“Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior … mental processes such as thoughts, feelings … ”¹

There are a number of religious things you can explain away just using psychology. This was detrimental to my faith, so I’ve decided that psychology isn’t real.

What does that mean? Have I decided that the happenings in our brains are all fake? No, everything we ascribe to psychology is perhaps, just spiritual.

Why? Let me give you a scenario:

Somebody says they are depressed, we pray for them, they feel better.

Do they feel better because God interacted with them and performed a miracle? Or do they feel better because they now know that people around them support them? Either option causes the prayer to be “answered” but did God do anything?

If God isn’t doing anything, then what do we need God for? (Yes, obviously we need him to be saved, regardless if he is curing depression right now.) What if God, since he created the human brain, knows all the inner workings of the brain, and how to exploit them. So what if God just have us systems (like prayer) which aren’t “actually” doing anything but are just methods to exploit the systems God already setup? So in once sense God is still doing something, but he just did it in the past.

Same thing with evangelical worship. It’s common to have people cry and get surrounded by their group of friends, praying for them. We actually organize the worship set so invoke emotions like this. Then people in the congregation who are crying will then talk about how much they felt God, specifically the Holy Spirit. But how much of that is just emotion, and how much is God? If we engineered the set to invoke emotion, are people actually interacting with God? Well, we could take the position that we took with prayer. God gave you emotions, you now exploit the emotions praising God, your emotions are invoked, and you “feel God”. So in once sense, again, God did something, but isn’t doing something.

I didn’t like this whole situation, so I scrapped it. No more psychology, no more problem. Everything in your mind is spiritual. This isn’t even that much of a stretch, really all I’m saying is consciousness is spiritual. This might even be how people used to think:

Job 20:2-3 [NASB]

2: “Therefore my disquieting thoughts make me respond,

Even because of my inward agitation.

3: I listened to the reprimand which insults me,

And the spirit of my understanding makes me answer.

Here we see that Zophar doesn’t say “I was thinking”, “my inner dialog came to the conclusion of”, or anything to that effect. But instead “…the spirit of my understanding…”.

Footnotes

1. Source; the opening statements on the wiki page ↩

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