?? Has Religion Hijacked and Usurped the Science of Human Thought and Behavior??

I believe yes, religion has hijacked and usurped the science of human thought and behavior.

I am part of a large Irish Catholic clan of people. I knew this straight away because in April of 1961 I opened my eyes fresh out of the womb to golden crucifixes, beaded rosaries, and framed pictures of the pope flanked by similarly framed pictures of John F. Kennedy (who is kind of like the Irish pope). I would have heard at least one praying aloud of the Hail Mary within the first hour of my birth. From then on would hear it at least once a day and twice on Sundays.

How many people who have grown up and become scientists or educators were also inculcated into the world with a wide variety of religious information before they reached the age of reason? How many of the most influebntial psychological theorists were submerged in a religious teachings since birth? How would this have imacted their eventual theories?

Iconic Catholic sounds and images hung in my own home and in all the relatives’ homes. And of course there were the statues of the Blessed Mother and various saints gracing everyone’s kitchen window sills, dressers, side tables, and car dashboards. As Paul McCartney might put it, instead of Penny Lane being in my ears and in my eyes, Catholicism was; there beneath the blue suburban skies.

put next 4 paragraphs at end of bio…..Catholicism was intermingled into the culture of my life so seamlessly it took me 50 years to figure out how deeply its dogmas interlaced all of my stored memories and therefore all of my information analysis and decision-making capacities.

Comingled with the Catholic iconography in the 60’s and 70’s, at least in the homes of my college educated relatives, were psychology books tagged with anything to do with Freud, Jung, Rollo May, Chomsky, I’m O.K. You’re O.K., Maslow, and self-actualization, to name a few. Self-help books started popping onto bookshelves after Your Erroneous Zones by Wayne Dyer kicked off the now bloated self-help industry in 1976. Yoga and alternative- spiritual-pseudoscientific practices started to pop up in the 60’s and have been gaining momentum every since.

x out maybe …Psychology could not compete with Christianity, the self-help industry, yoga, or the ever changing pseudoscientific spiritual fads. The ‘science’ of psychology possesses a philosophy that allows it to embrace whatever it wants to embrace. To remain economically viable and socially relevant, psychoology has always intermittently hopped on and off popular bandwagons in order to hold onto clientele.

How is it possible the icons of popular psychology have co-existed so easily and seemlessly beside the icons of Catholicism and Christianity, self-help, yoga, philosophical fads and spiritual fads? How is it possible that psychology, the alleged science of human thought and behavior, has not become the clearly dominant force behind how we modern human beings develop the best practices for observing, understanding, and managing human thought and behavior?

Well, one May day in 2011 on a junior high football field while playing kickball with my students with special needs during my adapted physical education class, I happened upon an answer to the above questions, as you do in that situation.

Before elaborating upon my answer, it seems relevant to elaborate further

And even more importantly, how did psychology, allegedly a science, never develop the muster to replace dogmatic Christian explanations of human thought and behavior, or spiritual, philosophical, or pseudoscientific explanations for that matter? Well, one May day in 20011, I figured out exactly why. But until that day I was one confused Irish Catholic agnostic student of psychology and e.

Auspiciously, I was born on one of the most important Catholic holy days, Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday. My petite and feisty Irish Catholic grandmother, born and raised by Irish immigrants in Cleveland’s Irish neighborhood called The Angle, gave the hospital staff an enormous Easter basket packed with colorfully wrapped Malley’s chocolates, insurance they would properly look after my mother and I. On the west side of Cleveland, Malley’s is as revered as Jesus Christ himself. We received excellent care to be sure.

My grandmother, all 5 feet of her, cast her net of protection around us grandchildren from the moment we opened our eyes until the moment she closed hers before her final rest. As a rule, our Irish-American parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, great aunts, great uncles, first and second cousins once removed, etc. spun a protective cocoon around us children. Inside this cocoon we knew who had our backs, where we came from, and who we were.

