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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
remark of Stern concerning these factors must always be borne
in mind. They imply ‘not predestination but pre-disposition’.
Concerning external factors something more must be said.
An unfavourable environment can prevent the religious
tendency from being impregnated by objective stimulations
with the result that the religious need remains dormant.
Adverse external influences can inhibit the development of a
religious need that has been partly awakened. Certain
environmental stimulations can at the same time arouse religious
interest and hinder personal religious development. For
instance, religious intolerance, hypocrisy and uncharitableness
observed in the behaviour of others can distort religious growth;
and religious compulsion in early years can do irreparable
harm. Personal disappointments within the realm of religious
interest, moral failures and false conceptions about prayer
may have very adverse effects; and where religion is grounded
in false assumptions as the result of ignorance or faulty teaching,
the disappointments and tragedies common to all human beings
can deprive a person of faith in the meaning of life and thus in
spiritual realities.
The Purpose of Unbelief
A denial of religious value may be purposive: that is to say,
it may be a more or less conscious attempt to satisfy an acquired
need or achieve a desired end.
Oskar Pfister, the Swiss clergyman and psychologist,
draws attention, for example, to the relation between unbelief
and narcissism. Narcissism is a morbid condition of
selfpreoccupation in which the individual becomes his own
loveobject. The narcissist regards himself as the centre about
which everything revolves. He cannot tolerate the idea that
there exists any power superior to his own. He denies the
existence of God and all evidences of supernatural reality in
order to assert the sovereignty of his own ego.
Again, unbelief may be the rationalisation of a desire for an
immoral or unmoral way of living. If a person is the victim of
tendencies he cannot control, and yet is unwilling to
acknowledge their dominion over him, he will very often deny the
! Die Verschiedenen Arten des Unglaubens in Psychoanalytischer Beleuchtung, Zeitschrift
für Religionspsychologie, No. 1, 1935.
116
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