The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 7: Dogma

Aside from the common factors I have already described, religions also feature dogmatic belief, which in some cases can be very strict. This is where the biggest problems lie—because these beliefs are not literally true.  At best they can be understood as a kind of mythic construct: not to be taken as history or physics, but as poetic narrative, figurative teaching, or a focus for moral reflection.

Some dogmatic beliefs may contain wise reflections about morality or justice. But when people treat dogma as literal fact—or as rigid moral law—it often leads to narrow or rigid moral reductionism. Furthermore, some particular religious stories, even if understood as metaphors, can be brutal and totally contradictory to other aspects of the religion’s doctrines, so it can be quite a stretch to find a plausible “beneficial” figurative interpretation.

One can often find, in the same religious text, stories or teachings that contradict each other—sometimes directly, sometimes in subtler ways. Because of this, many individuals end up “picking and choosing” passages to bolster a pre-existing stance on almost any subject. There is a name for this in religious studies—proof-texting—and it is one of the main ways dogma becomes both rigid in tone and flexible in application.

Many people feel that their guidance regarding “right and wrong”—their foundation of morality—comes from religion or religious texts. People may consider the Ten Commandments to be an obvious moral guide. Yet thinking about morality this way reminds me of the moral development of children. At an early stage, a child may feel morality is dictated by a rigid external rule: “don’t take that cookie,” or “you’ll be punished if you take that cookie.” In this stage, the “reason” not to take the cookie is not understanding, empathy, or principle, but obedience and fear of punishment. That may keep order, but it is a precarious foundation for morality.

It is morally superior—and practically necessary—for a person to reason about complex situations beyond simply following an external instruction or fearing punishment. Safety and success in life often depend on being able to think flexibly about moral issues, including resisting instructions from potentially malevolent or unreliable authority figures. Rule-following is not the same thing as conscience. (And in severe antisocial or psychopathic traits, the problem is often not a lack of knowing rules, but a shallowness in guilt, empathy, or concern—one more reason that rule-following alone is not enough.)

Imagine being with someone for whom the main reason they are not assaulting you or stealing from you is strict obedience to an external rule, a scripture passage, or fear of punishment—would you feel comfortable with this person’s character? Deep moral development—the kind most people would want for themselves and require in close relationships—involves reasoning about why an action is right or wrong, balancing desires with social consequences, short-term impulses with long-term outcomes, and recognizing that rare exceptions can exist (for example, stealing medicine to save a starving child). Humans are capable of this kind of moral reasoning irrespective of religious belief, and there are good reasons why it emerges naturally in social species and cooperative cultures.

I do have to acknowledge that some religious texts contain inspired statements about moral reasoning—for example, the Sermon on the Mount, with its emphasis on kindness, love, and humility. But many of these ideas are not unique to Christianity. Variations of the Golden Rule—the ethic of reciprocity—appear across many traditions: Confucian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and others. This is not evidence of divinity; it is what we would expect in human societies grappling with the same recurring problems of cooperation, conflict, and conscience.

The treatment of religious texts as perfect moral instruction manuals is problematic on many levels. Even within traditions that claim “inspiration,” it is hard to maintain that every specific word—let alone every translation choice or manuscript tradition—is a flawless, literal directive. Most people therefore focus on a higher level of organization: a verse (a numbered unit), which is the most common unit studied in sermons or religious meetings.

Many churches have a kind of “book club” format in which small groups meet in someone’s home—refreshments served—to discuss a particular passage, often guided by published interpretations consistent with the group’s existing style of thinking. Sometimes the analysis stops at the verse level, partly out of practicality. It is complicated to integrate a theme across an entire text like the Bible, with its many books, authors, genres, and historical layers. For each theme or figure of speech present in one verse, there may be dozens of resonant passages elsewhere, sometimes in widely disparate parts of the text, and contradictions—either direct or qualitative—are not difficult to find.

But, as with studying literature, it is a narrow way to understand a text to focus only on its most granular fragments. Much meaning in literature comes from a more holistic analysis: genre, context, narrative arc, tension, voice, contrast. Likewise, if you look at a photograph, it would not make sense to divide it into tiny sections and analyze each separately as though the whole image were nothing but a pile of fragments. It is often inconvenient to do holistic analysis in most sermons or study sessions, so many communities stop at the verse level—or at best, a short passage. And it matters that these verse divisions were decided upon by editors, rather than being features of the earliest manuscripts.

This focus on the fragment over the whole is emblematic of the broader failure of dogmatic thinking. By reducing complex, ancient literature to a repository of isolated rules, we trap ourselves in a state of arrested moral development—clinging to the certainty of the 'instruction manual' rather than doing the hard work of empathy and reason. We remain the child obeying the parent out of fear, rather than the adult navigating the world with conscience. When we trade the nuance of reality for the rigidity of dogma, we do not just stunt our own growth; we lay the groundwork for collective intolerance and harm.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 6: Faith Healing

In more dramatic religion-based therapeutic interventions—such as “faith healing”—the common (nonspecific) factors I discussed earlier are especially salient, magnified further by the awe of a crowd, intense emotions, and a strong attachment to a charismatic leader. Faith healing, much like hypnosis, can appear particularly effective for problems with a substantial functional or psychosomatic component: symptoms that fluctuate with stress, attention, expectation, and social reinforcement (for example, dissociative phenomena, psychogenic seizures, factitious disorders, and other mind–body presentations where meaning and arousal shape the experience of illness). In such settings, a sudden “cure” can allow a person to save face and feel validated—endorsed by the community—rather than being left with a banal story of life stress and misfortune. Their experience may even be framed as sacred or chosen, which can temporarily boost self-esteem and social standing. Unfortunately, these dynamics are easily exploited by charlatans, and one does not have to look far to find examples.

Most people with severe medical problems who pursue faith healing will not experience remission, because many illnesses are not primarily psychosomatic and are not particularly amenable to community support, suggestion, or adrenaline-soaked collective emotion. Yet devout people may then conclude that they did not have sufficient faith, or that they were not worthy of divine intervention. Or they may conclude—resigned, defeated—that it is God’s will for them to continue suffering, while others, for reasons no one can explain, receive a miracle.

Similarly, miracle stories in religious texts—blindness cured, paralysis reversed, even the dead raised—are awe-inspiring if taken literally. But they should be read against the background rate of suffering in the ancient world. In pre-modern settings, roughly a quarter of newborns died within the first year of life, and a very large fraction of children did not survive to adulthood.  Maternal death in childbirth was also far more common. In such a world—saturated with infection, malnutrition, injury, and loss—miraculous healing would have had to be common and broadly distributed to register as a genuine explanation of reality. Instead, what we mainly have are vivid stories about rare exceptions (or legendary claims) in a sea of ordinary, relentless suffering.

This is why miracle stories are a little bit like discussing lottery winners: if miracles truly occur, they are extraordinarily rare, and the narrative focus on the “winner” distracts from the millions who bought tickets and got nothing. As with lotteries, one is not well-advised to build one’s planning—medical, psychological, or moral—around the hope of an exception.

There are also some predictable cognitive and statistical illusions at work here. One is selection bias: the “success stories” are the ones that get put on stage, recorded, and retold, while the far more numerous failures quietly disappear. Another is regression to the mean: many symptoms fluctuate naturally, and people are most likely to seek dramatic interventions when they are at their worst—so improvement afterwards can look like a miracle even when it is simply the usual swing back toward baseline. Base-rate neglect adds to the distortion: a vivid testimony feels more compelling than the boring, brutal fact that most people do not improve. And then motivated reasoning does the rest: once someone has publicly declared faith, donated money, and staked identity and relationships on the story, it becomes emotionally costly to admit that nothing supernatural happened. The narrative hardens, not because the evidence is strong, but because the social and psychological incentives are.

