Religion as Cultural OCD
Some people turn the lights on and off in a certain pattern because they think if they don’t something bad will happen. This is a marker of a dysfunctional mental malady known as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The irrational and overwhelming desire to engage in an action that does not correlate to reality can range in intensity for the individual. The behavior can be somewhat subtle or it can be debilitating to the extreme. Its dysfunction is like that of an allergic reaction whereby a mechanism adapted to create defensive measures misfires and instead creates a behavior that causes more harm than good. This is not a technical definition of OCD and this article is not attempting to say that the same mechanisms that create ODC in the brain are responsible for religious beliefs. OCD is an analogy for the irrational and dysfunctional behaviors exhibited by religious groups and individuals. Both OCD and Religion play on natural tendencies intended to increase survival but both manifest negative results.
The instinct to turn off and on lights to forego some potentially negative outcome is the same instinct that leads people to religion because they both are aiming toward survival. As a group, humans attempt to manipulate the environment to prevent potential negative outcomes. We take an action and if it coincides with a positive outcome we link the two events and continue to repeat the initial action as long as it continues to coincide with the positive outcome. The causal assumptions are automatic and until we face significant evidence contrary to our explanations we hold the correlations as life-affirming.
Speechify is a free text-to-speech software so you can listen to your favorite books. Click this affiliate link image to download today!
One of the reasons that a person with OCD wants to stop engaging in obsessive actions/thoughts is that it has a negative outcome on their life. It can affect their ability to engage in social activities and can isolate them from others. It can delay their ability to move forward in their day if they are continually engaging in meaningless repetitive actions. It can be distressing to feel out of control and know that your actions do not align with your desires or with reality. This dysfunction is not to be celebrated but instead, it is to be accepted and with work, the negative manifestations may be reduced. In the case of OCD, these actions can isolate one from society but in the case of religion, it can create social bonds that become very difficult to disband.
Religion is a social version of the survival mechanism in an individual that confuses correlation with causation. If a group discovers that acting in a certain way seems to lead toward positive outcomes then they codify this information and perpetuate its importance through communication. Groups reinforce these actions through storytelling and moralizing. The explanations are wrong even if the outcomes are favorable. From minimal beginnings, an entire worldview can emerge and soon a group believes that their way of doing things is so important that they will kill anyone that challenges that belief. Groups become intoxicated by their traditions and superstitions and work to spread the righteousness of their way to others. If they do not they feel that they court disaster.
They induce gods to explain how amazing it is that they have discovered these truths—these traditions. And the gods are like them. Like parents. Like ghosts. They guide and punish. They distance the human from the lesson and give it divine significance. Don’t question the gods that allow us to prosper! It is not me, it is god!
Wear this headcover to survive. Turn the lights on and off to survive.
Would you rather do something because you think it has value or live with the harsh truth that what you're doing is nonsense? Sometimes giving it up means losing that value you thought was there. If so, you would have to find value in other things and other activities. It might even be possible to engage in those activities for different reasons and retain the value that derives from them. If one gives up religion they give up a set way of life and the consequences of that should not be taken lightly.
One of the issues with atheism is that it says nothing about how to behave. It just indicates a lack of belief in something. Something that if more people didn’t believe in would be unnecessary to label but because it is not the norm it needs a name. So how does a society without religion create shared values to work together toward some positive end? If the end isn’t to make god happy then to whom do we owe our collective morality? The quick answer to this would be to hold humanity as god and do everything we can to make sure that humanity thrives and lives on into the future. If this is too grand, one might want to simply make a better world for their children. If this is too abstract then I suppose one can simply act in one's best interest to live a life without pain and suffering.
All of these goals can act as a bedrock of values on which to base cooperative action and these likely are the actual evolutionarily selected traits that are embedded in our genes regardless of our breathy justifications. The formal explanations we conjure up to account for our actions are typically made up after the actions have already taken place. This is especially true of automatic responses to the environment. The why of things are oftentimes just physical inevitabilities that we like to take intellectual credit for. The instinct to say, “I did that on purpose” or because “it is god’s will” is a mechanism for social lubrication more than a fact about the universe.
The reason that it is important to challenge the dogma of religion is that many of the mandatory actions that they require are dysfunctional and immoral. They lead to pain and suffering. They lead to oppression and “us vs them” dichotomies. Some of the explanations create a false sense of reality that leads to negative outcomes that would otherwise be easily avoided. The problem with religious OCD is that it is upheld as divine instead of disturbed. This leads to its defense and in some cases aggression expansion. It is like a person with OCD attempting to get everyone to take ten minutes a day to turn their lights off and on again and if they don’t the person will burn their house down. It is dysfunctional to try to get everyone to believe something that is both wrong scientifically and also leads toward human suffering.
The problem with religion is that it doesn’t think it’s wrong. In many cases, religions punish those who question it which only perpetuates the dysfunction. The reason that science outpaces religion when it comes to solving real-world problems as well as understanding how things work is that it has a built-in skepticism in its philosophy. Part of the scientific method involves critical review and repeatability. Science also allows for uncertainty and humility. Confidence in a scientific theory should only be as strong as the evidence that supports it and when there is doubt it should not be denied. This doesn’t make science perfect which is the point. There is no perfect knowledge. There is no god. Humans are the only ones who can make things better. If the underlying belief system is irrational and dogmatic then how can it lead to human flourishing for everyone? Humans flourish when they can adapt to new information and environments so one should reject rigid and irrational obsessions.