And who we were was largely defined by our Catholic/Christian heritage. Our religious inheritance ‘gifted’ us with a set of rules we were taught for how to interpret the thoughts that existed in our heads and the actions that emanated from our bodies. Catholicism was a gift we had no choice but to accept, open, and use. There was a no return policy to be sure.

In a nutshell, this gift taught us we were to interpret the biology of our brains and bodies in terms of how the Catholic/Christian church had decided to interpret our human biology and then teach it back to us.

I tried very hard to believe what I was taught as a Catholic girl, but I struggled with it because I loved my clan of relatives, wanted to be like them, please them, fit in with them, and make them proud of me. I especially loved my grandmother. She was as devoted a Catholic as a person could be. I wanted to be like her in every way and struggled valiantly to have as much faith in our Our Dear Lord as she did.

But I struggled with it. Even though my world view growing up in the 60’s and 70’s on the west side of Cleveland was filled with Irish Catholic icons and information, it was also filled with a solid public school education that taught me to look for and analyze concrete evidence and think for myself when forming conclusions.

As I got older, smarter, and better educated, many bits of Catholicism and Christianity seemed totally nuts to me. I incessantly struggled in earnest to believe it all because it is what I was suppose to believe, it was my heritage, it was what the people who fiercely loved and took care of me believed. Even as a kid parts of it seemed nuts, but all the while growing up I focused a lot of my intellectual energy into grappling with the nutty bits, mainly trying to intellectually wrestle them into something that would make sense so I could embrace them. I didn't want to let my family down.

The bits of Catholicism I had trouble swallowing, I believed, rested in my own lack of faith and were my own fault, my own weakness. Surrendering one’s skepticism to the mystery of one’s faith is what good Catholic girls did to grow up to be as good and holy as Mary, Our Blessed Mother. It is what good Catholic girls did if they wanted to fit in, belong, and be worthy.

I wanted more than anything to be as good, holy, and as worthy as the Virgin Mary. I didn’t know single Catholic girl who did not, except for Eileen Moran. But she was always in trouble and suffered quite a bit for not dressing or acting Catholic enough. I was afraid to have people look at me and treat me the way they looked at and treated Eileen Moran.

From the moment we girls dressed in beautiful white dresses with lacy veils, ate the flesh of Christ placed onto our tongues by priests in ornate tunics, and drank the blood of Christ from heavy golden chalices during our First Holy Communion at age 7, we carried a lot of responsibility. To receive Holy Communion we freckly girls with skinned knees had to be pure, clean, untainted. We had to strive not to sin. To remove the stain of sin we were taught we would surely commit simply for being born human, we had to confess the unfortunate moments in which we lapsed into sin. And we had to do penance regularly on our oft-bandaged knees in order to be forgiven for the times when we let down Mary, Our Blessed Mother, as well as the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost.

It was a lot for a 7-year-old to carry. But it didn’t seem like a lot at the time because it simply what was done, to ingest the body and blood of Christ, to kneel in the confessional, confess the sins we 7-year-olds were taught we committed, beg for God’s forgiveness, and atone for our wretched sins by saying as many Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s as the priest told us to. This is how things had been done in Ireland for one thousand years.

It is no small thing to turn one’s back on a thousand years of tradition. Who does that?

But the older I got, the more I questioned.

Maybe elsewhere From the ages of 30–50, I could neither accept or reject the faith of my childhood. I grappled with it intermittently, but mostly swam in a sea of agnosticism.

But the older I got, the more I questioned. Plus, comingling with the Catholic iconography in the 60’s and 70’s, at least in the homes of my college educated relatives, were psychology books tagged with anything to do with Freud, Jung, Rollo May, Chomsky, I’m O.K. You’re O.K., Maslow, and self-actualization, to name a few. Self-help books started popping onto bookshelves after Your Erroneous Zones by Wayne Dyer kicked off the now bloated self-help industry in 1976.

