pain

Religion: why do people believe in God?

Religion: why do people believe in God?

As scientists prove that faith can relieve pain, distinguished psychologist Dorothy Rowe examines the case for and against religion

I’m not religious, but I have thought about religion all of my life. My mother never attended church but she insisted that I went to St Andrew’s Church, a cold, unfriendly place filled with cold, unfriendly people. At home, my father, an atheist, would read aloud to us from the essays of Robert Ingersoll, the 19th-century militant atheist.

Ingersoll’s prose had the music and majesty of King James’s Bible. I loved the language of them both. I learned how to use Ingersoll’s logic to examine the teachings of the Bible. My disapproval of the cruelty and vanity of the Presbyterian God knew no bounds, but I felt at home with Jesus, whom I saw as a kind, loving man like my father.

God had not been in the trenches, or anywhere else, with the ex-Servicemen whom I met at university. When religion was discussed, we listed the cruelties and stupidities of religion throughout history, just as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens were to do 40 years later.

However, when I went to work in psychiatric hospitals, I realised that criticising religion was not enough. I needed to understand why religion becomes an integral part of a person’s life – and doesn’t cease to be so when such beliefs cause the person much pain and guilt, or lead him to commit murder, even to the point of genocide.

Although they had not recognised it, my depressed or psychotic patients were struggling with the questions that theologians and philosophers had struggled with for thousands of years. “What will happen to me when I die?” “How can I be a good person?” “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

Siegfried, a depressed, alcoholic psychiatrist, told me about his uncle, who was in the RAF during the war. He provided the love and concern for Siegfried that was lacking in Siegfried’s parents. He said: “Then, one day his aeroplane came down a bit too fast.

“Up to that time, aged 13, I’d had some vague concept of God – I sang in the church choir every Sunday. My last memories of any contact with God was that particular night when I called Him all the filthy language I knew. I thought, if He exists, He’s a s–t.” I asked him how he felt about God now. He said, ‘If He exists, He’s a s–t’.”

Unable to find satisfactory answers about the meaning of their existence, the psychotic patients had constructed very idiosyncratic fantasies. Ella was a beautiful 16-year-old who had become withdrawn and isolated. Her parents had taken time to recognise that there was a problem because, to them, she was the perfectly obedient child they wanted.

Ella’s mother told me: “I always obeyed my parents and I expect my children to obey me.” Fearing her parents’ anger, Ella learned to avoid all spontaneous decisions and actions. She told me: “I’ve begun to wonder whether I’m the only person who’s really alive – the only living person. Everyone else is a vision. I’m living each person’s life in turn.”

Pope to sick: ‘Accept death at hour chosen by God’

It’s nice to see the pope feel compassion for those who’s existence is marked by pain and suffering by telling them to suck it up and deal with it.

Pope to sick: ‘Accept death at hour chosen by God’

LOURDES, France (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI urged ailing pilgrims to accept death “at the hour chosen by God,” reasserting the Vatican’s opposition to euthanasia on Monday at an open-air Mass for the sick in Lourdes.

Benedict administered the sacrament of the sick to pilgrims outside the French shrine reputed for its curative powers. In the crowd, many pilgrims in wheelchairs and on gurneys were bundled in quilts against the chill.

In his homily, the pope said the ill should pray to find “the grace to accept, without fear or bitterness, to leave this world at the hour chosen by God.” The Vatican vehemently maintains that life must continue to its natural end.

The message has special resonance in Europe. Belgium and the Netherlands have legalized euthanasia, and Switzerland allows counselors or physicians to prepare a lethal dose, though patients must take it on their own.

France permits patients to refuse treatment that can keep them alive but stops short of allowing euthanasia. The debate in France was revived this year with the death of a woman whose tumor burrowed through her head, leaving her with constant pain, hemorrhaging and difficulty eating.

Benedict’s Mass for the sick outside the gold mosaic facade of the Basilica of the Rosary was the final stop of his visit to Lourdes. The shrine in the foothills of the French Pyrenees draws 6 million pilgrims a year, many of whom believe that Lourdes’ spring water has the power to heal and even work miracles.

Helped by attendants, the sick bathe in pools of the cool water and take it home in plastic jugs and vials in the shape of the Virgin Mary. Thousands of people have claimed to be cured here, and the Roman Catholic church has officially recognized 67 incidents of miraculous healing linked to Lourdes.

At the close of Mass, Benedict anointed 10 ailing pilgrims, ranging from a teenage boy to an elderly nun in a white habit. He gently touched their foreheads and palms with oil and addressed each one in his or her own language.

The pope urged the ailing to remember that “dignity never abandons the sick person.”

“Unfortunately we know only too well: the endurance of suffering can upset life’s most stable equilibrium, it can shake the firmest foundations of confidence, and sometimes even leads people to despair of the meaning and value of life,” the pope said.

“There are struggles that we cannot sustain alone, without the help of divine grace,” he said.

Maryse Bargain, a 48-year-old woman from the Brittany region of northwest France, was among those praying for healing. She expressed hope that the pope, “someone else or the Virgin” might help cure the blindness she has suffered from since birth.

Benedict planned his trip to mark the 150th anniversary of visions of the Virgin Mary to a Lourdes peasant girl, 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, who was later named a saint. On Monday he wrapped up a visit of sites linked to Bernadette’s life, stopping at the chapel where she received her First Communion.

The pontiff departed by plane for Rome en route to the papal summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo after his four-day trip to Paris and Lourdes — his first visit to France since his election as pope in 2005.

Benedict said he hoped to return to France though that decision was “in the hands of God.”