Most Christians are taught social conformity through a sort of Pavlovian conditioning. In many Protestant sects they are taught to fear hell, and learn to more or less behave through fear and social reinforcement. Catholics are simply born into a community, and if you want to remain in that community, you do what everyone else is doing.
Many Christians remember the fate of the Sodomites, but not “judge not lest ye be judged”, and “take no thought for the morrow; sufficient unto the day is the evil therein”.
This article is interesting, and I will quote bit of it at length:
Many years ago, a team of researchers at the department of
anthropology at the University of Minnesota decided to put this
association to the test. They studied certain fringe religious groups,
such as fundamentalist Baptists, Pentecostalists and the snake-handlers
of West Virginia, to see if they showed the particular type of
psychopathology associated with mental illness. Members of mainstream
Protestant churches from a similar social and financial background
provided a good control group for comparison. Some of the wilder
fundamentalists prayed with what can only be described as great and
transcendental ecstasy, but there was no obvious sign of any particular
psychopathology among most of the people studied. After further
analysis, however, there appeared a tendency to what can only be
described as mental instability in one particular group. The study was
blinded, so that most of the research team involved with questionnaires
did not have access to the final data. When they were asked which group
they thought would show the most disturbed psychopathology, the whole
team identified the snake-handlers. But when the data were revealed, the
reverse was true: there was more mental illness among the conventional
Protestant churchgoers – the “extrinsically” religious – than among the
fervently committed.A Harvard psychologist named Gordon Allport
did some key research in the 1950s on various kinds of human prejudice
and came up with a definition of religiosity that is still in use today.
He suggested that there were two types of religious commitment –
extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic religiosity he defined as religious
self-centredness. Such a person goes to church or synagogue as a means
to an end – for what they can get out of it. They might go to church to
be seen, because it is the social norm in their society, conferring
respectability or social advancement. Going to church (or synagogue)
becomes a social convention.Allport thought that intrinsic
religiosity was different. He identified a group of people who were
intrinsically religious, seeing their religion as an end in itself. They
tended to be more deeply committed; religion became the organising
principle of their lives, a central and personal experience. In support
of his research, Allport found that prejudice was more common in those
individuals who scored highly for extrinsic religion.
The evidence
generally is that intrinsic religiosity seems to be associated with
lower levels of anxiety and stress, freedom from guilt, better
adjustment in society and less depression. On the other hand, extrinsic
religious feelings – where religion is used as a way to belong to and
prosper within a group – seem to be associated with increased tendencies
to guilt, worry and anxiety.
To my way of thinking “religion”, which comes from a root word meaning “to bind”, is unhealthy. It is too monolithic, too large, to impersonal, too inaccessible. I have tried to come up with new words, but the best I have at this point is “Wholotropic Telearchy”, which is unwieldy. “That” would be a good substitute, when referring to something existing and organic. Names are only needed outside the circle.
I think a proper spiritual unit is about the size of a classroom, roughly 24 people. 24 people can know one another well.
What the goal is, though, is shared understanding, shared commitments, to one another, and to everyone else.
As I think about it, somebody came up with the word “holons”, which I will spell “Wholons’. That is not bad. I have proposed “bohannon” for reasons which frankly are opaque even to me.
What I would propose is the obvious thought that what is ALIVE, MOVES. Things that don’t move, that don’t grow, that don’t interact with the world at least through a need for food and oxygen, are not alive.
Something driven down into the ground with a stake, and to which an endless array of ropes is attached, is not alive, not spiritual, not Good.
I am moving. Interesting things may be on the way.