How did the icons of popular psychology exist so easily beside the icons of Catholicism and Christianity in general? How did psychology, allegedly a science, never develop the muster to replace dogmatic Christian explanations of human thought and behavior? Well, one May day in 20011, I figured out exactly why. But until that day I was one confused Irish Catholic agnostic student of psychology.

By the time I was 30, for all practical purposes, I was a wife, mother of 4, and a teacher who looked to the science of psychology to understand my thoughts and behaviors and to understand the thoughts and behaviors of other people, not religious teachings. I drew from psychological theories to figure out how to optimally interact with my children, my students, and my husband.

However, the psychological theories available were a grab bag of choices. No human problem was attached to a single evidenced based psychological theory and practice. Every human problem was attached to as many theories as there were therapists and as many solutions as their were therapists.

But psychology is the evidenced based science of the human personality, right? I had faith and trust in this field, the faith and trust I ultimately could not place in Catholic/Christian dogma. For 3 decades I poured over different psychological books and texts in search of the just-right rtheory for each of my personal and professional problems. And I tried out everything I came acress that seemed feasible.

But after 30 long years of mining the field of psychology, not a single psychological theory or practice gave me reliable or lasting results. Even though I mined the field of psychology for 30 long years with no success, I never thought to question the premises upon which the theories were developed the way I had questioned the premises of Catholicism and Christianity. I blamed myself for my lack of finding successful psychological theories.

Just like when I blamed my lack of faith on myself as a girl, I blamed my lack of finding succesful psychological theories as my own fault. Instead of questioning the It never occurred to me to question the psychological theories themselves. The science of psychology was the alternative to the archaic religious dogma, right? I took on faith that psychological theories are, in fact, grounded in facts and evidence.

Then at age 50, I had an experience with a student with special needs after he had been my adapted physical education student for 5 years. All I did was closely observe this boy problem towards.

I suddenly saw everything this boy was dealing with from the problem at hand, to the potential solutions, and to the ramifications of each potential solution as bits of information that had nothing to do with his alleged psychology.

I had been trained to analyze this student and all my students in terms of how they behaved and emoted. How each student could engage in a learning task was secondary to how they engaged their personalities during school.

He handled some information in the ways he was cognitively able to understand that information. With great earnestness and effort he formed predictions about how to manage the information he had just made sense of and then acted on those predictions. It just so happens, while in the process of acting upon his predictions for how to best manage the information in question, this student broke a few school rules.

My student, who was not proficient at estimating spatial, numerical, or temporal relationships, had poor short and long term memory, had poor generalizing skills, had managed to grapple with and make sense of the information at hand as best as he could considering his many cognitive deficits.

This boy actually came up with reasonable and effective predictions for how to handle the situation he was grappling, predictions that he acted on in order to solve the problem he had encountered.

OFF the wall behaVIOrs This student often analyzed the information present in any given sitiuation and came up with out of the ordinary and what many would consider off the wall resp

In fact, my student with many cognitive deficits engaged his cognitive skills in relationship to the information he was grappling with and came up with a very reasonable and plausible prediction for how to handle the situation. It just so happens, while in the process of acting upon his predictions for how to best manage the information in question, this student broke a few school rules.

Had I not been watching my student so earnestly and straightforwardly as he considered his options and grappled with his potential solutions, I would have defaulted to the psychologically driven analysis of the fact that he broke two school rules onc ehe chose a course of action. I would have decided that my student was being oppostional and defiant. After all, he had been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Personality Disorder.

the self help industry for everything it had to oghave clever ways of presenting fantastical religious dogma to coerce young, educated, modern people to buy into it. And

When we are taught information for how to understand one’s biological tendencies from the moment of birth onward, the patterns and schematas we build up for how to tie together, associate, and store that information are as important as the knowledge itself because we will forever use these patterns when we encounter new information.We make sense of new information hy associating it to old information and we use our old and established patterns to inform us for how to interpret, understand, and categorize new information.