On a slight tangent, there are also poetic references in religious texts to the beauty and serenity of nature—for example, to birds, with the insinuation that they live joyfully and are fed through divine providence. This is an attractive image, but it reflects a limited understanding of biology. Wild creatures face high mortality from starvation, disease, and predation. Birdsong has natural functions—communication, territory, mating—not simply the expression of joy or a benevolent performance for human listeners. Similarly, “lilies of the field” (a symbol of divine providence) have a difficult existence shaped by competition, pathogens, drought, and chance: the blooming lilies that catch our eye do not reveal the many that did not survive. In other words: nature is beautiful, but it is not reliably gentle—and any spirituality that wants to use nature as moral reassurance has to be honest about what nature actually does.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 5: Non-specific Factors

To explain what I mean by “nonspecific factors,” I’d like to share an analogy from psychiatric practice. In the previous chapter I emphasized that religion can provide real benefits. One reason is that many benefits come not from the literal truth of a doctrine, but from the psychological and social frame in which the doctrine is delivered.

Many styles of psychotherapy have evolved over the past 150 years, and many of them began with strong, sometimes dogmatic theories about the causes and cures of psychological suffering. The advent of these styles was, on balance, beneficial: at least there was a serious, systematic attempt to help people with mental illness. Psychoanalysis is a good example. It was originally developed with an elaborate and sometimes poetic set of beliefs—its own compelling “scripture,” in the original writings of Freud and others—about the origins of mental health problems, with a heavy emphasis on childhood experiences and family relationships. Over time, many specific psychoanalytic claims have not held up well as literal causal explanations (or have proven far more exaggerated than their founders believed), and yet many people clearly benefited from psychoanalysis. How could this be?

Part of the answer is that the benefit often comes from the frame more than the theory. Visiting a kind, curious, intelligent person to discuss your problems in a professional setting, regularly and frequently, over months or years, can be tremendously helpful for many psychiatric problems. Even if a therapist holds mistaken beliefs about causation, or offers interpretations that are too speculative or overconfident, the overarching experience can still be one of patient, non-judgmental, empathic attention, along with a steady relationship and a structured space to reflect.

Something similar can happen when people visit psychics, mystics, or faith-healers. Some people come away impressed, comforted, and genuinely helped. I don’t believe this is because paranormal powers are operating in the room. Rather, at best, the “healer” may provide a comforting frame, strong social skills, confidence, gentle curiosity, and careful attention; they may pick up accurate insights from verbal and non-verbal cues; and they may communicate these ideas using techniques that resemble psychotherapy, especially when rapport is strong. There is also the Barnum (Forer) effect, in which statements feel uniquely personal and profound even though they are broad enough to apply to almost anyone. And in more controlled research settings, claims of psychic phenomena have not produced results that are reliably replicable and widely accepted, with apparent “hits” often attributable to ordinary psychological mechanisms, biases, and statistical pitfalls.

Dream analysis provides another example. There is elaborate psychoanalytic reasoning about meaning contained in dreams, and for some people this can feel helpful. But dreams are, in many ways, an unusually intimate and ambiguous data source: they borrow from daily events, memories, anxious themes, problem-solving efforts, and emotional concerns. Because dreams feel so personal, interpretations can easily feel meaningful—even when different interpretations contradict each other. I don’t believe there is a single “correct” interpretation of a dream in the way one might decode a message with a key. Dream material can be a useful framework for reflection, but the usefulness comes from the reflective process, not from dreams being literal guides.

Most psychotherapy styles share these nonspecific factors, and many bona fide approaches end up with broadly similar effectiveness when the relationship and the therapeutic frame are strong. At the same time, some specific techniques do add value in particular contexts—especially methods that directly help people change patterns of thinking and behavior and face feared situations in a structured way (an idea most explicit in CBT, but not absent from other traditions). The dark side, though, is when a therapeutic theory becomes so rigid that people misunderstand the causes of their suffering, become more confused or ashamed, or blame themselves when they don’t improve—concluding that they “failed” rather than noticing that the framework itself may be flawed.

Religions often contain many of these same nonspecific factors: kind and stable group involvement; loyal community ties; warm, altruistic mentors; regular devotional practices; a commitment to values that often reach beyond selfishness or materialism; and sermons that can contain useful moral reflections regardless of their supernatural premises. All of this is often couched in moving music, meaningful ritual, architecture that evokes reverence, and a peer group with shared language and shared life. These factors can be psychologically powerful—whether or not the doctrinal claims are literally true.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 4: The Main Thesis

With these acknowledgments in mind, I still have to come around to my main thesis here: that all religions are based on beliefs that are not literally true, with some of the stories having an idealized, embellished, or exaggerated relationship to actual historical figures or events, and with many narratives shaped by—sometimes directly adapted from—the surrounding mythologies of their time. 

We see recurring motifs across cultures: flood myths (for example, the Mesopotamian flood traditions in the Atrahasis material and the Epic of Gilgamesh, which closely resemble later biblical flood storytelling), miraculous or “virginal” conception stories in which a revered figure is portrayed as born under exceptional divine circumstances (for example, the Roman tradition that Romulus and Remus were conceived when Mars impregnated the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia), and death-and-restoration / descent-and-return narratives that can function as “proto‑resurrection” themes (for example, Osiris in Egyptian religion, or Inanna’s descent and restoration in Sumerian literature). Even the moral ideas most frequently marketed as uniquely Christian have deep pedigrees outside Christian theology. The command to “love your neighbour” predates Christianity in the Hebrew Bible; versions of the Golden Rule appear in Confucius and in ancient Indian sources; and the psychological logic of non‑retaliation—refusing to keep hatred alive by feeding it—shows up in pre‑Christian moral traditions. Christianity did not invent the moral grammar from nothing; it inherited, recombined, amplified, and ritualized themes that human cultures have been discovering for a very long time.

All religions contain stories that can have moral lessons and often reflect the history of cultural groups striving to improve justice, security, morality, happiness, and harmony in their civilizations, while reflecting on human foibles. Modern religions are not very much different from other historical mythologies, such as Greek, Roman, or Egyptian mythology: they have profoundly shaped culture, and they continue to give us interesting, thoughtful stories, but they are not generally treated as literal truths.The fact that religious narratives can be psychologically helpful, ethically suggestive, or aesthetically beautiful does not make their supernatural claims true; it makes them powerful cultural creations, which is a different category.

It is also worth noticing that while religion is ancient, many features of large-scale organized religion—public priesthoods, written canons, institutional authority, standardized doctrine, and state alignment—intensified alongside agriculture, cities, and larger political structures. In such settings, religion can function as social “glue”: a way to unify large groups, encode shared identity, and establish norms for how people should behave together in communities far larger than anything most hunter-gatherer minds evolved to manage. 

Not surprisingly, many sacred texts contain themes of intergroup conflict, invasion, conquest, boundary maintenance, and rules for cooperation—stories shaped by the political pressures, environmental constraints, and moral agendas of their times, repeatedly revised and reinterpreted, and naturally inclined to aggrandize the moral standing of the home tribe. In that way, religions can function like other art forms—literature, theatre, poetry, film—sometimes illuminating human experience, sometimes acting as tools of persuasion, and sometimes sliding into outright propaganda.

People become deeply attached to religious beliefs through powerful psychological forces. Most of all, there is longstanding commitment—often beginning in childhood—bolstered by parents, friends, admired community figures, and the sheer comfort of familiarity. It is as though roots form around a belief system, growing deeper over time, intertwined with identity, memory, and the need for coherence. Weakening those roots can feel like a threat to one’s sense of self, one’s social safety, and one’s personal integrity. For many, it would also be embarrassing—or even humiliating—to admit that something they have honored for decades might be false or misguided; so the mind protects itself by doubling down on prior commitments.

We see versions of this phenomenon far beyond religion, including in medicine and science, where people like to imagine that evidence automatically wins. Even among highly educated experts, new frameworks are often resisted when they threaten status, identity, professional sunk costs, or a lifetime of being “the one who knows.” History is full of examples: the Copernican move toward a Sun-centred system; the germ theory of infectious disease; the slow acceptance of plate tectonics; the bacterial role of Helicobacter pylori in peptic ulcer disease; Boltzmann’s atomic theory and statistical mechanics; Cecilia Payne’s early demonstration that stars are composed primarily of hydrogen (and helium); and the recognition of prion diseases as a genuinely new kind of infectious process. 

