The Trouble with Christianity: A Psychological Perspective - Softcover

Oxtoby, Richard Markham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178535289X ISBN 13: 9781785352898

Verlag: John Hunt Publishing, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In this book, using Eric Fromm’s distinction between Humanistic and Authoritarian Religions whose implications for Christianity the author explored at some length in his recently published /The Two Faces of Christianity/, he identifies what he believes to be the fundamental psychopathology which has prevented Christianity becoming an unambiguous good for humanity, namely an authoritarian mind-set. Central to this mindset is the idea of God as a controlling force acting on the universe, but separate from it, rather than as a property of ‘all that is’. Dr Oxtoby argues that it is this ubiquitous authoritarian thinking, with its emphasis on the need for obedience to imposed authority which lies at the root of the sado-masochistic obsession with pain, suffering and death of the Doctrine of the Atonement.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Markham Oxtoby is a clinical and industrial psychologist who spent more than 33 years on the staff of the Department of Psychology of the University of Cape Town. Since taking early retirement at the end of 1999 he has been involved in business consulting in the area of human relations, conflict resolution and executive coaching, concert-giving in the field of Renaissance and Baroque music, and the writing of books.

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The Trouble with Christianity

A Psychological Perspective

By Richard Oxtoby

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Richard Oxtoby
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78535-289-8

Contents

Introduction, 
Chapter 1. The Meaning of Words, 
Chapter 2. How Concepts are Formed, 
Chapter 3. The Nature of God, 
Chapter 4. What God is Not, 
Chapter 5. So What is the Trouble with Christianity?, 
Appendix, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Additional Reading, 
A Few Words of Thanks, 
Also by Richard Oxtoby, 

CHAPTER 1

The Meaning of Words

It is not the case that our apprehension of a general truth is dependent on its accurate verbal expression. You cannot rise above the adequacy of the terms you employ.

– Alfred North Whitehead. Religion in the Making

Words, whether written or spoken, have no meaning in themselves. Their meaning, (which is at least subtly different for everyone who uses them) resides in the intellectual abstractions which make up the concept to which we attach those verbal labels (of, for example, an 'apple', a 'person', 'love', 'compassion', or 'hatred').

These abstractions are made by our nervous systems, and are of two types: Primary Abstractions and Higher-Order Abstractions. Primary Abstractions result from the interactions between our sensory receptors and the world around us in which we 'live, and move, and have our being'. They in turn become the raw material for Higher-Order abstractions. The contents of thought are a mixture of Primary and Higher-Order abstractions. The way in which both these types of abstractions arise is described in some detail in the next chapter.

Letters and words are part of the physical world: they belong in the same category as all the other physical things we encounter every day. The intellectual abstractions which make up the concepts we have of things, and which form the basis of all our intellectual activity however humble it might be, belong in a different category. They are part of the realm of non-physical reality, which is in no way either superior or inferior to concrete physical reality, but must not be confused with it. Assuming that intellectual abstractions are physical realities is to commit what the profound mathematical philosopher A. N. Whitehead described as, 'The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness'.

It seems more and more clear to me that this fallacy lies at the root of many of the problems which academic, and sometimes everyday conversations run into from time to time. Prominent among these, and of particular interest and concern to me at the present time are the questions of the Existence of God, the Nature of Time and Space, and the so-called 'Mind-Body Problem' – the conundrum posed by the attempt to reconcile the fact that mental state and bodily condition are clearly closely related to each other, with the question that if 'the body' is understood to be a purely physical entity and 'the mind' to be at least partially defined as a non-physical entity, how can they possibly interact with each other? In this book, my primary focus will be on 'The Concept of God' – does such a 'being' have any objective, 'real world' physical existence. It is my contention that many, perhaps most, Christians make erroneous judgments in this matter and that this is the most fundamental 'trouble' with Christianity.

Some readers may find the next chapter quite heavy going, and that they are not particularly interested in the technicalities of how concepts are formed. I hope that those readers who feel this way will simply skip to the end of the chapter and carry on reading from the last two paragraphs of that chapter.

CHAPTER 2

How Concepts are Formed

It is characteristic of the learned mind to exalt words. Yet mothers can ponder many things in their hearts which their lips cannot express. ... We know more of the characters of those who are dear to us than we can express accurately in words.

– Alfred North Whitehead. Religion in the Making

According to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 to 322 BCE), human beings have five senses – Vision, Hearing, Touch, Smell, and Taste. Since Aristotle's time many more senses have been identified, now believed to be about 20 in number. Some of these bring to our awareness various aspects of the physical environment both outside and inside our bodies, others (such as the electroreceptors which respond to changes in the electric fields around us) provide information which various systems within our body use, but of which we have no conscious awareness. There is no reason to think that we now have a complete listing of all the sensory receptors in the human body.

The basic unit responsible for the transmission and processing of information in the nervous system is the neurone. Most of the neurones in our body do their work by responding to the stimulation they receive at one of their ends (where the cell body is located) by releasing neurotransmitter chemicals from the terminal buttons at their other end. These in turn stimulate any other neurones with which they are connected (by means of a synapse) to discharge their dose of stimulating chemicals, and so the chain goes on, with many side-shoots and sometimes doublings back on themselves. With any one neurone (and there are estimated to be about 86 billion of them within the average human brain) making up to several thousand synaptic connections with other neurones, it is perhaps hardly surprising that it has been estimated that there are probably more than 1000 trillion neuronal connections in the human brain. It is this huge network of inter-connectedness which makes possible the remarkable feats of which the human being is capable.

Sensory receptors

Some of the total collection of neurones are modified in such a way that it is not the arrival of neurotransmitter chemicals from another neurone that stimulates them to release their own dose of chemicals onto the next neurone in the chain, but rather the receipt of physical stimulation (within certain upper and lower limits) from some other source, for example, sound within certain pitches and degrees of loudness, and light within a certain range of wavelengths and degrees of brightness.

Bundles of these specially modified neurones form the sensory receptors which constitute the interface between the physical world and our experience and understanding of it. Activity in these receptors is the first fundamental step in the process of converting the events of nature into our intellectual knowledge about those events.

Four things are particularly important to know and remember about the performance of our sensory receptors. Most fundamentally, our nervous systems are inevitably digital processing systems which convert the processes of continuous change within the human body into a series of digital events. I describe the system as inevitably a digital one because every neurone, whether it is part of a sensory receptor or just involved in transmitting information, acts in an 'all or none' manner, not becoming active until it has received a certain minimum amount of stimulation which causes it to 'fire', and release a dose of its own neurotransmitter onto the next neurone in the chain of which it is a part. In this way it is acting as an analogue to digital converter, aggregating the total of all the events influencing it between each digital signal into a single digital event.

Each of those single digital events gives...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Hunt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 178535289X
• ISBN 13: 9781785352898
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 120
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar