Psychology of Religion - Quotes

Question 1

reduce a supernatural phenomena to a natural phenomena

Answer 1

‘supernatural reductionism’

Question 2

flattens complex situation to singular cause

Answer 2

‘complexity reductionism’

Question 3

Totem = ‘an object of reverence or worship, and is protected by taboos which generally forbid killing it, eating it, or even touching it’

Answer 3

Storr

Question 4

they undid their deed by declaring that the killing of the father substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and renounced the fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated women’

Answer 4

Freud

Question 5

‘The birth of belief is to be found in the Oedipus complex, in the powerful, divided emotions that led humanity to its first great crime, then turned a murdered father into a god and promised sexual renunciation as a way to serve him’

Answer 5

Pals

Question 6

‘we let the sense of guilt for a deed survive for thousands of years, remaining effective in generations which could not have known anything of this deed’

Answer 6

Freud

Question 7

‘we are all Freudians now’

Answer 7

Auden

Question 8

‘the scientific future of psychoanalysis does not look to be especially promising’

Answer 8

Pals

Question 9

‘We can perhaps understand how an early trauma could stay with one person for the rest of his or her life. But how can an ancient murder be unconsciously ‘remembered’ by the whole human race?’

Answer 9

Pals

Question 10

that descendants may biologically inherit experiences of their ancestors

Answer 10

Larnack’s evolutionary theory

Question 11

‘bears witness to Freud’s tendency to generalisation from an insufficient basis of fact when he thought that he could thereby find support for psychoanalytic theory’

Answer 11

Storr

Question 12

‘are illusions, fulfilment of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind’

Answer 12

Freud

Question 13

‘main characteristic is that we very much want it to be true’

Answer 13

Pals

Question 14

‘we continue to crave that childhood security, though in reality we can no longer have it’

Answer 14

Pals

Question 15

‘symbolic substitutes for unconscious guilt’

Answer 15

Merkur

Question 16

‘the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity’

Answer 16

Freud

Question 17

‘religious feelings and religious impulses’

Answer 17

James

Question 18

1) Ineffable - R exp(s) can’t be explained to another but must be experienced to be understood.
2) Noetic - they must provide ‘insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.’
3) Transient - they must be fleeting, mystical states.
4) Passive - the individual will feel as though they ‘were grasped and held by a superior power.’

Answer 18

Common features of a Religious Experience

Question 19

attitude ‘toward what he felt to be the primal truth’

Answer 19

James

Question 20

‘we must interpret the term ‘divine’ very broadly, as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not,’

Answer 20

James

Question 21

ultimate origin which ‘he took to lie outside the purview of a science of religions’

Answer 21

Proudfoot

Question 22

‘James elaborated neither a specific theory nor a particular method, beyond the judicious use of personal documents’

Answer 22

Wulff

Question 23

‘to look beneath the surface of accepted doctrines and discover the deep, unnoticed elements of personality that shape human religious faith and are in turn shaped by it’

Answer 23

Pals