As I grew up and began to question many of the Catholic teachings I learned as a child, I began to reject much of it. Or at least I thought I was rejecting it. What I would not realize until age 50 due to a fluke experience is that the psychological information I decided to put my faith in was exactly the same as the Catholic/Christian information I had thought I’d rejected. Psychological Catholic/Christian dogma in different clothes.

My world view growing up in the 60’s and 70’s on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio was filled with Irish Catholic icons and information., but it was also filled with a solid public school education that taught me to think for myself.

we learn it is hard to untangle the cognitive patterns that tied that information together. In learning that information, we learn patterns for how to make associations between old and new informtion. We learn patterns for how to interpret new information in relationship to the old information. If we come to believe information we learned when we were young was incorrect, we cannot always disentangle the pattern

As a Catholic girl, I did not know that even when I figure out much of what I was taught was wrong, I did not figure out that the patterns for how I came to understand myself and the world around me were firmly entrenched in how I was able to make sense of all future information about myself and the world around me.The patterns I was using to interpret inforamtion I inherirted lock stock and barrel since day 1 on planet earth. one has learned even

when I opened at birth in a Catholic hospital to iconic Catholic images that would forever dot my visual landscape. Crucifixes, rosaries, pictures of the Pope and John F. Kennedy (who is kind of like an Irish pope) hung in all my relatives’ homes on Cleveland’s west side, an area heavily populated by first, second, and third generation Irish Americans. Also not to be missed were the statues of the Blessed Mother and the various saints who dotted our window sills, end tables, dressers, and car dashboards.

In the 60’s and 70’s, psychology books tagged with anything to do with Freud, Jung, Rollo May, Chomsky, I’m O.K. You’re O.K., Maslow, or self-actualization were found on bookshelves intermingled with religious icons, at least in the homes of my college educated relatives. Self-help books started popping onto bookshelves after Your Erroneous Zones by Wayne Dyer kicked off the now bloated self-help industry in 1976.

And how things were done in the culture of my family was informed by hundreds and hundreds of years of very specific Catholic dogma that would be taught to me directly and indirectly, but mostly indirectly, on a daily basis, throughout my growing up years. The Catholic/Christian messages would seep into the schemata of my brain quickly and quietly, well before I had the intellect to compare and contrast the information to alternative points of view.

And because I was a child of the 60’s and 70’s, psychological dogma would be just as pervasive. Religious information was taught as being faith based. Psychological information was taught as being evidenced based. I was taught they were quite different ways of understanding the self, others and the world around me, which I accepted on faith ironically, until I didn’t.

I stopped believing in the teachings of both religions and psychology after having an intellectual epiphany. And more importanly, I stopped believing there was a difference between the two. It ende up, they are both faith based bodies of information.

I stopped believing in both religious and psychological dogma for a very unusual and unexpected reason.

When I discovered there was no difference, I started living as I was biologically intended to live for the first time, which I have to say, is way, way, way easier, better, richer and logical. Once I exized religious and psychological dogma from my stored conceptual memories, which took a full year,

When we are infants, toddlers, and preschoolers our brains are amped to take in, process, understand, and learn the specific elements of the specific environments we are born into to survive those environments, however harsh or difficult. As mammals of the human kind, we could be born into poverty, riches, violence, adversity, perversity, a jungle, a desert, a mountain top, or by the sea. We have the potential to be 1 of 12 children in a huge extended family or to be an only child with no relatives beyond parents. The human brain has to be able to learn about and adapt to whatever and wherever it finds itself from day 1 of life until the end of life.

As social mammals, our brains are amped to attach to the members of our family group, to be loved and proteced by them and to love and protect them in return. Our brain soaks up the information our family members have to teach us because that is what brains do to survive the environment they are born into.

Neuroscientists have shown us a picture of the world does not come ready made inside of our brains. We must construct a picture of the world based upon every single thing we encounter and learn. We learn and then we store the memory of what we just learned, over and over again. We rely upon stored memories to work our future learning and future stored memories.

When religious and psychological teachings guide our learning by teaching us how to understand how we work, how other people work, and how the world works, these teachings become woven throughout our brain like ivy. We cannot distentangle religious and psychological learning from our stored memories with one stroke because it is so pervasive.

