God Is on Our Side. Does That Mean War?
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New Research Shows How Religion Is Used to Justify Violence
March 27, 2007
Does believing that “God is on our side” make it easier for us to inflict pain and suffering on those perceived to be our enemies? If we think God sanctions violence, are we more likely to engage in violent acts?
The answer to both those questions, according to new research, is a resounding “yes,” even among those who do not consider themselves believers.
Social psychologist Brad Bushman of the University of Michigan led an international research effort to find answers to these questions, and said he is very “disturbed” by the results, though he found what he had expected. Bushman has spent 20 years studying aggression and violence, especially the impact on human behavior of violence in the media, but most previous research has focused on television and movie violence, not such things as scriptures and texts held sacred by many.
He wanted to take it a step further and see if simply exposing someone to a text that implies God sanctions violence would increase their level of aggression.
Fought in the Name of God
“I think many people use God as their justification for violent and aggressive actions,” Bushman said. “Take the current conflict in Iraq as an example. Bush claims that God is on his side. Osama bin Laden claims that God, or Allah, is on his side.”
History is replete with other examples of wars fought in the name of God, involving nearly every religion on the planet.
To find his answers, Bushman assembled teams of researchers at two very different universities, Vrije University in Amsterdam, Holland, where he also holds a professorship, and Brigham Young University in Utah.
Only half of the students who participated in the study at Vrije reported that they believe in God, and only 27 percent believe in the Bible. At Brigham Young, 99 percent said they believe in God and the Bible.
Biblical Descriptions
Here’s the fundamental issue the researchers addressed, as stated in their study published in the current issue of Psychological Science:
“We hypothesized that exposure to a biblical description of violence would increase aggression more than a secular description of the same violence. We also predicted that aggression would be greater when the violence was sanctioned by God than when it was not sanctioned by God.”
Because violence in a classroom is a bit hard to justify, the researchers relied on a widely used tool to measure aggression. Students in the study were not initially told its true purpose. Instead, they were told they were participating in two separate studies, one on Middle Eastern literature, and one on stimulation of reaction time.
Each student competed against another student in the reaction time phase. Those who pushed a button first won the competition and could punish the loser by blasting him or her through a set of earphones with a loud noise.
The Blast of War
The volume of the noise was controlled by the winning student. Those who hit the loser with a mild blast were considered less aggressive than those who gave the loser the loudest blast — approximately the volume of a siren.
“The noise is very, very unpleasant,” Bushman said. “It’s a combination of somebody scratching their fingernails on a chalkboard and screaming and sirens.”
The idea behind the test, used widely in laboratories, is that only someone who feels very aggressive would blast someone else with the loudest screech, about 105 decibels.
Biblical? Or Not?
Before the blasting phase, the students read a description of the beating and raping and murder of a woman in ancient Israel. Half of the students read a version of the story that included an assertion that God commanded the friends of the woman to take revenge. The other half read a version that did not mention God sanctioning violence. Half of the students were told the account came from the Bible, and half were told it came from an ancient scroll.
“What we found is that people who believed the passage was from the Bible were more aggressive [than those who did not know it came from the Bible], and when God said it is OK to retaliate they were even more aggressive,” Bushman said. “We found that both at Brigham Young, which is a religious school, and at Amsterdam, where only half believe in God.
“Even among nonbelievers, if God says it’s OK to retaliate, they are more aggressive. And that’s the worry here. When God sanctions aggression, when God says it’s OK to retaliate, people use that as justification for their own violent and aggressive behavior.”
When asked why nonbelievers would become more aggressive, Bushman suggested that perhaps some nonbelievers are not all that sure that there is no God. However, nonbelievers did not show as much of an increase in aggression as believers when told violence was sanctioned by God.
At the end of the interview, I intruded into Bushman’s own religious feelings and asked if he is a believer.
“Yes, I do believe in God, and I do believe in the Bible,” he said. “In fact, I read it every day.”
So it’s a personal, as well as a professional, search for Bushman.
“What worries me is when people use God as a justification for their violence. There are scriptures that say you should not take God’s name in vain. This is the most extreme version of taking God’s name in vain,” he said.