In each case, the evidence did not simply land on neutral minds; it collided with human psychology—pride, fear, loyalty, identity, and the discomfort of having to revise one’s story about reality.

At times, the advent or widespread adoption of a new religion has been followed by improvements in a society’s stability. But the reasons for this, as I will argue, often have less to do with the truth of any particular doctrine, or the real existence of any divinity with imagined powers, and more to do with what I would call “nonspecific factors”: the social technology of shared rituals, shared identity, shared moral language, mutual aid, and coordinated behavior—effects that can be psychologically and culturally potent even when the beliefs are false.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 3: Benefits of Religion

Discussions about religion from a psychological—or more broadly scientific—point of view require great care. For most believers, faith is not just an intellectual position. It is a lived emotional landscape, developed over a lifetime. Religious beliefs are often taught in early childhood, and they can represent a fundamental bond and a shared culture with parents and ancestors, sometimes going back centuries.

Religious stories, passages from religious texts, and familiar rituals can become like a “native language,” in the sense of the fluency and familiarity people develop through repeated exposure and practice over many years. Shared religious beliefs can be a bridge to memories of parents—alongside memories of fishing together, playing baseball, going camping, playing music, or cooking together. In that sense, religion is not simply an “idea.” It is the atmosphere of the family home—a mood, a shared vocabulary, and a living link to one’s past.

Unlike hobbies, however, religion carries a far heavier weight. A parent might be mildly disappointed if a child dislikes baseball; with religion, the stakes are much higher. Parents may insist—with fear, sadness, anger, or a sense of emergency—that their children must remain within the same faith. If the children stray, guilt can be induced in ways that are far deeper than ordinary family disagreements. In extreme cases, the divergence leads to estrangement or disowning. It is hard to overstate how high the emotional cost can be, in some families, for simply asking religious questions out loud.

A huge reason why many people are religious is because their most beloved people have been religious: parents, grandparents, mentors, teachers, community leaders, or admired public figures (for me, someone like Desmond Tutu or Martin Luther King). When these beloved figures explain their moral courage, comfort, or meaning as flowing from God, the religion becomes fused with the goodness of the person. Out of love and respect, many people continue the same faith—not because they have evaluated the evidence with fresh eyes, but because questioning the belief can feel like questioning the beloved person. It can feel, emotionally, like an insult to one’s parents, or a betrayal of one’s ancestors, or a rejection of one’s own story. Over time, religion can become so interwoven with identity that challenging it feels less like an intellectual inquiry and more like a renunciation of a precious part of oneself.

Beyond family attachment, there is the brain itself: the human mind is remarkably capable of mystical experience. Many people have had moments—alone or in groups—of awe, presence, unity, transcendence, or “spiritual certainty.” Whatever one concludes philosophically, the raw fact is that such states are part of the normal range of human experience. And they can be intensified or triggered by particular brain states: by drugs that act strongly on serotonin and dopamine systems, by sleep deprivation, by stress, and in some neurological conditions. Wilder Penfield’s neurosurgical stimulation work in the mid‑20th century, for example, illustrates how focal stimulation can produce vivid sensory phenomena and “dreamy states” that feel subjectively profound. In temporal lobe epilepsy, similarly, some people report intense subjective or spiritual states in association with seizure activity.

A point that matters here—psychiatrically—is that the brain constantly seeks to make sense of things. When something unusual happens in perception, emotion, or bodily feeling, the mind strains to explain it. Often a mystical explanation feels logical even when the actual cause is biological.  A powerful feeling state can be interpreted as “God,” “fate,” “destiny,” “the universe speaking,” or “a presence,” depending on one’s cultural vocabulary and expectations.

The same instinct often fuels belief in other mystical phenomena, such as ghosts, spirits, or psychic abilities. These beliefs can act as a lens for understanding reality, where coincidences are read as evidence of a hidden world. This can make life feel “magical” in a deeply satisfying way, offering a sense of specialness and wonder akin to the feeling one gets from a fantasy story like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.

The vocabulary we use to describe these states matters. Many religious phrases are woven into everyday language; other words and symbols have roots in ancient mythology. For example, our word “panic” comes from the Greek god Pan, and our month “January” is named for the Roman god Janus. Language forms a lens—deeply ingrained in the brain through memory infused with emotion—through which we describe and interpret experience; in a religious household, one naturally develops the habit of interpreting events with religious references in mind, because those are the interpretive tools one has practiced. And historically, in some homes and communities, scripture was not merely a weekly reading—it was a central text around which literacy and moral education were organized.

Religion has also served, in many families and cultures, as a framework for moral development. Lessons about how to be kind, how to deal with guilt or mistakes (“sin”), how to navigate conflict, how to be a decent citizen, how to face suffering and loss—these have often been taught through weekly sermons, study of sacred texts, and the social modeling that occurs in a community of adults trying (at least some of the time) to be better people. Daily habits—such as saying grace—can instill a rhythm of gratitude. Religious services often use architecture, music, and ritual to evoke awe and reverence. And it would be dishonest to deny the artistic beauty and power that has emerged from religious contexts: sacred music, religious painting and sculpture, the architecture and acoustics of churches, cathedrals, temples, mosques. Many of my own favorite pieces of music are deeply tied to that history.

It is no surprise, then, that for many people their happiest memories—friendship, loyalty, meaningful service, celebration, “ecstatic” spine-tingling moments of being emotionally moved—are associated with church or religious community. Many believers interpret these peak emotional states as manifestations of God. As a psychiatrist, I see them as natural human emotional states that can occur whenever there is meaningful absorption shared by a group of like-minded people: in a cathedral, at a concert, at a political rally, in nature, or even at a sports event. The emotion is real; the interpretation is culturally shaped.

This communal power is often concentrated through the figure of the minister. Some ministers are wonderful orators: gifted storytellers with compelling voices, humor, and genuine moral seriousness—sometimes with a breadth of knowledge about history and literature that makes their sermons a kind of free education in the humanities. Some of the great orators in modern history, such as Martin Luther King, were ministers. Churches have been one of the few sustained modern venues where people regularly gather to hear impassioned, ethically themed rhetoric delivered with skill and intensity. Mind you, preaching can be used for darker purposes: demagogues can weaponize charisma, spectacle, and group emotion to fuel intolerance.

Religion can also function as refuge. Many people who feel lonely, adrift, or ungrounded are drawn to a religious or spiritual group because it offers instant community: new friendships, mentorship, comforting rituals, structure, sometimes even material support, and a ready-made language for meaning. This differs from many other community organizations because the commitment is thicker: it is not merely “we play badminton together,” but “we share a destiny that goes beyond this life.” It's a little bit like an orphan finding a home and then adopting the adoptive family’s beliefs.

This is also part of why religious (and ideological) communities can become so resilient: they meet deep social and psychological needs. Research on radicalization and extremist commitment—work associated with researchers such as Nafees Hamid—has explored how peer influence, identity, and social exclusion can harden commitment in tightly bound groups. The point here is not to equate ordinary religious life with extremism, but to recognize a shared human vulnerability: when belonging and identity are fused to belief, questioning belief can feel like social annihilation.

It would also be unfair not to acknowledge the amount of genuine charitable work done by some churches, including some quite conservative ones. In downtown Vancouver, for example, a well-known fundamentalist church has helped provide temporary winter shelter for street-involved adults; and on a much larger scale the Salvation Army reports thousands of shelter, detox, addiction, mental-health, supportive-housing, healthcare, and corrections beds available each night across its Canadian programs, millions of meals distributed, and large numbers of street-outreach interactions plus housing and employment referrals. The financial scale is substantial as well: Statistics Canada reports that religious organizations received about $4.9 billion in donations in 2023, and the Salvation Army’s most recent audited statements reported roughly $1.17 billion in consolidated revenue. Still, this needs to be interpreted carefully. These figures do not mean that all religious giving goes directly to the poor, and church charity can at times be paternalistic or conditional—tied to sobriety rules, doctrinal messaging, or a subtle expectation of loyalty. Nor is this benevolence unique to religion: secular charities, food banks, municipal programs, and public agencies also provide shelter, low-cost food, outreach, housing support, and addiction services. So the charitable success of churches is real, and sometimes admirable, but it demonstrates the power of organized community, volunteer labour, and pooled resources more than it demonstrates the truth of any supernatural claim.

