11.26.05

I was raised Catholic. I say that in a sort of secular confession because my upbringing inevitably informs much of what I used to think of as "reality." I've since spent nearly a decade trying to shed that parochial world-view by investigating other belief structures and expanding my understanding of the theological psychology. Sadly, no one can ever truly escape the training – dare I say the indoctrination – of one's parents and grandparents; I am no exception.
       The problem is that, as children, we lack perspective. As adults, we have accumulated a lifetime's worth of reference points; when presented with new suspect information, we can see its incongruity with respect to the rest of our understanding of the world and denounce it as illogical; the elephant is out of place in the living room, for example, when we begin by establishing the living room and later by adding the elephant. When we are children, however, the living room has not yet been established; we are still struggling toward even a rudimentary understanding of our environment. To add the elephant then leads to the perspective problem; it is accepted as natural because no established standard exists to contradict it, and all subsequent facts are either forced to conform to it or rejected because the elephant has become the standard.
       Needless to say (and saying it anyway), Religion is the elephant in the living room; but more correctly, Religion is the elephant put in place before the living room has been established. Too many people (myself included) are taught a Religion nearly from birth, and as they grow into adolescence, their social support (family, friends, community) only serves to reinforce those initial theological ideologies. By the early teenage years, those beliefs have become so embedded in the personality as to be inextricable; they have become accepted as "truth," and are part of the individual identity.
       The psychology behind this naοve assimilation is simple enough. We lack, as children, the logical functions necessary to fully examine such wild Religious notions as Heaven, Hell and the Soul; many of us still believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. Coupled with the child's innate sense of trust in its parents, and thus what its parents have to teach, we can understand our own early gullibility. Moving forward, we also begin to understand why and how we are so entrenched in our beliefs later in life.
       The psychology that prevents critical analysis of Religious belief later in life is also relatively easy to unravel. Most Religious doctrines maintain that the deconstructive critique of the skeptic (as opposed to the constructive critique involved in the training of priests, ministers and the like) is heretical, if not outright blasphemous – a safeguard in place, it seems, because most Religious doctrine tends to fall apart due to self-contradiction upon meticulous scrutiny.
       Violation of the self-protecting tenet of most Religions is punishable by the eternal damnation of the Soul after death. We can begin to grasp why few people ever seriously consider their own theological beliefs; followers trained from birth believe in the veracity of their ideology and fear the repercussions associated with sacrilegious dissent. Many people also fear the prospect of having their entire theological ideology, that in which they belief most fundamentally, sundered.
       And thus we reach the core of the theological conundrum: Fear.
       We are participants in a chaotic universe, and as such are often plagued with a fear of the randomness of our world; tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes, disease, hurricanes, terrorism, volcanoes and blizzards throw human life into disarray with incalculable frequency. People die every day; people murder, are murdered, and give their lives for myriad causes all over the planet. We are afraid of our lack of control over the universe because we become helpless victims of circumstance at the mercy of inanimate forces.
       We also fear that our actions and sacrifices are ultimately meaningless if the powers of the universe are random and uncontrollable. Thus we devise the notion of God – a being that knows everything (past, present, future), can do anything, and which created and controls the entire universe – who orchestrates every event of every human life to an premeditated end, thus giving them meaning. Furthermore, this creationary deity cares for humans – created the world for them according to many doctrines – and thus protects them from the indiscriminate forces of the universe. Thus through Fear did Man create God.
       In the time before established theological structures, those in power sought ways to control those over whom they attempted to exert their power. Those leaders realized that threatening a person's life was an ineffective means of controlling them (as evinced by criminal recidivism rates and homicide statistics), so they needed to find some thing that could be threatened; or in the absence of such a thing, they needed to invent one. Eventually, they managed to concoct the notion of the Soul – an intangible entity that is the essence of the individual, and is immortal.
       This Soul, they maintained, would be rewarded or punished after death based on the actions of the individual during life; adhering to the laws set forth by those in power –laws which they often claimed were handed down to them by that omniscient, omni-potent deity – world earn everlasting reward, while breaking those laws would result in eternal punishment. Thus through Fear did Man create the Soul.
       One of the most pervasive collective fears – the greatest unknown and most uncontrollable element in the human experience – is death; its randomness and senseless-ness confounds every attempt at understanding. In response to this inevitable, insurmountable fear, we have applied the notion of the eternal Soul and invented a complex ideological structure detailing an existence that follows death. To this ontological state we have applied the wholly unoriginal moniker of the Afterlife.
       After the body of the individual dies, that immortal essence of the Soul passes into some higher alternate plane of existence where it persists in either perpetual paradise – called alternately Nirvana, Heaven, Val Halla – or never-ending damnation – named at times Hades, Jahannam, Hell. In essence, we have envisioned a scenario in which we continue to live to even after we have died; thus through Fear did Man create the Afterlife, and by doing so, conquered Death.


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