Thread: The Pscychological Perspective: Carl Jung on Organized Religion

So I've been reading a lot of Carl Jung lately. His theory of the collective unconscious really interests me for it's ramifications to the religious world among other things. I thought it would be interesting to see a religious debate from the psychological perspective rather than a biological perspective or a physical/astronomical perspective. I've watched quite a few debates on youtube, usually involving a biologist and a creationist, and they inevitably turn into the same old arguments about evolution and missing fossils and "it's only a theory" and "I just think they should teach an alternative theory." It's like a roundabout way of addressing the issue of religon, it doesn't attack it directly. If there is one thing I know about religious people, it's that they won't give up their faith on a technicallity. It makes no difference to them if you prove evolution or the big bang or if you find contradictions in their teachings. There is always an excuse. "God caused the big bang," "God started evolution,"or "God designed evolution." It's not that I don't think these perspectives satisfactorally invalidate all of the major religions, it's that I think the psychological perspective is much more compelling.

I'll focus mainly on Carl Jung because he was one of the original pioneers in this field and it's what he focused most of his effort on. I'll try to make this brief: The gist of the argument is that, through studying the entire known history of world religions, from unique tribal societies to the major religious institutions that dominate the world, Jung has found that they all have certain elements in common and their roots can all be traced back to certain attributes of human psychology. There are no truly unique religions. It isn't random. They all have a significance to our mental health and they do indeed serve a psychological purpose. The concept of religion can be traced through evolution just and the development of any certain body part can. Jung believed that all religion is founded by the unconscious projection of our inner psychic makeup onto the outside world. With greater consciousness comes a greater curiosity and a greater level of anxiety about the world. We may in fact be the only species on the planet with the ability to contemplate our own death before it is imminent. This will invariably cause undue stress on the human mind. So the evolutionary advantage of religion would be as a coping strategy against insanity. If we can explain exactly how and why we have religion, in a scientific manner, should that not rule out the possibility of it's supernatural origin? I realize this argument has the same potential outcome of the biological perspective, but it should be at least enough to make you think. And as in psychotherapy, if you bring unconscious activity into consciousness, and realize in what ways you were acting unconsciously, it makes it much easier to consciously control those facets of your life that you thought you were in control of but it turns out you were just along for the ride. I am also interested in Jung's levels of conscioussness. He made a system of at least five levels of consciousness that a human may reach through the development of their personality (before he died he was also looking into the possibility of a 6th and even a 7th level existing.) These are arbitrary lines drawn by Jung but each level is characterized by distinct shifts in consciousness. He also found that the majority of people never make it passed level 3. By definition, a person who literally believes there is a God who is watching them and judging them, can never advance passed a level three of counsciousness unless they give up their belief. He feels that it is the natural course of development for a person to eventually give up that belief, but modern religion has succeeded in stimying this natural devlopment.

From a mixed biological and psychological standpoint: Our brains, being a sexual ornament rather than a survival tool, carry along with them unforseen pitfalls. Just like a peacocks tail, the bigger and more colorful the tail, the more attractive you are, but then you have to lug that thing around which makes it hard to evade predators. That is a fitness indicator but it could also be seen as a survival hinderance. So my personal opinion would be that our higher levels of consiousness which resulted from the growth of our brains and it's use as a sexual ornament, have made us prone to psychological illness where our dumber ancestors never had any problems. Religion and spirituality are ways of coping with these ailments. With greater pleasure comes greater pain and only with effective coping strategies can we control our mental state to a level where we can live a normal and productive life.

"Jung reached many of his conclusions based on comparative studies
he made of the world’s various mythologies. These mythologies,
he found, each constituted a similar compilation of fables, legends,
and morality tales that exist among every human culture from the
dawn of our species. Through its mythology, every human culture has
codified its social and spiritual norms, rites, customs, ethical standards,
and beliefs. Jung not only concluded that all cultures possessed a
mythology, but that all of them also contained remarkable similarities.
Whether he was studying the Old and New Testaments of Judeo-
Christianity, the Zarathustrian Avestas, the Norse Eddas, the Icelandic
Sagas, the Islamic Koran, the Egyptian or Tibetan Books of the Dead,
Hesiod’s Theogony, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, the Celtic
Sagas, Urartian (Armenian) cuneiform, the Japanese Kojiki (Record of
Ancient Masters) or Nihongi (the Chronicles), the Babylonian tales,
the Ugaritic myths of Palestine and Syria, the Chinese Shi Ching
(Book of History), the Hindu Rig Veda, Mahabharata and Ramayana,
the Theravada Buddhist Vinanatthu, the myths from the various cultures
of Africa, Polynesia, or South and Central America, or the manuscripts
of the medieval Alchemists, Jung found common themes in
each of these culture’s writings...........Because he found such similarities in the myths of every world
culture, Jung concluded that the contents of these myths must be generated
from some inherent psychic substrate that must be shared by
our entire species. This he called our collective unconscious." --Matthew Alper

"What is ordinarily called "religion" is a substitute.
The substitute has the obvious purpose of replacing
immediate experience by a choice of suitable symbols
supported by an organized dogma and ritual." --Carl G. Jung

William Cowper (1731-1800), an English poet and hymn writer (one of his most beloved hymns is "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood"), whose funeral was conducted by his good friend John Newton (the man who wrote "Amazing Grace"), once observed, "Religion makes the free by nature slaves!" Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) firmly believed that formalized religion, which he characterized as "a system of wish-illusions, incompatible with reality," had a distinct tendency to bring with it a type of neurosis he termed "obsessional limitation." In other words, the more a system of religion seeks to control all of one's thoughts and actions, the more pathologically obsessed one inevitably becomes, which in turn will invariably lead to the imposing of harsh restrictions and limitations, both upon self and others. When other men fail to perceive the spiritual significance of one's rigid religious regulations and rituals, each and all of these others will be perceived by the one obsessed by his/her dogma as apostate and fit for destruction. Such thinking invariably leads to the oppression of those deemed by these religious zealots as "godless, faithless wretches." Dr. Robert Lindner (1914-1956), who, in his tragically brief lifespan, penned some of our greatest works on psychoanalysis, astutely observed, "There is no formal religion that does not insist, as its first requirement, on a confession of conformity. Nor is there, any longer, a religion that offers a path to Heaven other than the autobahn of submission. One and all, they have conspired, in the name of the Spirit, against the spirit of man: one and all, they have sold him into slavery. Under threat of damnation, hell-fire, they have ordered him to renounce protest, to forego revolt, to be passive, to surrender" [Must You Conform?, written in 1956].

http://www.zianet.com/maxey/reflx397.htm

I'm interested in what a Christian has to say about all of this.

Recommended reading:

The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller

The God Part of the Brain by Matthew Alper

Jung's Map of the Soul by Dr. Bernstein

Moder Man in Search of a Soul by Carl Jung

Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung