IGM Religious Mitigation of Human behavior

Intergalactic Memo


To: Discerning readers everywhere
Fr: W. Leavitt, Crypto-Psychologist
Re: New theory of Religious relevance.


I found a fascinating article at Physorg.com today. Here is the title:
Religion may have evolved because of its ability to help people exercise self-control
Whew! This is just in time, eh? Religion is taking some serious hits these days. Without this kind of cutting-edge research, all us believers would be out of luck, nowhere to go, belittled and de-relevantized into a corner.
Professor of Psychology, Michael McCullough of the University of Miami has come to the rescue. He heroically evaluated 8 decades of research (this is called secondary research, because he just read old studies) in order to come to the conclusion that Religion has a mitigating effect on human behavior. Really? Gosh, who’d have ever seen that coming? I wonder what he pulls down a year . . . because I figured this out when I was fifteen. I expect most everyone does. It would have been nice to be bringing in that kind of money as a teenager.
One wonders what Professor McCullough was thinking prior to the study? That religion was only good for boring songs and baptismal font salesmen? Let’s see what the study reveals:
He found persuasive evidence from a variety of domains within the social sciences, including neuroscience, economics, psychology, and sociology, that religious beliefs and religious behaviors are capable of encouraging people to exercise self-control and to more effectively regulate their emotions and behaviors, so that they can pursue valued goals.
Do I detect a pattern here? First of all he used the social sciences, listing Neuroscience, economics, psychology, and sociology. I suppose these disciplines are useful as conversation starters at cocktail parties, or to evaluate pseudo-trends among large populations of human beings (which, by definition renders any conclusions irrelevant), but not much else.
Let’s see if we can get to the heart of the matter here. First of all, I will concede that religion does indeed evolve over time, as well as devolve, mutate, change, diminish, and increase, in strange, unpredictable and funny ways. Anyone with any sense knows that it started out as a rock-solid set of well-designed and perfectly-conceived rules and guidelines, offered as a gift from Deity to mankind, which then quickly fell into the pattern of all things touched by humans. Still, we managed to maintain a few of the best of the rules in all the mish-mash of cruel, useless, ridiculous ones; Rules like don’t shed innocent blood, don’t break promises, don’t steal things, don’t cheat on your spouse, maintain a high standard of personal ethics, forgive your enemy, always have hope, be charitable, loving, positive, humble and obedient to God’s will.
Those are pretty good rules. I think a precocious five year-old would be able to figure out that trying to live by them would help a person exercise self-control. In fact I know one or two who have. The governing principle behind all of these religious strictures is this:
If you want to be truly free, don’t let yourself do whatever you want whenever you want. Adopt some standards. Accept some values, embrace limitations. Pretty simple, and very self-explanatory.
It amuses me that someone takes himself so seriously that he has written a paper for a “prestigious” Journal, the Psychological Bulletin, presenting this information as news, as insightful, and as something that only a professional like himself could ever have figured out. And he gets paid for this! America; what a country!