I had no way of knowing my orientation to myself, to others, and to all information in the world would be so colored by the teachings of the Catholic church and psychological dogma until my late teen/early adult years because I didn’t know it was happening when it was happening. By the time I was intellectually capable of developing a wider intellectual perspective, my understanding of myself and the world around me was set in ways I could not change…until suddenly, due to a fluke experience at age 50, I could.

So if information we are fed when we are little permeates every past, present and future thought we have, how has religious and psychological dogma impacted those of us exposed to it from the moment we emerged out of the womb?

What happened to me was a miracle of logic because it is next to impossible to excise the bits of religious and psychological dogma that permeated every past, present, and future thought I was capable of having by the time I was an adult with adult brain. As adults we have the intellectual capacity to develop much broader intellectual perspectives, but we still must rely upon our past learning to do so because we use past concepts to build future concepts.

My fluke experienced occurred while observing a student of mine with special needs encounter a problem, assess his options, and then solve it. He went through these steps so cleanly, that suddenly his decision making processes made complete sense. In fact, his decision making process made human information analysis make sense across the board. Information analysis is the holy grail, the big question, the raison d’etre, the purpose of our human lives.

Once I understood his decision making process made perfect sense, So did the decision making processes of many of my students with special needs plus my daughter with Down syndrome.

What they were all doing is making sense of information in the ways that make sense to them.

Because of their mental and physical differences, individuals with special needs take in, understand, and manage information in a whole host of different and often what we would consider unsual ways. They have different cognitive strenghts and deficits, different eye-hand coordination, depth perception, thinking speed, working memory, long term memory, generalization abilities, verbal abilities, balance, coordinwhat to do next based upon how we have ation, strength, agility, visual acuity, auditory acuity, to name a few.

Both religious and psychological dogma teach us to understand ourselves and others as a reflection of our behaviors. But our behaviors are simply tools used by our brains and bodies to take in and analyze infoprmation so we can form predictions for what to do next. Neuroscientists have shown us that decisions we make can be defined as predictions for what to do next based upon our abiolity to understand the information we are dealing with in any given moment.

could observe individuals who were not impacted by either religious or psychological dogma during their developmental years? This is next to impossible to do, because all human groups, regardless of how primitive, have dogmatic beliefs they superimpose upon their developing children and adults alike.

Here is what I figured out after observing my own daughter with Down syndrome and my many students with a wide variety of special needs. Many individuals with special needs have a cognitive process that allows them to exercise their information processing and decision making biologically appropropriately.

There are fundamental differences in how many individuals with special needs analyze information and make decisions. My educational psychology courses and readings taught to understand many of the differences to be caused by behavioral problems, disorders, stubbornnes, defiance, etc. Psychologists teach teachers how to identify what they call behavioral based problems so teachers can modfiy the behaviors and change them into more ‘normal’ behaviors.

Psychologists arbitrarily decided to look at behaviors as if they exist in a separate realm from human perception, cognition, and emotion. Instead of looking at the human being as a whole, they have carved him up into parts.

After years and years of observing general education students and special education students, I realized these behavioral distinctions were misdirecting our efforts to raise and teach brain healthy children. Behavioral distinctions were actually causing us to raise overly anxious, depressed children, 1 in 4 of whom will eventually develop a mental illness. these differences I realized in what I would call a secular epiphany that individuals with special needs have a cognitive process that allows them to exercise their information processing and decision making biologically appropropriately.

What do I mean by this? Well, when we are raised with religious and psychological dogma,

I figured out being raised with both religious and psychological dogma, (because they are fundamentally similar in their patterns), causes us to make our moment to moment predictive decisions for ‘what to do next’ by constantly referencing an external set of rules we have internalized as part of our personality.

