Religion & Sex: Studies in the Pathology of Religious DevelopmentCohen, Chapman
Religion
Religion & Sex: Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development
Cohen, Chapman
Sex -- Religious aspects
that while the professional astronomer, biologist, or physicist each
adds to our knowledge of the subject that falls within his respective
department, we owe little or nothing of our knowledge of the nature of
religion to the professional theologian.
To put the whole matter in a sentence, the study of religion must be
affiliated to the study of life as a whole. If possible, we must get at
the determining factors that lead one person to expend his energy on
religion and see supernatural influence in a thousand and one details of
his life, while another person, with apparently the same mental
qualities, finds complete satisfaction in another direction, and is
conscious of no such supernatural influence. It is scientifically
inadmissible to posit a "religious faculty" organically ear-marked for
religious use. Something of this kind is evidently in the minds of those
who explain Darwin's agnosticism as due to atrophy of his religious
sense, consequent on over-absorption in scientific pursuits, and who
also argue that the "religious faculty," like a physiological structure,
increases in efficiency with use and atrophies with disuse. There is no
reason for believing that, had Darwin been profoundly religious, his
mental qualities would have been different to what they were. They would
have been expressed in a different form, that is all. As I have already
said, there are no such things as specifically religious qualities of
the mind. There may be hope or fear or love or hatred or terror or
devotion or wonder in relation to religion, but they are precisely the
same mental qualities that meet us in relation to other things. The old
"faculty" psychology is dead, and the religious faculty must go with
it.[9] Mental qualities may be roused to activity in connection with a
belief in the supernatural, or they may be expressed in connection with
mundane associations. Even the belief in the supernatural is only an
expression of the same qualities of mind that with fuller knowledge
result in a scientific generalisation. Whatever be the exciting cause,
mental qualities themselves remain unchanged.
In the present enquiry we are not concerned with a disproval of the
religious idea, but with an examination of the conditions of its
expression; less with the varieties of religious experience than with
the nature of its manifestations. How far may religious experience be
explained as a misinterpretation of normal non-religious life? To what
extent have pathological nervous states influenced the building up of
the religious consciousness? There can be no question that the
last-named factor is an important one. This is admitted by Professor
James in the following passage:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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