Personal experiences count in the psychology of an individuals religion only because they already believe.
For ages man believed that the summer’s crop, the rain supply, the fertility of the cattle, depended upon the gods, and this gave him a bias toward religion; but, obviously, the belief is the primary thing.
Personal reasoning, on the other hand, has very little to do with religion in this largest class of worshipers.
The world seems to them, in such dull gleams of reflection as they have, to be quite in harmony with their religion.
The prosperity of the wicked and suffering of the good will be put right in the next world, and so on. Doubt never occurs to the overwhelming majority, and reason is not invoked to allay it. The stream of religious tradition flows placidly on.
The consciousness of sin or of moral struggle which some Christians give as an important element of the psychology of religion seems to me an effect rather than a cause, or even an ingredient.
There is no consciousness of sin until you believe in God.
The painful sense of moral struggle and the heightened (delusional) sense of moral decency is often largely a creation in the mind of the individual, with little prompts from external stimulus, but largely the ego.
These people will create the feeling in a few people and then boast that religion meets it.
It does not.
Religion makes it far worse. The ordinary healthy man or woman is not conscious of legions of devils urging him or her to be unfaithful or to get drunk. One has to be firm sometimes, to decline an attraction, to refuse to lie or cheat, but one doesn’t on that account groan and froth at the mouth. The moral struggle is an accompaniment or effect of belief rather than an element of religion.
Men of recent centuries are deeply psychological beings. They hypothesize psychologically and primarily evaluate their thoughts and feelings psychologically.
Most are not aware of the specific content of the deep and hidden dimensions of their psyches, why would they be ?
But because they have some inkling that, most often they are repressed and miserably inaccessible to their consciousness; they are aware that such dimensions exist and that they control their lives and actions more than do their
conscious egos.
Without reservation, Biblical authors were never psychological beings.
They did not hold a fraction of the information that they would today.
Yet almost paradoxically, as people they would have had the same deep thought processes we do today, although unaware they were of psychological realities.
