Into That Darkness...the Mind Of The 'true Believer'

[Guest Glaswegian]

To understand the 'true believer' of religion in more than a superficial way - that is, to know what he is at bottom - one must possess huge, powerful lungs in order to dive down to the psychological depths where the more complex truths about him are to be found. No sooner has one done this, no sooner has one penetrated into the very 'soul' of the true believer, than one begins to feel that one has entered a fetid chamber of dripping anxiety in which obscene and detestable impulses abound. Here, at the innermost core of the true believer's being where the light never reaches, one has a palpable sense of dangerous, gelatinous things quivering and throbbing shamelessly in the darkness.

 

The secret, raving violence of the true believer's 'soul' is, to a considerable degree, rooted in his ontological insecurity. When I say that the true believer is ontologically insecure, I mean that he experiences his very being-in-the-world as precarious. This individual's sense of personal identity, autonomy and cohesiveness are felt to be under continual threat from existence itself. Thus, the mere fact that he is alive fills the true believer with dread because, in his eyes, 'the world is liable at any moment to crash in and obliterate his tenuous sense of self as a gas will rush in and obliterate a vacuum' (Laing, 1990 p.45).

 

The true believer is only too aware that his ontological insecurity renders him unfit for life - as Nietzsche would say, he is simply, 'not up to it' - and this knowledge naturally arouses feelings of self-loathing. The hatred which the true believer feels towards his own inadequacy is something which must be urgently got rid of: and so, instead of being directed against himself, it is turned outwards on the world. But it is not enough for the true believer just to hate the world. No. Because the world is felt by the true believer to be inimical to his being - because everything about it threatens him with non-being - he must also revenge himself upon it. And fundamentalist religion provides a perfect vehicle for his hatred and revenge because of its intolerant and condemnatory character. As well as supplying the true believer with the means of re-directing the enmity he feels towards himself onto the external world, fundamentalist religion allows him to anchor his weak and beleaguered Self in something putatively absolute, infallible and enduring that is beyond the vicissitudes of human existence: viz. an omnipotent, omniscient, transcendent Deity which exists eternally. The true believer, then, is driven to embrace monotheism fervently because the preservation of his very being depends upon it.

 

The true believer's ontological insecurity also accounts for his tendency to think in terms of polarities. As was noted above, the true believer experiences existence as posing a perpetual and deadly danger to his fragile sense of Self. This means that he is always in a condition of high alert with regard to everything for even the most ordinary circumstances of life have the potential to overwhelm and engulf him. Thus, every single thing must be quickly and correctly ascertained as to whether or not it threatens the true believer with complete loss of being: ambiguities are wholly intolerable to him, there can be no grey areas in his experience at all, no sources of doubt. This schizoid orientation to life causes the true believer to interpret his experience in a 'black and white' manner: that is, people, objects and events are necessarily perceived as either utterly dangerous or utterly innocuous, utterly good or utterly bad, utterly right or utterly wrong, utterly godly or utterly ungodly, utterly redeemed or utterly damned, and so on...until the entire universe and all it contains are bifurcated in his mind into a cosmic conflict between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil.

 

The true believer's attempt to compensate for the weakness of his Self by anchoring it in the 'eternal verities' of fundamentalist religion is doomed from the outset. This is because he knows in his heart of heart's that his fundamentalist faith is as shaky as the Self which pains him. Although the true believer maintains his religious faith through various forms of self-deception - for example, by not attending to criticisms of it, by not weighing its pros and cons, by refusing to test it in the crucible of reality - he is always under continual accusation from within. A voice from the depths charges him with evading the truth. For fundamentalist religion requires him to believe in things for which there is no substantial evidence whatsoever, and no person can do this without affronting their sense of intellectual honesty.

 

The struggle between faith and doubt in the true believer is unrelenting his whole life long. And this is why the rational individual should always be circumspect as he contemplates the true believer from his hammock of cool sanity. For the tension produced in the true believer by gnawing religious doubt which never goes away has a tendency to eventually discharge itself in unspeakable acts of violence as is evidenced by the Inquisition, the Crusades, the 'Witch' Holocaust in Europe, the Russian pogroms, the extermination of the Cathars by the Catholic Church, the World Trade Center massacre, the Bali bombings, the murder of abortion workers in America, Hamas suicide missions, Baruch Goldstein's slaughter of Muslim worshippers in Hebron, etc., etc., etc....

 

Regards

 

James

 

References:

 

Bergsten, G. (1951) Pastoral Psychology, London: Allen and Unwin

 

Laing, R. D. (1990) The Divided Self, Harmondsworth: Penguin

[eightman]

I would not be so drastic. What we have is people who go through a positive feedback loop:

 

1) they become happy because they think they will get eternal life

 

2) this reinforces their faith and in turn reinforces point 1.

 

This loop is self sustaining and feeds off all the ideas of once saved always saved, absolute assurance is the mark of being truly saved etc. This at least is what most evangelicals feel. They obtain this absolute faith usually after being depressed or drugs or maybe boredome. Trying to debate them logically with bible contradictions is uselss because what they have is a SUBJECTIVE FEELING-EXPERIENCE that they can't deny because it is very real for them and then they will always find verses that can somehow confirm anything they think or say.

 

The whole concept of evangelicals is not fear of hell but really JOY OF HEAVEN SINCE THEY ARE ABSOLUTELY SURE THEY ARE SAVED. It is like trying to talk a person WHO FALLS IN LOVE with another person not to love that person. Anyone knows that it can't be done, since it is based on feelings and self convictions.

 

These strong believers seem to have somehow hardwired their minds into the idea that they have been saved, and often they achieve this after bad depressions or drugs or bad experiences. It is like they are at the end of the road and this is the last chance to be happy. Of course it is a kind of self brainwashing, but it is very effective. Do you guys think I am close or are my views far from what is really happening ?