Religion and psychology both teach us how to dissociate and disengage our own personalized decision-making capacities in order to make sense of information using rules they superimpose on us. How we are biologically suppose to be making sense of information in order to make ‘predictive decisions for what to do next’ is taught out of us. Instead, we learn how to make predictive decisions for how the outcomes of our decisions will impact other people and standards.

This, I believe, is why 1 in 4 of us become mentally ill at some point. It is stressful and uncomfortable to manage information and make decisions by constantly referencing externalized rules and the potential judgments of other people for how well we have followed the rules.

One day about 3 years ago I had what I called a secular epiphany. I figured out children with special needs often cannot hold in their heads a set of dogmatic rules each time they assess a piece of information to make a predictive decision for what to do next. It is too much of a cognitive load for them. They also cannot figure out how other people think in order to match their predictive decisions up to how their decisions will impact others. I figured out children with special needs are engaging their predictive capacities more biologically correctly than most of us, not because they are more special and insightful than the rest of us, but due to brain mechanics.

I don’t mean to trivialize the children I observed by implying they exist to ‘teach’ us something special or inspire us. They exist to live their own personal lives to the fullest like the rest of us. I simply noticed they have an efficient and direct manner of assessing information in ways that make sense to them in order to make decisions that make sense to them.

I came to this epiphany quite indirectly because the predictive decisions children with special needs make for what to do next are quite often different than we are expecting. I was taught to view these differences as behavioral problems or behavioral disorders.

Both religion and psychology are founded on the idea that humans come into the world with the potential to develop many behavioral flaws and disorders. They tell us we must be on our guard constantly in order to prevent ourselves from ‘giving in’ to our base animal urges, instincts, or subconscious desires. They teach us our brain and body work to conspire against us quite frequently so we have to control ourselves with standardizes sets of rules for how to think and behave.

tBehaviors are simply a tool to help us continuously predict what to do next. If we tell children how to manage their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, we cripple them because these are the raw materials with which they manage information in order to predict what to do next.

I also figured out is any time a human being predicts something to happen next, and something different happens than predicted, it puts that human into fight-or-flight.

Pain is an example of something occuring different than we predicted. We have intense reactions to pain and we become paranoid if we believe someone is going to cause us pain. Our brain is no less intense about anomolies to our predictions than it is to pain because they are one in the same. When we believe we cannot predict what to do next or we believe someone will constantly counter our predictions, we become as paranoid as we would if they were going to hit us with a bat every time we see them.

Our brains are an instrument of paranoia. They have to be to keep us safe and oriented in space and time. So keeping life predictable is as dire to our sanity as keeping ourselves free from pain. Religious dogma provides as much predictability as we can humanly muster. Religion has been a pain reducer for our brains because it lays out specific rules for how people are to think and behave under all circumstances.

Religious rules and psychology’s behavioral standards, ultimately, are about helping us predict how other people will behave because as mammals, we are very skittish about other humans. Man is the most feared mammal of all, and our brains require us to be cautious of any unpredictable mammal. We cannot choose to turn our brains off, no matter how much yoga or meditation we do. We are animals and we have brains that require us to be vigilant, paranoid, and circumspect.

Upon figuring this all out with the help of my daughter, my students, and neuroscience research, I have excised the religious and psychological beliefs I was indoctrinated with as a child. As a result, I have never been more at ease in the world. Assessing information and making predictive decisions for what to do next has become pleasing and fulfilling instead of confusing and stressful.

I now know what causes anxiety, so I can manage anxiety about prediction anomalies the same as I can manage physical pain. Life has become a straightforward, pleasing experience for me. I now make sense of information in the ways that make sense to me, instead of constantly trying to make sense to other people and standardized rules of religion and psychology. My daughter and my students modeled for me how to have a direct relationship to the world without constantly referencing rules that told me how to think, feel, and behave. They set me in a direction to make some great discoveries about this human brain of ours.

I have figured out the whole religion thing for myself and have dropped it like a hot, Irish potato. Not a popular decision by my family, and I can’t bring myself to hide my statues of Mary, but life is much better for me now than ever!

By the way, your writing style is funny and smart and I love it!