How they keep themselves sacred believers (Our Top 10)

Post date: Mar 17, 2021 2:42:7 PM

1. Extremism and dogmatism... Fanatically religious individuals think in extremist, all or nothing ways... They do not merely think their views are correct; they fanatically, overzealously are sure they are... They not only give significance to certain things; like practically all bigoted persons, they exaggerate their dogmas’ significance... When they believe in something, they tend to be highly dogmatic, rigid, closeminded, bigoted, and orthodox... They hold onto their views for dear life as if they would fall apart at the seams if they held them more loosely, or let them go...

2. Absolutism and need for certainty... Fanatical religionists believe in absolutes: in unqualified and unconditional creeds... They have a desperate need for certainty, and essentially strive to be perfect and infallible... They are anxious about doing the wrong thing or appearing in a bad light to others; so they insist on an inexorable order in the universe that make them feel safe and secure... As part of their absolutism, they frequently believe in some superhuman, or infallible god, who will completely be on their side and who will help them to be angelic... But instead of such a personified god, they can easily dream up other absolute entities or ideas with which they feel safe...

3. Tautological and definitional thinking... Because fanatic religionists demand certainty, and because they live in a world of probability and chance where no absolutes and nothing perfect exists, they tend to create artificial certainty by thinking tautologically and definitionally... They invent some logical or mathematical system, in which everything comes out exactly because they start with certain axioms or definitions that insure perfect answers... Then they foist this system upon the world of diverse reality and delude themselves that it is reality... As another aspect of their need to be certain, once they determine that something is true, is a strong tendency to keep "proving" that it is true with specious logic and all kinds of non sequitur "proof..."

4. Intolerance of opposition... True believers cannot tolerate the fact that others have opposing views... They tend to be hostile to other points of view; to diabolize their opponents; to use all kinds of illegitimate, and frequently adhominem, arguments against them; to set up easy to knockdown ideas their opponents supposedly believe and then over enthusiastically mow down these strawmen; to try to prevent their dissenters from having a fair hearing; and otherwise to become incensed and persecutory toward those who do not agree... Here again their own underlying weakness is apparent along with a pitiful attempt to cover it up with false strength and bellicosity...

5. Deification and hero worship... Fanatic religionists usually deify and hero worship... They are not content with admiring the traits of worldly achievers; they find it necessary to apotheosize them, their personages... They frequently invent omnipotent gods to worship; but, at bottom, they usually have grandiose aspirations and sometimes (as when they have paranoid schizophrenia, for example,) they make themselves into some kind of god... When they do not go to this extreme, they still tend to imagine some great and glorious deity or hero, to identify closely with this paragon, and to feel semiomnipotent, holier than thou, and oneup on the world by showing how this deity or hero accepts them and how, therefore, they are really better than other common people...

6. Unrealism and antiempiricism... Fanatic religionists believe strongly in some kind of faith unfounded on fact, and frequently believe in spite of observable facts that contradict their belief system... They tend to be highly unscientific, unrealistic, antiempirical, romantic, and utopian. They frequently make up or believe in myths and fairy tales; and stubbornly refuse to accept certain aspects of reality that oppose their religion...

7. Condemning and punitive attitudes... Many true believers are condemning and punitive toward other people who display "erroneous" or "wrong" behavior... They not only have powerful, dogmatic moral codes of behavior; but they moralistically believe that everyone should follow these codes and that they should be condemned, and perhaps roasted everlastingly in some kind of hell, if they do not... Not only do they deplore many human acts or performances, but also they theologically condemn the whole individual, as a person, for engaging in these "wrong" acts... Frequently fanatical religious individuals are scrupulous about their own morals, perfectionistically demanding that they act angelically, and excoriating and flagellating themselves and others mightily if they do not live up to this noble standard...

8. Obsessiveness and compulsivity... Fanatical religionists are often obsessed with their dogmatically held views and feel compelled to follow them to the letter... They do not merely want things; they demand the world be the way they want... They are driven people and frequently sacrifice their own happiness, and even their lives, because of their obsessive compulsive behaviors... They are rarely relaxed or easy going, but are overintensely involved with their devout religious goals...

9. Mysticism... Religious minded individuals often believe that it is possible to achieve communion with some deity through contemplation and love without the medium of human reason... Or they think that they can attain knowledge of spiritual truths through special intuition or through some form of meditation rather than by scientific understanding... They overly rely on intuition; they engage in vague or obscure thinking; they believe in some essence of life, something in itself, which can never be known or is knowable only to the "specially initiated..."

10. Ritualism.. Many, perhaps most, religious persons tend to believe in and to follow arbitrary rites and rituals, which they consider necessary for good living... They believe that either they will be punished if they do not follow these rituals or that they will lead infinitely better lives if they do... They usually feel that some higher order of the universe, or god, demands that they practice specific rites, and they feel guilty if they do not live up to its or his demands... They believe that certain objects and symbols are holy or sacrosanct; and they frequently have various scriptures considered to be especially holy, and whose regulations must be rigidly followed... It should be noted that all people who are religious do not necessarily subscribe to the foregoing characteristics of the fanatically religiously minded person, though many individuals do have all these tendencies... Moreover, several of them overlap; so it is hard to determine, exactly, where one ends and the other begins... Religious people also may omit certain traits such as sectarianism, cultlike, hallucination, and outright psychosis that true believers frequently possess, but that may also be characteristic of the nonreligious, and therefore shouldn’t be included in our model of fanatical religiosity... In any event, I believe that devout religiosity in a fairly specific sense of this term is realistically defined in terms of the foregoing behaviors and can be disturbed and neurotic, if not psychotic...