Psychology of Religion - Quotes Flashcards
(23 cards)
reduce a supernatural phenomena to a natural phenomena
‘supernatural reductionism’
flattens complex situation to singular cause
‘complexity reductionism’
Totem = ‘an object of reverence or worship, and is protected by taboos which generally forbid killing it, eating it, or even touching it’
Storr
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’
Freud
‘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’
Pals
‘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’
Freud
‘we are all Freudians now’
Auden
‘the scientific future of psychoanalysis does not look to be especially promising’
Pals
‘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?’
Pals
that descendants may biologically inherit experiences of their ancestors
Larnack’s evolutionary theory
‘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’
Storr
‘are illusions, fulfilment of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind’
Freud
‘main characteristic is that we very much want it to be true’
Pals
‘we continue to crave that childhood security, though in reality we can no longer have it’
Pals
‘symbolic substitutes for unconscious guilt’
Merkur
‘the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity’
Freud
‘religious feelings and religious impulses’
James
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.’
Common features of a Religious Experience
attitude ‘toward what he felt to be the primal truth’
James
‘we must interpret the term ‘divine’ very broadly, as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not,’
James
ultimate origin which ‘he took to lie outside the purview of a science of religions’
Proudfoot
‘James elaborated neither a specific theory nor a particular method, beyond the judicious use of personal documents’
Wulff
‘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’
Pals