Religious beliefs, services, and rituals have helped countless people cope psychologically with death and loss. You can have less fear about death—your own death, or the death of someone you love—if you believe that death is an entry point to another world, and that separation is temporary. I think it is a psychological skill, for any person, to practice acceptance of the fact that everything ends: every pleasant experience, every day and night, every song, every meal, every breath, every firework, every life, every mountain. They all have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then they are gone—sometimes literally in a puff of smoke. It is entropy in action: one of the underlying realities of the universe. On some level, religion can interrupt that acceptance by bypassing finality with an imagined eternity. This calms fear. But it can also be a kind of avoidance—a comforting story that softens grief by blunting the truth.

It is easy to see, then, why the idea of “taking away” religion can feel like taking away a rich cultural inheritance and a shield against despair. Many people imagine that without religion they would be left adrift, empty, or nihilistic. I do not believe that is a necessary outcome, but I do believe it is a real fear—and a psychologically understandable one.

There is another layer as well: persecution and trauma. Many individuals and communities have been oppressed because of their religion, sometimes brutally—often by other religious groups, including rival branches of the same tradition. This happened to my own ancestors, most recently in my grandmother’s generation near the beginning of the Soviet era. There were experiences of fear and brutality that she could never speak about for the rest of her life. Trauma cements belief.

Mind you, people who questioned the religious beliefs of their time have also been persecuted and executed through the ages. The point is simply that fear—whether fear of outside violence, or fear of internal exclusion—can make belief feel like survival.

Finally, we should acknowledge the stigma surrounding the word “secular.” To many ears, it evokes coldness: a painting devoid of color, music devoid of emotion. It can evoke memories of totalitarian states that discouraged religion. Some people equate secularism or atheism with nihilism, criminality, or a lack of moral grounding. Many believers sincerely think that without God there would be moral decay.

Politics amplifies this. In many contexts, public piety is rewarded, and some leaders clearly perform religiosity to secure loyalty. We see this today in American politics, where leaders with life histories that are far removed from traditional piety can simply hold up a Bible for a photo op—a performative gesture that successfully rallies support from religious followers by trading on the symbols of their faith.

All of this is why critique of religion, to be intellectually honest, must begin with an honest accounting of religion’s benefits: the attachment, the community, the rituals, the moral vocabulary, the beauty, the refuge, the buffering against death. These are real goods, even when the supernatural claims do not align with the evidence. And understanding these benefits is not a concession—it is a prerequisite for explaining why religion persists, and why leaving it can be psychologically and socially costly.

Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 2: Mennonite Roots

My ancestors were part of a Protestant Christian denomination and cultural group known as the Mennonites, which originated in the Netherlands in the 1500s. While similar to other Protestant denominations, Mennonites stood out for endorsing pacifism and for avoiding participation in war, except as medics or to assist refugees. When I was young, I always admired this stance, though I have come to realize that there were situations, such as in World War II, in which this "conscientious objector" policy meant that other people had to risk or lose their lives for the greater good, while members of the church remained at home in safety—so this pacifism was not always admirable.

There was cultural unity among the Mennonites, migrating together for hundreds of years, maintaining their language of origin, Low German (Plattdeutsch), and other shared traditions. Such cultural unity is admirable, but there are downsides, such as reduced genetic diversity leading to an increased rate of heritable diseases. In groups with a relatively small and insular founding population, marrying within the community is genetically comparable to marrying one’s third cousin—or even a closer relative than that if families are more tightly connected.

Many Mennonites migrated east from the Netherlands to maintain cultural and religious freedom, settling as farmers in Ukraine for over 100 years. Eventually, most relocated again—under the trauma and duress of war and persecution—to various regions in North America, such as southern Manitoba. Some Mennonite subgroups adopted practices comparable to the Amish, while most others became quite mainstream Protestant denominations, often leaning toward conservatism or fundamentalism, though some became more liberal or progressive. The branch my family was most recently part of was comparable to other common modern Christian Protestant denominations. As with many families, the culture of my family over many centuries has been shaped by its religious involvement. Varieties of religion carried in a family are woven intimately into the family’s history, culture, and values. Much of this history is something to feel proud of.

During my childhood, we attended church frequently. For the most part, these were positive experiences. One virtue of weekly church attendance is the opportunity for moral reflection. Sermons contained messages about dealing with difficult issues or about being a better person. Some sermons appealed more to the intellectual side of the audience, with references to academic theologians or philosophers; others would appeal to the more emotional or sentimental side. Many contained moments of gentle humor or playfulness, and many deliberately reached out to children. Sermons were based on Bible passages, many of which were good foundations for moral reflection and also had a poetic quality. Members of the congregation would participate in the services, often volunteering to read the Bible passage aloud. I was frequently moved by stories about Jesus—a gentle, loving, humble, heroic figure who accomplished amazing, transformative things not through superhuman strength or military prowess, but through wisdom, love, and self-sacrificial devotion to others.

The congregation was always reminded to care for members who had experienced recent loss or illness, or to celebrate those who had experienced a recent joy, such as a marriage or birth. In some church services, perhaps during prayer or music, some people would enter a type of joyful trance, absorbed in a "flow" state. This kind of regular experience can be profoundly healthy: it offers structured moral reflection with an attitude of gratitude, service, and reverence, couched in a loving and supportive community. It encourages people to be aware of—and involved in—the joys and travails of other people’s lives.

However, this format was biased toward people who could meet strict behavioral expectations and who possessed a good attention span; those with ADHD symptoms, cognitive issues, or physical problems making it difficult to sit for an hour would surely have found many church services stifling. (I recall many unfortunate children during my childhood who were frequently scolded due to their impatience). I think this is one of the reasons why some modern fundamentalist churches, which put on a more exciting and emotionally dynamic show with charismatic preachers, rock bands, and other performers, have been so appealing, especially to the younger generation.

I also attended a religious high school, with significant exposure to daily religious practice and education. Once again, this was quite positive, since the teachers were for the most part kind, thoughtful people. The motivation of most of this education was to help students grow in kindness, morality, and ethical leadership while being humbly conscious of important local and global issues. However, I also noted that the frequency of bullying, conduct problems, and social ostracism among students was no different from what one would find in a public secular high school. Alongside educational content in religion, there were meaningful, enjoyable, and comforting practices almost every day, such as choral singing, “chapel time,” and opportunities for community volunteering. I only noticed major gaps in parts of the science and social studies curriculum years later.

At times my family went to a fundamentalist Christian camp in Minnesota for a summer holiday. I have fond memories of camping, being out in nature, camp songs, and friendly people. One family there had a wonderful little dog that I loved. I was excited about the use of tambourines by the musicians. People were engrossed by charismatic preachers and energetic sermons every day; many were in an almost trancelike state of excitement or passion fueled by group energy, music, and prayer. Some people would get baptized in the lake; for many, this was emotionally moving and transformative (“born again”), accompanied by tears of joy.

In my young adult life, I also appreciated the philosophical contributions of many religious thinkers. C.S. Lewis was a favorite (following a pleasant introduction during my early childhood, reading his children’s books aloud with my mother), as were Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer. In my final undergraduate year, I took a course covering historical theology and its manifestations through art and literature, looking at Western religious themes through the ages. This course became one of my intellectual foundations, resonating with my personality and interests, and combining the study of philosophy, art, literature, and history to deepen my understanding of the world.

Prayer and other symbolic actions can have a peaceful, meditative quality which is psychologically beneficial. It can be comforting to know that someone is praying for your well-being, and it can feel meaningful to pray for someone else’s well-being. (However, controlled studies, such as Benson’s 2006 STEP study, have not found reliable benefits of intercessory prayer beyond placebo effects).

Many church buildings are enjoyable spaces due to their architecture and acoustics, and their association with calm, comfort, safety, refuge, and transcendence. Church buildings in much of the world have historically been architectural gems in the middle of communities, sometimes the most visible or distinctive physical feature of the neighborhood.

