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RELIGION AND SELF-DECEPTION
Great harm has been done to true faith and religion by the
activities of fanatics and heaven-stormers of this kind. It is of
the utmost importance to beware of them, and to recognise that
it is their distortions of religion that have evoked the criticism
that ‘religion is opium for the people’.
We can hardly expect the enemies of religion to acknowledge
that wishful thinking or dubious motives account for their
antagonism to it or their criticisms of it. People always have
‘very good reasons’ for inferior thinking. The process by which
these ‘reasons’ are produced is called ‘rationalising’.
Thouless says that rationalising is forming a chain of evidence
‘which common sense uses to justify a conviction which in fact
has originated in a suggestion or an affective disposition’.
The person who desires to correct a tendency to rationalise in
his personal life and thought has a long and difficult voyage of
discovery in self-knowledge before him. He will continually
have to come to terms with conflicts in himself; with the forces
of his inner being that are trying to lead him away from the
dangerous and accusing revelations of truth.
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