of people in every advanced civilization abandoned all religion. ”

“ And thus there came about the paradox of modern psychology, that it spreads itself over a field of vast extent and steadily refuses to consider the chief question that occurs to the mind about itself. ”

“ Interest in politics would be feeble if there were no political orators, although political conduct is certainly concerned with grave realities of life. How much real interest in religion would there be if a hundred thousand clergymen did not make it their proper and very earnest business to keep that interest alive? ”

“ Things are not to be multiplied without necessity. You have a mind which is quite capable of saying to you, "God exists," and if you say that you have in addition this mystic voice, you must prove it. You can't. Your conviction may tell you a good deal about religion, but it can tell you nothing about itself.
In another volume (Little Blue Book No. 1060, The Futility of Belief in God) I have considered this religious sense or instinct from another point of view, and I gave there certain considerations which really dispense us from dealing further with it. ”

“ In its more familiar form, the Freud system, it seems to me, and now to most people, an extreme exaggeration of what is certainly a very large fact in life, sex; and when it is applied to religion it is quite untrue to experience. On this side there was a strong disposition on the part of thoughtful people to receive the Freudian explanation. As I have explained, the usual idea of the religiousness of women is very exaggerated, and the view was commonly taken that the repression of sex-feelings in unmarried girls and women was largely responsible. ”

“ If a single one of these gentlemen is correct, if a believer of any type is right, the essential truth for man, the real drama of life, in comparison with which the secular story of the race, is a puppet-show and the unfolding of the universe is a triviality, is the dialogue of the immortal soul and the eternal God. ”

“ Psycho-Analysis of the Jung and Adler type, which keeps the sex-impulse in its place and speaks rather of a general surge upward from the subconscious of old vital impulses, throws no light on religion. There is no reason why suppressed impulses should find a religious expression. But the chief weakness of writers of both schools who discuss religion—and I am not concerned otherwise with the theories—is that they assume that there is something in the religious mood or attitude which has not yet been explained by more familiar and conscious impulses. ”

“ The evolution of psychology is a proof that science has not yet completely emancipated itself from its serfdom to religious beliefs. It was originally a branch of philosophy, and its chief purpose was to serve religion by furnishing convincing proofs that the soul is spiritual and immortal. In proportion as the methods of science were adopted in it, and arguments of a philosophical character were eliminated, the aim of the science was changed. ”

“ From the fourth century onward it has been a tradition in the Christian Church that, if you have a mother or grown-up daughter zealous in a home, you have the best chance of securing the others. Priests will even (in broad language) urge wives to use their sex-attraction (by refusing or grudging it) in inducing a husband to go to church; and, in any case, hers is the chief influence on the children. It is, surely, an indisputable fact of life that she is exposed far more than the man is to priestly pressure. ”

“ We have a psychology of everything, from education to salesmanship, from the heroine of the novel or the film to the art of advertising, from the baby to the bishop, from the criminal to the saint. In another ten years we shall have psychologies of wallpapers, soft drinks (I have heard an expert divide humanity into white coffee and black coffee people) , tooth-brushes, cigarettes, neckwear, and griddle cakes. About a million people in America make a good living out of the other hundred and fifteen millions by psychologizing about them. ”

“ Meantime science has made an end, not only of the supposed universality of belief in gods, but of the word instinct itself. We still, it is true, speak of an animal's habitual actions as instinctive, but we mean only that there is a certain structure or mechanism of nerve and muscle in an animal which acts automatically when it is stimulated. No matter how complex this mechanism may become by special evolution, it is always a mechanism. ”

“ Aristotle believed in an impersonal and totally different God and denied immortality. The Pythagoreans and Eleatics believed that everything was spiritual: the Stoics held that even the gods, if there are any, are material: the Epicureans and Skeptics said that all religion was superstition. Roman thinkers and Moorish thinkers were just as divided, and the modern philosophic world is as far as ever from agreement.
In face of these masses of historical and contemporary facts it is futile to ask us to believe in a religious sense or instinct. ”

“ Parents, priests, and "the herd" make each new citizen of the world religious according to the pattern of the region in which he is born. I have in very ignorant parts of Europe, where everybody belonged to the Greek Church and most of the people never heard of any other, tried the effect of introducing the idea of skepticism. I do not mean that I tried to argue against religion, but merely to ascertain what would be the reaction of these people if I said that I was a skeptic and that half the people of my city were skeptics. ”

“ In the overwhelming majority of believers the emotions are normal and have no specific religious or sexual meaning. What requires explanation, in other words, is the belief. Given the belief, the emotions follow as naturally as anger follows an injury, or gratitude follows a generous act, or hope and enthusiasm follow the acceptance of an economic creed.
And the factors of the belief are really only two in the mass of believers—tradition and reasoning—and in the case of the overwhelming majority only one, tradition. ”

“ Where there is a variety of religions or sects, the diversity may provoke the believer to reflect, but as a rule his own sect has a literature so unblushingly mendacious that he never carries the inquiry beyond his own church. His religion as belief requires no analysis ”

“ Religion is just an ordinary conviction in the mind and it is enfeebled when we accumulate knowledge, because it is essentially based upon ignorance. We see this on a very much broader scale in the collective experience of our time. There never was less religion in the world before, and there never was so much knowledge. ”