I want to emphasize that I did not have a negative or bitter experience of religion in my childhood that led me to my current stance on this subject. There must be great respect and sensitivity for the many intimate, positive experiences of cultural enrichment and meaning that religion—or what others might call “spirituality”—brings to people in their own life history and in their family history.

 Next Chapter

The Psychology of Religion, 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 are not true. And despite their capacity for building community and moral leadership, religions have also caused profound harm to both individuals and society. The chapters that follow move from my personal history to the psychology of belief, a review of what science teaches us about natural history, then to the social harms of dogma, and finally to a reflection on how to preserve the positive aspects of religion.

During my childhood, I was drawn to many attractive features of religious life: the warmth of a "church family," an altruistic focus on service, and striving towards ideals—love, justice, forgiveness—personified in a gentle, loving deity.  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 create a feeling of specialness and awe. They suggest that hidden powers might guide 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: 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 many benefits—friendship, structure, material support, and safety—but at the price of intellectual narrowness. This process is not uniquely religious; is is an ordinary human tendency that religion can intensify and sanctify.

In some fundamentalist communities, the same 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. They may buffer loneliness for insiders while amplifying prejudice. The conviction that one’s group possesses divinely mandated truth creates pressure to treat other traditions as inferior—a recipe for arrogance that weakens the opportunity to learn with humility from other cultures.

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 injure. Understanding the natural world—from evolution to astrophysics to the brain—does not have to leave us nihilistic, in fact I feel that appreciation of science deepens our humanity.  We can preserve the best ethical and communal aspects of religion without accepting its fictions as literal truth.

Faith is deeply shaped by identity, and this process develops over a lifetime; accepting evidence that challenges this identity can feel like betraying one's community. So it can be tempting to stick to the status quo within one's faith system.  However, a process of questioning dogma can lead to a better life for both individuals and for groups. 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.

Next Chapter

Reflections on Pandemic Management

During the pandemic I wrote a lot, in terms of analysis and encouragement of public health measures.  Some of my contributions were on this Blog, others were on Twitter.  To this day, I think that the measures taken to manage the pandemic were for the most part necessary and successful, for example restricted activity, masking, and vaccine policy.  

The COVID vaccines in particular have been one of the great achievements in the history of medicine.  

But here are some ideas about ways I think it could have been done better: in sharing this I know I run the risk of dabbling into territory that many would consider outside my lane of expertise.  That was a constant frustration for public health experts during the pandemic.  

However, I was conscious all the way through the pandemic that we did not adequately use the most powerful tool available in science and medicine to evaluate the effectiveness and optimize the efficiency of an intervention: the Randomized Controlled Trial.   

And also in dealing with people who were extremely resistant to adopting mandated restrictions or vaccines, there could have been a way to manage this situation that would have helped rapidly gather much better data about COVID itself, protect the population, while also appeasing people who did not want to get vaccinated or follow restrictions.  

Randomized Controlled Studies (or "Randomized Controlled Trials -- RCTs") 

There were many RCTs during the pandemic, but in my opinion there could have been much more done here, in almost every stage, and there could have been massive public investment to get this done, which subsequently could have saved billions of dollars of economic loss, in addition to saving lives.  

For example, it was very clear from basic science knowledge that masking was valuable to reduce viral contagion.  When some people raised the idea of doing more RCTs on masking, it was met with some resistance, as though we were wasting everyone's time in a dangerous way.  Some used a comparison with doing an RCT of using parachutes when jumping out of an airplane -- obviously this would be recklessly inappropriate, and the entire placebo group would die!  Masks, like parachutes, are obviously effective, and mask proponents made a reasonable case that randomizing people such that a placebo group would not get masks would be needlessly dangerous.  But an RCT does not require that there be a "placebo" wing!  It only requires that the study be randomized to compare one treatment with another.  To follow the parachute analogy, it could be to randomize people jumping out of an airplane to receive one of two different types of parachutes, each of which an accepted standard; or for them to use two different timings for releasing parachutes, if each of these was also within an accepted standard.   

In the case of masks, there could have been RCTs of using different types of masks (e.g. procedure vs. N95), different timings of masking (indoor only vs continuous outside the home), or different replacement times for masks (e.g. re-using N95 masks for days vs replacing them every use), or different N95 use details (e.g. receiving formal instruction on technique vs. not).  And early in the pandemic there was an N95 shortage.  One of the ways to deal with this could have been to randomly distribute the timing of the N95 supply, so that some entire communities would receive an adequate supply first.  Then the entire community would use N95s while adjacent communities would temporarily make do with other types of masks.  Then the disease prevalence rates and hospital admission rates could have been compared between adjacent communities.  This type of design could have been tremendously valuable, since mask use has not only an individual benefit for infection control, but has a collective impact, akin mathematically to the effect of vaccines -- if everyone in the population has a modestly reduced probability of infection, then it could translate to a massive reduction in community prevalence.  If such a study had shown reduced infection and hospitalization rates in the better masked areas, it could have propelled a much more urgent and timely effort to manufacture better masks for everyone, and in the medium term the whole community could have had better access to N95s, saving thousands of lives.   But since such studies were lacking, there was enough doubt about mask effectiveness or effect size to delay the massive investment needed to increase mask production.  

When RCTs are done, it does not settle questions once and for all: in good science, we are always repeating, tweaking, and refining.  New RCTs would have to be done after the first ones, with different details being looked at, or simply for replication.  

One type of mask use behaviour which should have been better guided by evidence, is the use of masks outdoors.  I still see many people outside with their masks, or people wearing them in their cars on the way to work.  It was pretty clear from the ventilation evidence that outdoor mask use was very likely unnecessary, unless one were in very close proximity to crowds, or doing a lot of talking up close.  Perhaps masks would still be needed in playgrounds etc. but certainly not for walks at the beach alone or with just a few people close to you.  

Similarly, RCTs could have been done on ventilation control in buildings.  The basic science on ventilation was one of the most important and underappreciated areas of science during the pandemic.  There was a wonderful group of engineers who had done great work in this area.  Ventilation improvement was also a totally non-controversial intervention:  regardless of one's views about masks or vaccines or restrictions etc., I think everybody would welcome the idea of having better fresh air inside our homes and workplaces.  Ventilation improvements involved air filtration (such as with HEPA or MERV-13 HVAC filters) but also increased fresh air replacement rates.   But the engineers again used the parachute analogy when there were challenges to do RCTs, arguing that their work was established basic science, which didn't need to be tested in an RCT.  But once again, if RCTs had been done, of whole communities which made ventilation improvements, vs communities which did not, we could have much more quickly found a "signal" of improved infection control, and then made much more rapid investments in ventilation improvement technology for everyone.  

In all of these studies, the data to gather should always have been not only rates of infection, but also most importantly rates of severe disease.  Some interventions such as masks arguably could cause a reduction in infection rate, but perhaps in cases of people getting infected despite mask use, they would have inhaled a smaller inoculum, and possibly could subsequently have developed milder disease, since the immune system would have had a little bit more time to respond to the virus before getting overwhelmed.  The question of whether inoculum size impacts disease severity is yet another one which I don't think is well-enough answered by the research.  

The Covid Hotel 

The "COVID hotel" idea was something I proposed early on as a thought experiment at the very least, and there was at least one other scientist in the US who shared this idea as well... but it was received very coldly by experts--when I gently suggested it I got the sense that they thought it was scandalously inappropriate or unethical.  But this idea could have saved thousands of lives, and could have helped gather optimized, crystal-clear data about COVID in terms of the mechanism of transmission, the effectiveness of masks, the impact of ventilation, etc.  This information could have been obtained within a few months, and then could have helped focus optimal interventions with much better clarity and urgency, and to mobilize public investments in such things as masks etc. much sooner.   

