Lecture 6: The Religious Level PSYCH 218

Winter 2025 Chris Burris Test #2

3 Questions to Consider

1. what will happen to you when you die?

2. what do you believe that?

3. has this changed over time? why?

when a person endorses a certain ultimate truth claim then why do they believe that? where did it come from? what are the implications of one idea set over another?

3 Assumed Human Needs

meaning - the purpose in life, making sense of all the things that happen, physical stimuli, how things work

• we are storytellers and receivers. people talk to each other (whether to gossip or in a fire) to make sense of what’s happening

control - in moderation

• not necessarily a master of the universe but just having some sense of acting with a positive outcome on your environment, or do something and see results along the lines of what you were looking for

• learned helplessness: people feel like they can’t control anything no matter what they do

relationship - trusting others and having them trust us takes time and without it, people feel disconnected and suffer

Religion: ascribing importance to an entity in the absense of “objectively justifiable” criteria and subsequently attempting to use it and/or relate to it.

ascribing importance to an entity - a force, person, principle that is raised to the ultimate importance, as the center of the universe and everything else fits under it giving people the ability to reorganize their life

in the absence of objectively justifiable criteria - does not depend on direct experience and social consensus; simply based on the private sense that it feels true.

• Christians were mailed a card saying that the traditional teachings are wrong and God doesn’t exist and scientists believe it - 100% said they would change their beliefs.

• similar thing to atheist societies and found the opposite, God exists, 50% said no

• suggests a robustness about religion

and subsequently attempting to use it and/or relate to it - this refers to control and relationship; using the meaning of your ultimate meaning and if the entity is a personality, it becomes about relating to it

How is religion applicable to death?

0. it is a central theme - entity has a lot to say about life and subsequently death especially since it claims emotional and psychological authority

1. specializes in non-empirical questions that can’t be solved by data and observation

   1. origins of how things came into being

   2. purpose of humanity and existence, why are we here and why we live

   3. destinations - why we die and what happens, can we alter that

2. the “unseen” vs what you see is what you get: religion relies on the idea of unseen + WYSIWYG type person can’t be religious because the unseen can’t exist

3. “afterdeath” beliefs” - important to answer “what do you think happens when you die” otherwise the most you could do is speculate. people with near-death experiences have direct experience with death

4. belief is inescapable

Burris: Consciousness, identity, physicality

no consciousness → annihilation; most common among non-believers but is still a belief (in disbelief)

• secular

consciousness without identity or body → disembodied spirit; consciousness is all that survives and personality and body are gone, similar to Pure I (history of Pure I is more likely to endorse this)

consciousness and body without identity → reincarnation; you’re not you anymore, amnesia about past reincarnations

• eastern

consciousness, identity but no body → spiritual embodiment; you’re still you but without the body. basis for paranormal beliefs (most popular afterdeath belief)

consciousness and identity but new body → bodily resurrection; you have yourself as a person in an improved body. part represents the whole; worldviews tend to be against cremation

• western

The Experiential Congruence of Beliefs

when people dissociate they’re conscious that their baseline of identity is altered, which is part of a tradition they don’t identify with

Burris’ experiment to see if the psychological process of dissociation is a shift from our baseline level of identity and connection when people are focused on something else

dissociation affects identity → afterdeath beliefs

his studies had 4 measures of dissociation with eastern, western, or secular continuations (consciousness with detachment from identity = eastern continuation)

1. does intense positive experience having dissociative properties predict afterdeath beliefs → found that people were more likely to agree with eastern beliefs

2. negative experience showing dissociation found that still eastern beliefs were dominant

3. cause and effect? so far we know correlation but to find causation, they had people who were told to think of the suicide of a close other. found that survivors had a higher score on the dissociation scale, anxiety, and depression

   1. suicide group DISSOCIATION ←→ eastern afterdeath beliefs even though depression and anxiety were also higher for them

More Effects of Experience

cognitive reappraisal: early-stage emotional regulation (change the way you think about things if you want to feel differently)

expressive suppression: dampening the intensity of emotion

this study had people self-identify religious identity and rate things on cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression (atheists, non-religious, religious)

• cognitive reappraisal showed no differences across the 3 groups on average

• expressive suppression showed atheists scoring way higher than non-religious or religious which were equal to each other (more likely to suppress)

follow up study showed recorded video clips with no sound of people talking about positive or negative emotional experiences that were shown to participants for impression formation.

• atheist people were less likely to show positive emotion and participants were able to predict whether they were believers or disbelievers above chance

positive emotion enhances spirituality (opens to more spiritual experiences and increases their likelihood)

Focusing Exercise Experiment

had people think about a time they felt frustrated/annoyed OR happy/joyful

• some were told to not let their emotions show at all (suppress)

• some were told to let their emotions leak out (not suppress)

• measured atheistic/secular postmortem beliefs and their preferred emotion regulation strategy

people who did not suppress (reappraised) emotion regulation didn’t predict anything

people who suppressed predicts secular beliefs

if suppressing emotion constricts the self then the self does NOT extend beyond the body

Afterdeath beliefs and relationship requires

preservation of personhood (identity)

the dead continues to exist in spirtual form where consciousness and identity survive

Religion, Death, and Control

• belief/behaviour efficacy: fate beyond death is affected by what you do while you’re alive

• interpretation: how faith traditions make sense of illness and death (punishment, test, consequence of negative thoughts, etc)

• prescription: how to behave since what we do affects what happens when we die

• notion of sacrifice: killing of animals or even humans to satisfy/bribe gods

• incorporation: life feeds off life; taking in the divine through virtue like eating bread and wine in christianity

• heroes: those who cheated death by triumph over human condition makes them models

• “worldview" defense”: protects us from fear of death by identifying with cultural beliefs. people are willing to die and kill for their worldviews