“ Academic writers are very apt to construct their own "religious man," and too often they construct him to fit a preconceived theory of what he ought to be. Other writers take eccentric and exceptional types of believers and make general theories of religion out of their analysis of these. Let us try, as far as possible, to ascertain the actual attitudes of a very great variety of religious men and women—there is, of course, no such thing as a religious type—and see what influences give them the different shades of religious belief or emotion which most of us lack. ”

“ Of eighteen hundred million worshipers far more than fifteen hundred millions—say Chinese, Hindus, Latin Americans, the more backward races, and the mass of the peasantry everywhere—have no "psychology of religion." They inherit religious beliefs as they inherit beliefs about cattle and babies. ”

“ It has been held widely in all literatures, and is widely held today, that a woman knows things by "intuition," and one need know little psychology to see that this is a miserable fallacy: that the "intuition" (which exists more abundantly in fiction than in life) is simply a hasty deduction, unconscious of its own premises. ”

“ The boy talks to other boys of every religion or none. The girl in a much higher proportion is expressly put in an environment which will promote and harden the habit of church-going. I do not mean that this great difference in the use of authority or suggestion explains the whole disproportion of sexes in ritualistic churches. The woman is more emotional than the man, and the express aim of these churches is to gratify her emotions. Yet, clearly, there are very many things to be taken into account besides her emotions. Priestcraft does not merely influence her more than it influences man. ”

“ The priest prefers women to men: women are drawn to priests far more than men are. Further differences arise from occupation and education. The man's business does not promote the frame of mind which church-going requires, while the monotonous work of the woman rather disposes her in favor of church-going. The man listens all his life to very free remarks about clergymen, religion, and sex, and such conversation rarely occurs in the presence of women. ”

“ When I worked in the Feminist movement, ten to twenty years ago, I found it the quite general and dogmatic belief of my lady friends that woman is innately, or on principle more virtuous than man; and it was to them quite a new, though obvious, idea when I pointed out that if, in sexual intercourse, the male ran the risk of pregnancy, all the coyness and virtue would be on his side, and that familiarity with the use of preventives is already altering this distribution of virtue. ”

“ In fact, the psychology of the idealist is so identical with that of the believer that he now often claims that his idealism is a "religion," and often (as in my own case) the word is thrust upon him in spite of his protests. In the Ethical Culture movement, for instance, and many of the Unitarian churches of America you have thousands of people claiming to be religious, yet totally rejecting the beliefs, in any shape, in God and immortality. ”

“ A second rare class are what is called "mystics." Writers on religion often forget that what the mystic, like the occultist, claims is a special intellectual, not emotional, outfit. A mystic is not a man or woman of exceptional ability, but a man or woman who claims to acquire religious knowledge by other than ordinary ways: by intuition, for instance. Their emotions are the same as those of other pietists. What is needed to explain their peculiarities is, not a psychology of religion, but a psychological explanation of a certain intellectual error or illusion. ”

“ The facts even of lower savage life are entirely against the theory. As to ourselves and our Oedipus complex, I leave it to the reader, who knows just as much about it as Freud, to say if he thinks any large proportion of youths have an even subconscious desire of sexual intercourse with their mothers and are disposed on that account to hate their fathers. Life has a disconcerting way of being much less picturesque than our theories.
At all events, the mother-goddess has nothing to do with the Oedipus complex, because there is invariably a father god (generally the sky or sun) as well. ”

“ As I have already explained, I dislike the word instinct, but of the great mass of religious believers scattered over the earth it may justly be said that they believe and worship because the herd does. ”

“ The same human heart responds in each case to an intensely felt stimulus. The readiness of modern writers to grant a "religious fervor" to all kinds of idealists shows that there is no religious fervor. Zealous people are sometimes zealous about religion, and sometimes about other matters. The zeal is the same.
Two or three small special classes alone call for any particular psychological treatment, but to build a "psychology of religion" on these very small groups is like building a psychology of human nature on a few hundred gunmen or drug-takers. ”

“ It is just a blind acceptance of tradition and priestly authority in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred.
In short, it is only a very small minority of religious worshipers whose religion offers any material for psychological study. In the overwhelming majority of cases a set of statements are planted in the young mind, and, as they are accepted by the whole community, they remain unchallenged. They are beliefs, or statements, accepted on authority. ”

“ There Is very little variation in this great body of worshipers beyond the variation of individual temperaments. Some are, notoriously, "more religious" than others: which means that they are more emotional generally or that they brood over the religious ideas more than the others do. You have just the same variations of emotional intensity in the political world, and it is therefore needless to ask for any special psychological explanation of the "piety" of many of these mass-believers. The Hindu is more fanatical about politics than about religion. ”

“ The authority of tradition explains entirely the fact that they believe—the emotional religious life then follows of itself—and back of tradition and its enforcement are the priesthoods.
Personal experiences count in the psychology of their religion only because they already believe. For ages man believed that the summer's crop, the rain supply, the fertility of the cattle, depended upon the gods, and this gave him a bias toward religion ”

“ The consciousness of sin or of moral struggle which some writers give as an important element of the psychology of religion seems to me an effect rather than a cause, or even an ingredient. There is no consciousness of "sin" until you believe in God. The "painful sense of moral struggle" is very largely a creation of moralists and spiritual writers. They create the feeling in a few people and then boast that religion meets it. Religion makes it far worse. The ordinary healthy man or woman is not conscious of legions of devils urging him or her to be unfaithful or to get drunk. ”