Here's the idea: if people refused to be vaccinated, or insisted on having unrestricted freedoms, instead of punishing them using the justice system, they could instead opt to check into a "covid hotel" in which they would choose, with informed consent about risks, to be deliberately infected with COVID under controlled conditions, with optimal medical support available.  Then they would stay in the hotel for a few weeks under quarantine until they were no longer infectious.  Upon checking out, they would have a much lower risk of spreading COVID--the risk would be comparable to a person who had been vaccinated.  In this environment, there could be meticulously controlled experiments to determine if COVID could be transmitted through an airborne route (perhaps all the time, perhaps only in some cases of "superspreaders" etc.), or through a surface contamination route (after all this time, it is not crystal clear that surface contamination was ever a major route of spread).  And there could have been masking studies in this environment to determine if masks (including styles of mask usage and mask type such as N95 vs procedure masks, as well as the proportion of people wearing masks,  etc.) reduced the likelihood of contagion, or reduced the ensuing severity of disease (since the masks even if they didn't prevent infection might at least reduce the inoculum size).  Similarly there could have been meticulous ventilation control studies, to see if improved ventilation reduced contagion.  

In this environment, participants could even be offered to choose modalities of treatment of their choice, delivered by their practitioner of choice. They could try the "alternative treatments" in vogue if they wished, or opt for standard medical care.  This way, there could have been much more rapid evidence to establish the impact of these alternative treatments (all of these alternative remedies have been utterly disproven, but this could have happened much more quickly and persuasively in the "COVID hotel" environment).  

Some of the benefits of this idea would have been much, much better quality data about mask effectiveness, mode of contagion, effectiveness of ventilation improvement, etc.  And there would have been much less spreading of COVID to vulnerable people by people who refused to adhere to public health guidelines.  And there would have been much less upset from people who wanted more freedoms.  In fact these people, instead of being vilified, could have felt like true heroes, even from a scientific point of view.  The cost of this, of course, would have been that people who chose the "COVID hotel" route would have been much more likely to die, or to have severe long-term consequences of COVID.  But this would have been their choice, and if they didn't check into the COVID hotel, they would have subjected themselves to the same risk in the community, with less medical support and therefore an even higher likelihood of medical harm, and all the while they would have spread COVID to many more people, without contributing anything useful to the world's knowledge about the disease.   There are many other examples in life of people who are willing do risky activities, following informed consent: for example, joining the military, the fire department, or doing risky sports such as hang gliding.  

Animal Studies

There were animal studies during COVID.  It's a sensitive topic, since it is important to respect the rights of animals.  But COVID affected the animal world as well, and the research about contagion would have led to benefit for not only human populations but animals as well.  One very particular type of animal study that was never done well enough was to use an animal model to demonstrate spreading modality.  For example, the ventilation outflow from hospital rooms with human COVID patients could have been pumped into an animal enclosure of susceptible animals.  If these animals developed COVID it would have been tremendously strong evidence for airborne transmission in humans.  If, in a follow-up experiment, the same ventilation pipe passed through a HEPA filter first, and then into the animal enclosure, and if these animals did not contract COVID, it would have been incredibly powerful evidence that a simple filtration technique could prevent contagion.   If animals were simply allowed to visit hospital rooms where COVID patients had spent a few days, but who had left, and where the air in these rooms had been replaced using ventilation, then it could have helped determine if surface contamination unequivocally could cause COVID spreading.  It is quite possible that surface spreading was never a major problem, while airborne spreading was a huge problem, hence efforts would have been directed towards ventilation rather than as much surface cleaning.  But we would have needed the research to prove this.  

Vaccine / Restriction Timing

Restrictions were deployed in the pandemic quite wisely, particularly with a view to prevent the nightmare of ICU and hospitalization overflow.  For some individuals, going beyond mandates, they voluntarily maintained restrictions for months or years following vaccination.  One interesting study issue could have been to randomize people to maintain strict restrictions after vaccination for a long period of time, vs. ending restrictions for those people starting about 4 weeks after each vaccination.  This would have caused the unrestricted individuals to have greater exposure to ambient circulating COVID strains, but this would have occurred in the context of good immunity.  As the vaccine strains kept changing, the vaccinated people would continue having new exposures with new strains, and especially as 3-6 months passed after their vaccines, they most likely would have had some mostly mild cases of COVID along the way.  But I wonder if this process would have in the long term led to improved, robust immunity to multiple strains, with the same or lower long-term health risk, while also improving community freedoms, compared to the situation of maintaining continuous long-term restricted behaviour.  In a sense, this idea would suggest that the vaccine and annual boosters would be the primary preventative defense, but then exposures to the ambient COVID strains in the community would subsequently act as "boosters" for previously vaccinated people, and in the long term (measured over 3-5 years or more) lead to equivalent or better health outcomes, with fewer restrictions needed.  Conversely, the studies might instead show that maintaining more restrictions over the longer term would have led to better long-term outcomes.  We can't know for sure, since the studies were never done.

Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the pandemic, there has been increased polarization in the world about public health measures of all types.  We are seeing decreased rates of vaccination against other diseases, and we are seeing a return of various diseases which had previously been nearly eradicated, such as measles.  Just as with Covid, most people who get these diseases will recover ok, but there will be needless cases of severe disease and death, including among young children.  I hope that the field of public health can work hard on the sociopolitical aspects of their profession as well as the epidemiological parts.  But I also wish that some of the best scientific tools, such as RCTs, could be done much more quickly and on a much larger scale than what we saw during the worst years of COVID.  

The Harms of Social Media

 Social media is a miraculous invention:  a way to stay in touch with friends and family, to share thoughts and pictures and videos and common interests, at any moment with perfect convenience, literally with the push of a button (actually, even the force of pushing a button is not actually required, it's just touching a piece of glass!).  

It is an electronic extension of ancient modes of human communication: instead of sharing stories and starting conversations around a campfire with a group of fellow hunter-gatherers or villagers, we have an electronic campfire, which allows 24/7 contact with almost everyone in the whole world.  

Human interaction and communication is a need, and our brains are designed to be very sensitive to social stimuli.  

There are many benefits of using social media, but it is in my opinion very harmful, both on an individual level and as a national or worldwide community.  

Social media companies of course want you to spend more time on their apps.  The algorithms are designed to feed you information that would interest you more, and keep you looking for longer.  But this isn't necessarily good or healthy!  It's the same mechanism that feeds addiction or any unhealthy habit.  It's like candy for the brain.  The algorithms are not designed to give balanced information, or to help people avoid getting sucked into rabbit holes of misinformation, or to stay healthy, or to foster harmony in communities, they are simply designed to optimize time spent on the apps.  

So people are spending huge amounts of time surfing on social media or other scrolling information sites.  "Doomscrolling" is a very common activity.  For children, there are clear psychological harms--Jonathan Haidt's latest book "The Anxious Generation" is a good place to start reviewing the data on this.  Especially for children, the social comparison that is fed by social media is almost guaranteed to at once absorb attention, but also make people feel bad about themselves.  This could result in an increased rate in mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety disorders.  

And there are secondary costs, as Haidt has also shown:  every hour spent on an app means one less hour doing some other healthy or meaningful human activity, such as playing outside, going for a walk, doing a hobby, studying, conversing with friends in person, or reading a book.  App use fosters both psychological harm and damage to physical health as well, by reducing the amount of exercise we're getting, sometimes interfering with sleep (people are often up late at night looking at their phones; aside from the psychological component driving this, the bright light from the screens further interferes with normal sleep).   

I spent a few years using Twitter.  I am thankful that I stopped using it by the time it had changed names a few years ago.  There were many positives of Twitter for me, professionally:  it was a way to stay informed about the ideas and research of numerous experts in various fields of interest, and to hear their ideas instantaneously, rather than waiting for journal articles to come out (sometimes years later).  At times one could interact directly with the experts.  And one could add on other peripheral or hobby interests, and just feel better informed every day.  During the pandemic I felt Twitter was a good way both to follow news of critical matters daily, but also to contribute a public message as a professional.  

But I ended up spending more and more time on Twitter.  Even during a hike outside, I would find myself pulling out my phone and checking.  Hours were spent on the app that could have been spent reading a book or a journal or a newspaper, or doing some fun activity.  And as I discovered over time, many of the interactions on Twitter were frustrating -- often you couldn't really have a conversation with people.  It was rare for an expert to actually interact with you.   The app created an illusion of connectivity, while very little was actually there.  The one advantage it did have was convenience, and efficiency in terms of cultivating a community of like-minded peers.  Such a community can sometimes be useful, but at worst this feeds the worst tendencies in society, of polarization and division.  

