Optimistic Nihilism: A Psychologist's Personal Story & (Biased) Professional Appraisal of Shedding Religion

by David Landers

If you have a fear of contamination we do the same thing but switch dirt for the spider. If it’s speaking in public, you give me a speech and we work up from there. Such exposure therapy is also part of treatment for trauma (you telling your story of victimization is one potentially feared stimulus to engage). Exposure can even be used in treating personality disorders. For example, a narcissist may become accustomed to failure if exposed to it in manageable doses and processed with a skilled therapist. Of course, some exposures are trickier than others because the feared stimulus is not readily accessible, but there are options. For example, with a fear of flying some of the exposure can be done via virtual reality. And so on.

The other very interesting exercise that might surprise you is that we breathed from a bag of carbon dioxide. Apparently, many patients are “chronic hyperventilators”; perhaps due to chronic, low-grade anxiety, they don’t breathe as deeply as normal and instead do so in a choppy, shallow manner. Breathing as such disrupts the proper ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide in the body which can contribute to uneasy feelings leading to panic. All that hippie crap about taking slow, deep breaths to relax isn’t just annoying mumbo-jumbo; there’s a medical explanation for why that feels good.

“You know,” [Lilly] adds, “[mathematician Kurt] Gödel’s theorem, translated, says that a computer of a given size can model only a smaller computer. It cannot model itself. If it modeled a computer of its own size and complexity, it would fill it entirely and it couldn’t do anything.” “So the brain can never understand the brain?” we ask. “That’s right.”

For example, we had learned that Dionysus was the god of wine and partying, an instant fan favorite among us college undergraduates, we being obsessed with beer and titties and whatnot. However, in From Paganism to Christianity we delved deeper, learning that Dionysus was born of a virgin on December 25th. In fact, we learned that other gods were born on the winter solstice as well, like Egyptian Osiris and Persian Mithras, the connection apparently being that this was the most important day of the year to many ancient peoples, as it signaled the coming of longer, warmer days and the growing of crops.

Faith, then, does not offer only hope: It affords a sense of control, or agency. “Potency,” Yalom calls it.

As Lewis Wolpert says, “A simple drug like LSD could only have such effects if the circuits for these experiences were already in the brain.”18 I don’t think we know why they are there, but they apparently are.

Many pilots, at some point during G-LOC, experience dramatic altered states, eerily—or I guess I should say not so eerily—similar to NDEs. Yes, healthy pilots in G-LOC can experience tunnel vision and bright lights, floating sensations, automatic movement, autoscopy [sensation of seeing one’s own body from an external perspective], out-of-body experiences, not wanting to be disturbed, paralysis, vivid dreamlets of beautiful places, pleasurable sensations, . . . euphoria and dissociation, inclusion of friends and family, inclusion of prior memories and thoughts, the experience being very memorable . . . , confabulation, and a strong urge to understand the experience.19 No wonder atheists have NDEs as often as Christians: It’s because the NDE is a medical phenomenon, not a spiritual one. And no wonder dying people in India tend to see Hindu deities, those in New Guinea see sorcerers, and Native Americans see “Native American objects such as a ‘war eagle,’ deer, moose, bow and arrow, and moccasins.”20 It’s not because life after death is for everybody—it’s because life after death is for nobody. Even the mighty NDE is just another fucking neurological malfunction.

Now I understand why NDEs seem to be associated with some kinds of dying and not others. Your brain has to be deprived of oxygen to have the pleasant dying experience, like through cardiac arrest, bloodletting, or choking. I’ve never heard of an NDE associated with blunt force trauma to the head, even though people almost die from it all the time.

When we feel unable to tolerate the tension and confusion aroused by complexity, we “resolve” that complexity by splitting it into two simplified and opposing parts, usually aligning ourselves with one of them and rejecting the other. As a result, we may feel a sort of comfort in believing we know something with absolute certainty; at the same time, we’ve over-simplified a complex issue, robbing it of its richness and vitality . . . Feelings of anger and self-righteousness often accompany this process, bolstering our conviction that we are in the right and the other side in the wrong. Ambiguity and compromise are out of the question because they plunge us back into the painful realm of ambivalence.

Crusadism . . . is characterized by a powerful inclination to seek out and to dedicate oneself to dramatic and important causes. These individuals are demonstrators looking for an issue; they embrace a cause almost regardless of its content. As soon as one cause is finished, these hard-core activists must rapidly find another in order to stay one step ahead of the meaninglessness that pursues them.

Staying ahead of the meaninglessness that pursues us. That’s a very provocative thought, that sometimes our ambitions are motivated by fears of meaninglessness.

Ask George Bernard Shaw: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”

It’s well known in atheist circles that the happiest nations on earth are often the least religious, including Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The dynamics behind such a correlation are certainly complicated, but evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber believes that the atheism-happiness effect is mediated by economics. That is, the citizens of these nations are happy primarily due to “a combination of national wealth and redistribution of resources via high taxation and a well-developed welfare state.”10 In other less alarming words, “European social democracies provide existential security . . . a secure standard of living for everyone.” Italics added. The suggestion is that once people achieve existential security through financial stability, they’re less desperate to look for it in religion.

Smith and colleagues compiled 147 different studies that had each already assessed the correlation between religiosity and depression, altogether involving almost 99,000 different subjects.13 They found that when looking at all of these studies together, the correlation between religiosity and depression was -0.096. In the simplest of layman’s terms, this means that religious people are less depressed than nonreligious people, on average. However, of all the variation we might see in a population’s scores on a depression test, religiosity only accounts for about 1% of it. Yes, that means that 99% of the variation in our depression scores is not related to religiosity.