The Psychopathology of Faith

It is curious to note that defenders of faith assert that the latter is protection against hedonism in that it hedges believers round with a moral code which in the absence of a celestial being imparting such a code people would be swallowed in an amoral vortex of depravity. This is more a confession than anything else and it totally denies the possibility of a human moral code based on the facts of reality with no supernatural imput.

When it is pointed out to such people that many of the religious persuasion throughout history have committed the most heinous acts of moral depravity including horrific torture and murder on an industrial scale when the religious authorities had political power  they usually come back with the argument that this is inevitable because such crimes are committed by mere flawed humans who will never be able to live perfect Christian lives - in other words what they are doing is not real Christianity. If this argument sounds familiar that's because it is.

When those who advocate Socialism or Communism and it is pointed out to them that that ideology has led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the last century they come back with the retort that what happened in the Soviet Union and China was not 'real' Socialism and Communism but a perversion of it and that if it was done properly it would be a moral system. Venezuelans are starving,eating dogs and have no toilet paper but most Venezuelans still believe socialism is morally superior to capitalism so this tendency to deny reality and rationalise it away is something that is common to religious and non religious people alike.

The truth of the matter is that religion and secular collectivist ideologies have far more in common than people care to admit and they both rationalize away the horror caused by their programmes although collectivism has only decimated populations for a few centuries whereas religion has been at it for thousands of years.