From a psychiatric point of view, I believe it is important to assess internet and social media use.  It should be an essential component of any psychiatric history.  

Consideration should always be given to weaning from social media, to try a few months entirely without it.  You may experience "withdrawal" from it, but after this passes you may feel more free.  If you fear that you'll become less informed, remind yourself that you can just read magazines or newspapers once a week, or once a month, and most likely remain as informed, or even more, compared to doomscrolling.  

On a societal level, I understand that one of the principles at play here is freedom of speech.  If governments were to regulate social media companies this would be seen as interfering with freedoms.  But if we consider that social media and many other internet sites are analogous to addictive products, such as cigarettes or alcohol, maybe we could increase the amount of regulation about how these products are marketed or accessed, especially to children.  

One of Haidt's ideas is to insist that children in school should not be allowed to have their phones during school hours.  I think this is very good idea.  Of course, modern education often makes use of electronic media, but this could be provided in schools using other devices that would not allow kids to be surfing social media during their classroom hours.  

This idea could be extended into adult life, to invite people to set their phones aside much more often.  

Grocery Shopping & Mental Health

 Good nutrition is essential for physical and mental health.  

But changing one's diet is probably not going to cure depression or make your anxiety go away.  In fact, I'm concerned about various trends in health care which exaggerate the effect of dietary change.  For example, there are programs run by professionals with titles such as "food as medicine" in which patients are taught about healthy dietary practices.  But the therapeutic value here is very modest, especially if compared to a well-controlled placebo condition.  It may be beneficial to have nutritional education, dietary change, and regular supportive meetings supervised by a professional, but there would be a lot of nonspecific factors involved here, including a benevolent structure, group support, empathy, and focus on general healthy lifestyle habits other than nutrition, which contribute to clinical improvements.  And sometimes these programs end up recommending various supplements or "alternative" nutritional habits which have a very questionable evidence base.  

The basics of healthy nutrition, however, are simple.  There is a lot of room for individual differences in preferences or restrictions, but the foundation of a healthy diet is vegetables (especially fresh green vegetables); fruit; nuts; whole grains and other complex carbs with high fiber; beans, lentils, and other legumes; lean protein; healthy fats such as olive oil; fish; and much less red meat than the average North American consumes.   High-sugar and simple-carb foods such as pastries, cookies, cakes, candy, etc. should be greatly reduced--often if you've reduced these a lot, you can enjoy the occasional sweet treat even more, without needing to have as much.  One should cut back on the amount of salt.  Ultraprocessed foods, such as chips, processed breakfast cereals,  instant noodles, soft drinks, and fast foods, should be avoided.  

These basics do not lead to some kind of unpleasant, spartan lifestyle, these are the foundations for a wonderful, sensually pleasing diet in which every meal can be a joy of life, with no end of variety possible, from simple snacks to daily meals to gourmet adventures.  The enjoyment of this type of diet involves not only the nutritional benefits, but also the process of shopping (for example at farmers' markets, produce shops, or berry picking) and meal preparation (in the kitchen).  These activities touch upon basic joys and skills of life that have been part of human ancestral history for thousands of years.    

When wandering through a major grocery store the other day, I was struck by how hard it can be to make healthy choices.  These stores have incredible variety.  It's easy to find all the perfect, healthy foods listed above.  But the problem is that junk food, ultraprocessed foods, candy, etc. are all marketed aggressively.  Whole rows of the grocery store are dedicated to junk food.  Shelf after shelf of chips, cookies, soft drinks, or even "fake health foods" such as sugary cereals or "vitamin water."  At the cashier, there is yet another opportunity to buy chocolate bars and other candy.  Even in the areas with healthier foods, such as the produce section or the aisles with baking products, there is often a display of some kind of ultraprocessed food or junk food on special.  Even health-oriented grocery stores such as Whole Foods feature similar marketing.   It's the same even at pharmacies which sell food products.  And even in a hospital, whether it be at the cafeteria or at vending machines, there is an endless supply of junk food.  Lunches served at schools, or food provided after sports events, often consist of pizza, burgers, and cake.  When my own children were going to elementary school, I noted the common practice of parents sending their kids to school every day with a lunch box containing a chocolate bar, a bag of chips, and either a juice box (filled with sugary fruit juice), chocolate milk, or even a Coke.  

Junk food is designed to be enjoyable to eat, so that people will buy more of it.  In this way it is comparable to addictive products such as cigarettes.  Unlike cigarettes, there are no restrictions about how they are marketed.  And the companies manufacturing these products, and the grocery stores selling them, are earning billions.   So we have a whole generation of people, including young children, who are basically addicted to junk food.  The health consequences of this include much higher rates of obesity, as well as a likely lifelong, chronic decline in physical and mental health.  Another consequence is a decline in culinary culture--many people just aren't interested in the artistry of food, if they are addicted to processed products.  

One of my interests this past year has been learning Chinese, and as part of this I like to watch Mandarin language movies and TV series -- the Chinese culinary culture has probably been the healthiest one in the world, and likely is a factor contributing to better health and longevity in this population.  But even in China it appears that ultraprocessed foods are disturbingly common.  In modern Chinese movies, we often see the characters eating pizza (it seems a common North American chain restaurant is popular there) or visiting a grocery store, the shelves stocked floor to ceiling with bags of chips and instant noodles etc.  So even in the healthiest culinary culture in the world, the bad nutritional habits of the West have crept in.  

What can be done about this?  Aside from individual education on this matter, and striving to make healthier choices, I think that public measures can help.  Other countries in the world are experimenting with having taxes on sugary foods, ultraprocessed foods, etc., and restricting marketing, especially to children.  It's a similar approach as we used to help reduce cigarette smoking in the population--it didn't require banning anything (and taking away anyone's freedom), it just required restrictions on advertising, display, marketing, and introducing a tax on the product.  Another public measure that I would love to see is a subsidy on healthy foods such as vegetables, so that everyone could afford them more easily.  This would have benefits not only for individual health and nutrition, it would also be beneficial for the environment, for farmers, and would be economically more efficient.  

Reflections on Religion: Reference List

Attenborough, D. (Narrator). (2006). Planet Earth [TV series]. BBC.

Attenborough, D. (Narrator). (2016). Planet Earth II [TV series]. BBC.

Attenborough, D. (Narrator). (2023). Planet Earth III [TV series]. BBC.

Attenborough, D. (Narrator). (2020). David Attenborough: A life on our planet [Film]. Netflix.

BBC. (2008). Earth: The biography [TV miniseries]. BBC.

Benson, H., Dusek, J. A., Sherwood, J. B., Lam, P., Bethea, C. F., Carpenter, W., Levitsky, S., Hill, P. C., Clem, D. W., Jr., Jain, M. K., Drumel, D., Kopecky, S. L., Mueller, P. S., Marek, D., Rollins, S., & Hibberd, P. L. (2006). Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer. American Heart Journal, 151(4), 934–942. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ahj.2005.05.028

Benton, M. J., & Harper, D. A. T. (2009). Introduction to paleobiology and the fossil record. Wiley-Blackwell.

Blanke, O., Ortigue, S., Landis, T., & Seeck, M. (2002). Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions. Nature, 419(6904), 269–270. https://doi.org/10.1038/419269a

Bloom, P. (2013). Just babies: The origins of good and evil. Crown.

Bloom, P. (2016). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. Ecco.

Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. Basic Books.

Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton University Press.

Campbell, J. (1972). Myths to live by. Viking Press.

Campbell, J. (1988). The power of myth. Doubleday.

Chaisson, E., & McMillan, S. (2017). Astronomy today (9th ed.). Pearson.

Cialdini, R. B. (2007). Influence: The psychology of persuasion. HarperCollins.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.

Dawkins, R. (2004). The ancestor’s tale: A pilgrimage to the dawn of life. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Dawkins, R. (2006). The God delusion. Bantam Press.