Yet his own research shows that whether people consider themselves believers or not, they are more likely to be aggressive, perhaps even willing to start a war, if they think God is on their side.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=2983119&page=3
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Book description
When we mention hyperreligiosity, we mean the same thing as when others say “toxic faith.” Hyperreligiosity is a more established psychiatrically-used term for toxic faith. There is a timely nature of this work, as religious extremism is in the news every night. The author’s hope is that the ideas in this book will become assimilated so that people drawn to acting out in religious extremism have other perspectives to consider.
This book is essentially a book on toxic faith and is instrumental for understanding why people join destructive cults. This book bridges the gap between psychological understanding and the spiritual drive. Each one done separately is usually disregarded by the audience drawn more to the other. That is, people writing on a secular psychological level do not always take into account historically important spiritual goals. But the most dangerous situation is when people with a religious drive are not instructed on the dangers of what can happen to people who are very religious and have some imbalances. This book describes how these imbalances manifest and how they can be overcome.
Earlier psychologists used to explain psychological concepts to their patients. Psychology seems sometimes in danger of becoming a lost science in the minds of many. I think it’s time that people started understanding again more academic psychological concepts. It seems like there was more of a mainstream knowledge of psychological concepts in the past then there is today.
Hyperreligiosity is at the root of the need to join all destructive cults. This book examines the root causes why a person feels that a small group can have the answer to the greatest questions on earth.
One often sees reports in the news about people who have done various criminal acts because they believe they were guided by God to do so. The tone of this work is at once both psychological and spiritual. The author himself had hyperreligious tendencies but went on to live a normal life, graduating from a secular university and starting and maintaining a software company for over fifteen years. He uses basic psychological language to construct an analysis of the problem that takes into account the positive aspects of religion.
1. Description
The book is called “Hyperreligiosity — Identifying and Overcoming Patterns of Religious Dysfunction.” There is currently no book in print on hyperreligiosity. In fact, at the time of researching the book, it was even spelled four ways almost about equally on a Google search. This book takes a Western psychological approach yet maintains respect for spiritual values to describe how religious thinking can become distorted in people who have certain types of emotional and mental problems. The book also describes ways to overcome this. This book will become important because people are often sold quick religious ideas that promise them everything and often leave them without many things that are needed for a healthy psychological view of the world. This book helps people overcome destructive magical thinking while maintaining a spiritual tone. The audience is the same audience who buy many of books in spirituality and psychology.
2. Table of Contents
This book is written in the style of writing known as the “literary fragment.” It is in the same style of early religious texts as well many important author’s works such as Pascal’s Pensees and Novalis’s philosophical writing. There is a preface and then numbered sections.
3. Market
The audience for the book are those who are interested in religion, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, educators, and those who may know the hyperreligious such as parents or spouses, or the hyperreligious themselves. The author had problem himself with hyperreligiosity himself, but founded his own software company, beaome a successful rare book dealer, and developed theories in brainstorming and art. The book has well-written insights for psychologists and clergy on how the hyperreligious thinks and what kind of thinking may be liberating for them. It is written not from a perspective of an psychoanalytic theorist who must work from an aetheistic perspective, but from a recovered hyperreligious person himself. It describes what it is like living with hyperreligiosity and how he personally understands how to overcome it. He describes why hyperreligiosity is not a form of spirituality but instead a mental illness. There is a desire for a translation into Arabic for the Moslem community.
4. Competing Titles
There are currently no books with Hyperreligiosity in the title, however there are a few books written from a lay person’s or clergy’s perspective on religious addiction and what is called “toxic faith.” The problem with these books is that hyperreligious individuals may not be seen as religiously addicted nor were ever religiously abused. They may consider themselves more sophisticated than someone who gets “addicted” to a particular group or person, and perhaps they feel on a personal “mission from God.” I will show that each of these books comes from a different perspective and the Hyperrelgiosity book appeals more to the higher educated or person drawn to acceptance of interfaith beliefs, such as is common with many people today. The Hyperreligiosity book deals more with core psychological principles rather than only Evangelical or Catholic Christianity, although it is not offensive to those of those faiths.
via Hyperreligiosity as a psychological term for religious addiction and toxic faith.
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