Chapter 1: Introduction
Religion has been woven through my life from the beginning—Mennonite
ancestors, a gentle church-going childhood, and a religious high school. Yet as
I learned more about science, nature, and humanity, I moved away from the
religious ideas I internalized in childhood. While spiritual traditions can be
psychologically rich and culturally beautiful, their literal supernatural
claims do not withstand sustained scrutiny. And despite their capacity for
community cohesion and moral leadership, they have also repeatedly been
implicated in profound harm to both individuals and society. The chapters that
follow move from my personal history to the psychology of belief, then to the
social harms of dogma, and finally to what a secular, reality-based
spirituality could be.
During my childhood, I was drawn to many attractive features of religious
life: the warm embrace of a "church family," an altruistic focus on
service, and a shared language of high ideals—love, justice,
forgiveness—personified in a gentle, loving deity. The emotional resonance of
choral music and camp songs, and the ready-made social world of youth groups, offered
instant belonging to anyone willing to speak the language of faith.
For many whose faith lies outside the realm of organized
religion, magical or mystical beliefs—fate, spirits, psychic phenomena—can confer
a sense of specialness and awe. They suggest that hidden powers might guide one’s
destiny through an often confusing and unjust world.
In this essay, I aim to balance deep respect for the
ways faith offers community, moral reflection, and "nonspecific" therapeutic
factors—ritual, belonging, empathic attention—alongside a critique of dogma. Immense harms follow when sacred narratives
are treated as facts or as rigid moral law.
Religious belief thrives on the same psychological
mechanisms that render us vulnerable to misinformation or propaganda:
specifically, the primal pull of group allegiance. Our beliefs grow roots that
interweave with our social identities. The belief system becomes a costly
emblem of tribal loyalty, pushing us to selectively seek confirmatory evidence
and to discount or avoid evidence to the contrary. This loyalty offers robust
benefits—friendship, structure, material support, and safety—but at the price
of intellectual isolation. These
vulnerabilities are not uniquely religious; they are ordinary human tendencies
that religion can intensify and sanctify.
I examine a tension visible in fundamentalist
communities: the structures that create warmth and solidarity often calcify
into exclusion. These groups are often condescending or suspicious towards outsiders,
selectively resistant to scientific consensus, and tend to align tightly with
political identity. Consequently, they may buffer loneliness for insiders while
amplifying prejudice. Furthermore, the
conviction that one’s group possesses divinely mandated truth creates pressure
to treat other traditions as inferior—a recipe for arrogance that forecloses
the opportunity to learn with humility from the rich tapestry of human culture.
Drawing on evolutionary biology, neuroscience, history,
and my clinical experience as a psychiatrist, I explore why people so readily
defend spiritual beliefs and how they can both heal and wound. I argue that
understanding the natural world—from evolution to astrophysics to the
brain—need not leave us nihilistic. My aim is not to sneer at the faithful, but
to invite compassionate, evidence-based reflection. We must ask how we might
preserve the best ethical and communal aspects of religion without accepting
its fictions as literal truth.
I recognize the limitations of this endeavor. Faith is deeply shaped by
identity cultivated over a lifetime; for many, accepting evidence that
challenges this identity feels like a betrayal of their tribe. However,
acknowledging these protective mechanisms is the first step toward cultivating
deeper wisdom. Ironically, some of the greatest wisdom in sacred texts invites
us to humbly reflect upon our blind spots, and to transform ourselves for the
greater good. This essay is an
invitation to look behind the curtain of our own cognition, to value truth over
comfort, and to find a spirituality that survives the scrutiny of reason.
