Curing the Religious Disease, Part 1: Diagnosis

Over the last year I've been reading and interacting with some ideas that have shown some interesting convergence. The convergence speaks to what tends to go awry in religion and what needs to be in place to correct the diseases of religion.

What is the disease of religion? What happens when religion goes awry?

In my opinion, religion becomes diseased when its adherents settle into an insular, static, morally convicted ideology. Let me unpack this:

Insular:
The religious person or group rejects any sort of external critique or outside commentary.

Static:
The religious person or group feels that they are in possession of the "Truth." Thus, they cannot change. To change is to deny the truth. This position is very problematic in that conversation becomes impossible. The only conversational mode available to the group is evangelistic and never dialogical. To be always in the evangelistic mode is to be always in the position of Teacher and never the Student.

Morally Convcited:
I've written about the psychology of moral convictions before, but a review might be helpful to new readers (what follows is taken from Skitka, L., Bauman, C.W., & Sargis, E.G. 2005. Moral conviction: Another contributor to attitude strength or something more?. Journal of personality and social psychology, 88, 895-917).

First, moral convictions are experienced as OBJECTIVE MORAL FACTS about the world. For example, if someone is morally convicted about abortion being murder then they experience this conviction as a fact. Nothing could be more obvious to them than this "fact." They don't experience their conviction as a subjective moral judgment. No, it feels like a "fact." Obviously, this experience of "facthood" causes a problem. The reason is that if a person disagrees with the moral conviction (as Pro-Choice people do about abortion) these dissents appear to be coming from epistemologically broken or deviant persons. "I mean," the Pro-Life person exclaims, "can't these people SEE that abortion is wrong! Isn't it obvious?!" This stance is self-evidently problematic: You treat all dissenters as either idiotic or demonic.

But it gets worse. Beyond the experience of "facthood" the moral conviction is also experienced as a UNIVERSAL. That is, if you hold a moral conviction you believe that everyone must conform to your conviction. There is no opting out. No middle ground. No let's agree to disagree. This facet of moral conviction means that we will get into each other's stuff. We can't allow people to behave differently from our conviction. Thus, we'll work to try to get you to conform. And this boundary crossing increases the conflict.

But it gets worse. The third and final feature of moral conviction is EMOTION. That is, when moral convictions are being discussed people will get very emotional very quickly. Which means that the conversations become irrational shouting matches. The rhetorical object becomes to defend and attack rather than to learn.

So, to conclude this post, I just wanted to paint a picture of the "religious disease" as I see it:

Insular
Static
Morally Convicted

The question then becomes, how do we treat or prevent the illness?