Beliefs Taught to Children and their Consequences

When I was 16 years old, following a brief episode of involvement with a “Jesus-freak” community of young people, I asked my brother to guide me in a “real” dose of LSD. As he was quite experienced and had the right connections, he gave me 400 mcg of pure Sandoz product. The result was a very challenging 12 hour experience of great mystical import, which I won’t detail here. But one central insight that came out of this day, and which has informed an understanding of religious dogma ever since, is this:

Belief systems are a movement of thought based on fear.

Over the past 35 years in my psychiatric practice I have observed the complex interplay of factors underlying patients’ suffering, and broadly these predisposing factors fall into a few categories:

-Genetics: we can easily observe the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in close relatives going back a few generations, e.g. schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc.

-Intergenerational trauma: as we now understand, the traumas of our ancestors affect the gene expression and thus symptoms of later generations. An amazing example of this is PTSD symptoms in the children of holocaust survivors who had no direct experience of the trauma.

-Childhood and later life experiences, joys and traumas: we can all easily see these effects in our own lives. For example, the devastating effects of childhood abuse and neglect.

And finally, childhood conditioning in the form of teachings from both parents and society. This is todays subject, and one of profound consequence in my patients’ lives.

In its simplest form, this can manifest as religious doctrine, prejudices or morality tales presented to children as truth which defy reason and which children are asked to swallow whole, unexamined, irrefutable, not subject to enquiry or doubt.

I will start with a prevalent example in the West:

There was a man named Jesus, whose mother was a virgin, who taught the only way to salvation, who was Jewish as were all his followers, who was betrayed by Jews after teaching and performing miracles for only three years, put to death violently by the Romans even though it was still the fault of the Jews, who doubted everything at the end but all of this was God’s plan from the start, as He planned to have his son martyred to save everyone else, not everyone but only those who believed the right version of events, who so loved the world that He killed his son brutally and consigned the bulk of humanity to eternal suffering for not believing the right things, and then this dead son rose from the dead to prove his divinity and several people saw it, and fundamentally it was all the fault of a woman Eve who ate fruit she was told not to, and so on.

The confusion in a child who is repeatedly told this story, as truth, is consequential. That child is bound to feel baffled by the absurdity of this narrative: it sets up a condition of fear and self-doubt as the story clearly doesn’t make sense and difficulty thinking for oneself for fear of reprisals from family, religious authorities or a brutal deity. At a young age,  learning to think and feel for oneself is perhaps the most important developmental task.

In addition, the entire relationship with one’s body, whose primary drives are taught to be sinful, to one’s essential nature, which is taught to be corrupted from the start, and to one’s own insight, which is not to be used, is thrown off course.

With the dawning of a person’s sexuality, a profound conflict is set up, and perhaps the strongest drive of all is taught to be a problem stemming from the corruption that is our instincts, feelings and passions. If the body is sinful, then caring for it so it can experience life fully makes no sense. If the world is hurtling toward a resurrection event that will consign most humans to eternal punishment, then really nothing makes sense: not the benevolence of a creator, nor justice, forgiveness, lovingkindness, equality or faith in life itself.

These belief systems, taught to children, contain barbs like fishing hooks that are very difficult to remove, even decades later in a psychiatrist’s office. Fear is integral to the problem; if I question the doctrine, I may be eternally punished, excluded, frozen out of love and connection forever. I may be separated in some way from family and community,  perhaps eternally.

On a deeper level, these doctrines prevent a young person from coming to terms early on with the basic fact of uncertainty. Martin Heidegger described this as “thrownness,” the seeming arbitrariness of how we exist in a certain family, context and time in world events. In Buddhism, change and uncertainty are seen as the underlying facts of all existence. In existentialism this is sometimes called “meaninglessness,” but in grappling with this comes a young person’s sense of their own unique purpose, gifts and path. In yoga philosophy the term “sva-dharma” refers to one’s own individual path, distinct and wonderful, to be found through persistent inquiry, practice and study.

In my view it is fine to teach children the history of world religions, the ways different cultures developed as a result, and one’s own lineage going back generations. But it needs to be clear that the belief systems are just that, beliefs, and do not in themselves constitute truth. Truth is to be found for oneself, through study, experience, travel, relationship, and the wonderful practices for inquiry developed throughout the world called meditation.

“A person of scientific mindset will read hundreds of  books in the course of her life, but will always be convinced there is much for her to learn. A religious fanatic will read only one and be convinced she has understood everything.” (Author unknown)