Di Blasi, Z., Harkness, E., Ernst, E., Georgiou, A., & Kleijnen, J. (2001). Influence of context effects on health outcomes: A systematic review. The Lancet, 357(9258), 757–762. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(00)04169-6

Ehrman, B. D. (2005). Misquoting Jesus: The story behind who changed the Bible and why. HarperSanFrancisco.

Ehrman, B. D. (2009). Jesus, interrupted: Revealing the hidden contradictions in the Bible (and why we don’t know about them). HarperOne.

Ehrman, B. D. (2014). How Jesus became God: The exaltation of a Jewish preacher from Galilee. HarperOne.

Einstein, M. (2008). Brands of faith: Marketing religion in a commercial age. Routledge.

Finkelstein, I., & Silberman, N. A. (2001). The Bible unearthed: Archaeology’s new vision of ancient Israel and the origin of its sacred texts. Free Press.

Forer, B. R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(1), 118–123. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0059240

Frank, J. D., & Frank, J. B. (1993). Persuasion and healing: A comparative study of psychotherapy (3rd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.

French, C. C. (2009). Hauntings and poltergeists. In R. L. Gregory (Ed.), The Oxford companion to the mind (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Friedman, R. E. (1987). Who wrote the Bible? Harper & Row.

Futuyma, D. J., & Kirkpatrick, M. (2017). Evolution (4th ed.). Sinauer Associates.

Geschwind, N. (1979). Behavioural changes in temporal lobe epilepsy. Psychological Medicine, 9(2), 217–219. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291700030713

Gómez, Á., Martínez, M., Martel, F. A., López-Rodríguez, L., Vázquez, A., Chinchilla, J., Paredes, B., Hettiarachchi, M., Hamid, N., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (2021). Why people enter and embrace violent groups. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 614657. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.614657

Greene, B. (2004). The fabric of the cosmos: Space, time, and the texture of reality. Alfred A. Knopf.

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814

Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Harper.

Hawking, S. (1988). A brief history of time: From the Big Bang to black holes. Bantam Books.

Hawking, S. (Presenter). (2010). Into the universe with Stephen Hawking [TV miniseries]. Discovery Channel.

Ineichen, B. (2022). Faith healing and psychosomatic illness: A critical review. Journal of Religion and Health, 61(1), 200–213.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Koenig, L. B., McGue, M., Krueger, R. F., & Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (2005). Genetic and environmental influences on religiousness: Findings for retrospective and current religiousness ratings. Journal of Personality, 73(2), 471–488. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2005.00338.x

Konnikova, M. (2016). The confidence game: Why we fall for it... every time. Viking.

Kroodsma, D. E. (2005). The singing life of birds: The art and science of listening to birdsong. Houghton Mifflin.

MacArthur, J. (2013). Strange fire: The danger of offending the Holy Spirit with counterfeit worship. Thomas Nelson.

McRaney, D. (2022). How minds change: The surprising science of belief, opinion, and persuasion. Portfolio.

Maynard, M. (1998). Mother Teresa: A life of devotion. Karol Books.

Miller, G. (2009). Spent: Sex, evolution, and consumer behavior. Viking.

Milton, J., & Wiseman, R. (2001). Does psi exist? Lack of replication of an anomalous process of information transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 127(1), 130–137. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.127.1.130

Neeson, L. (Narrator). (2001). Evolution [TV series]. PBS.

Ng, Y. K. (1995). Towards welfare biology: Evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering. Biology and Philosophy, 10(3), 255–285. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00852469

Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton University Press.

Numbers, R. L. (2006). The creationists: From scientific creationism to intelligent design. Harvard University Press.

Pagels, E. (1995, April 3). The devil problem. The New Yorker.

Penfield, W., & Perot, P. (1963). The brain’s record of auditory and visual experience. Brain, 86, 595–696.

Pilkington, N. (2013). Growing up Roman: Infant mortality and reproductive development. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 44(1), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1162/JINH_a_00499

Pinker, S. (2025). When everyone knows that everyone knows...Common knowledge and the mysteries of money, power, and everyday life.  Scribner.

Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Viking.

Pretus, C., Hamid, N., Sheikh, H., Ginges, J., Tobeña, A., Davis, R., Vilarroya, O., & Atran, S. (2018). Neural and behavioral correlates of sacred values and vulnerability to violent extremism. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, Article 2462. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02462

Prothero, D. R. (2017). Evolution: What the fossils say and why it matters (2nd ed.). Columbia University Press.

Prum, R. O. (2017). The evolution of beauty: How Darwin’s forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world—and us. Doubleday.

Randi, J. (1982). Flim-Flam!: Psychics, ESP, unicorns, and other delusions. Prometheus Books.

Roberts, A. (Presenter). (2019). The incredible human journey [TV series]. BBC.

Russell, B. (1957). Why I am not a Christian: And other essays on religion and related subjects. Simon & Schuster.

Sagan, C. (Host). (1980). Cosmos: A personal voyage [TV series]. PBS.

Saver, J. L., & Rabin, J. (1997). The neural substrates of religious experience. Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 9, 498–510.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Press.

Shoots-Reinhard, B., Goodwin, R., Bjälkebring, P., Markowitz, D. M., Silverstein, M. C., & Peters, E. (2021). Ability-related political polarization in the COVID-19 pandemic. Intelligence, 88, Article 101580. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2021.101580

Slade, D. M., Smell, A., Wilson, E., & Drumsta, R. (2023). Percentage of U.S. adults suffering from religious trauma: A sociological study. Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry, 5(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.33929/sherm.2023.vol5.no1.01

Smith, M. S. (2002). The early history of God: Yahweh and the other deities in ancient Israel. Eerdmans.

Smith, M. S. (2010). The priestly vision of Genesis 1. Fortress Press.

Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. R. (2003). Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-Cultural Research, 37(2), 211–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069397103251426

Stoltzfus, A., & Yampolsky, L. Y. (2021). Mutation-biased adaptation in evolution. Nature Reviews Genetics, 22, 69–82.

Trivers, R. (2011). The folly of fools: The logic of deceit and self-deception in human life. Basic Books.

Turner, R., & White, E. (2008). The evolution of glossolalia: A historical and theological exploration of speaking in tongues [Manuscript]. ResearchGate.

Tyson, N. D. (Host). (2014). Cosmos: A spacetime odyssey [TV series]. National Geographic.

van Bavel, J. J., & Packer, D. J. (2020). The power of us: Harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony. Little, Brown Spark.

van der Linden, S., Panagopoulos, C., Azevedo, F., & Jost, J. T. (2021). The paranoid style in American politics revisited: An ideological asymmetry in conspiratorial thinking. Political Psychology, 42(1), 23–51. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12681

van der Linden, S. (2023). Foolproof: Why misinformation infects our minds and how to build immunity. W. W. Norton & Company.

van Prooijen, J.-W., & Douglas, K. M. (2018). Connecting the dots: Illusory pattern perception predicts belief in conspiracies and the supernatural. European Journal of Social Psychology, 48(3), 320–335. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2331

van Prooijen, J.-W., & Kuijper, S. M. H. C. (2020). A comparison of extreme religious and political ideologies in different grievances. Personality and Individual Differences, 159, Article 109888. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.109888

Volk, A. A., & Atkinson, J. A. (2013). Infant and child death in the human environment of evolutionary adaptation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34(3), 182–192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.11.007

Wagenmakers, E.-J., Wetzels, R., Borsboom, D., & van der Maas, H. L. J. (2011). Why psychologists must change the way they analyze their data: The case of psi: Comment on Bem (2011). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 426–432. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022790

Wilson, D. S., & Wilson, E. O. (2007). Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 82(4), 327–348. https://doi.org/10.1086/522809

Winell, M. (2011). Religious trauma syndrome: It’s time to recognise it (Parts I–III) [PDF]. Journey Free. https://journeyfree.org/wp-content/uploads/RTS-article-in-CBT-Today.pdf

Zimmer, C. (2018). She has her mother’s laugh: The powers, perversions, and potential of heredity. Dutton.

Zuckerman, M., Silberman, J., & Hall, J. A. (2013). The relation between intelligence and religiosity: A meta-analysis and some proposed explanations. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17(4), 325–354. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868313497266