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                    The Case against Religion


                       By Albert Ellis,    Ph.D.  Psychotherapy




Before we can talk sensibly about religion--or almost anything else!--
we should give some kind of definition of what we are talking about.  
Let me, therefore, start with what I think are some legitimate
definitions of the term religion.   Other concepts of this term, of
course, exist;  but what I am talking about when I use it is as
follows.

     According to Webster's New Word Dictionary, religion is: "(1)
belief in a divine or superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and
worshipped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe; (2)
expression of this belief in conduct and ritual."

     English and English, in their Comprehensive Dictionary of
Psychological and Psychoanalytical Terms (1958), define religion as
"a system of beliefs by means of which individuals or a community put
themselves in relation to god or to a supernatural world and often to
each other, and from which the religious person derives a set of
values by which to judge events in the natural world."

     The Columbia Encyclopedia notes that "when a man becomes
conscious of a power above and beyond the human, and recognizes a
dependence of himself upon that power, religion has become a factor in
his being."

     These, then are the definitions of religion which I accept and
which I shall have in mind as I discuss the religious viewpoint in this
paper.     Religion, to me, must include some concept of a deity.  
When the term is used merely to denote a system of beliefs, practices,
or ethical values which are not connected with any assumed higher
power, then I believe it is used loosely and confusingly; since such a
nonsupernatural system of beliefs can more accurately be described as
a philosophy of life or a code of ethics, and it is misleading to
confuse a believer in this general kind of philosophy or ethical code
with a true religionist.

     Every Atheist, in other words, has some kind of philosophy and
some code of ethics; and many Atheists, in fact, have much more
rigorous life philosophies and ethical systems than have most deists.


                      SOMEONE IS RELIGIOUS
     It therefore seems silly to say that someone is religious because
he happens to be philosophic or ethical; and unless we rigorously use
the term religion to mean some kind of faith unfounded on fact, or
dependency on some assumed superhuman entities, we broaden the
definition of the word so greatly as to make it practically
meaningless.    

     If religion is defined as man's dependence of a power above and
beyond the human, the as a psychotherapist, I find it to be
exceptionally pernicious.   For the psychotherapist is normally
dedicated to helping human beings in general, and his patients in
particular, to achieve certain goals of mental health, and virtually
all these goals are antithetical to a truly religious viewpoint.

     Let us look at the main psychotherapeutic goals.   On the basis
of twenty years of clinical experience, and in basic agreement with
most of my professional colleagues (such as Brasten, 1961; Dreikurs,
1955; Fromm, 1955; Goldstein 1954; Maslow, 1954, Rogers, 1957; and
Thorne, 1961), I would say that the psychotherapist tries to help his
patients to be minimally anxious and hostile; and to this end, he
tries to help them to acquire the following kind of personality
traits:

     1. Self-interest.   The emotionally healthy individual should
primarily be true to himself and not masochistically sacrifice himself
for others.    His kindness and consideration for others should be
derived form the idea that he himself wants to enjoy freedom form
unnecessary pain and restriction, and that he is only likely to do so
by helping create a world in which the rights of others, as well as
his own, are not needlessly curtailed. 

     2. Self-direction.   He should assume responsibility for his own
life, be able independently to work out his own problems, and while at
times wanting or preferring the cooperation and help of others, not
need their support for his effectiveness and well-being.

     3. Tolerance.   He should fully give other human beings the right
to be wrong; and while disliking or abhorring some of their behavior,
still not blame them, as persons, for performing this dislikeable
behavior.   He should accept the fact that all humans are remarkably
fallible, never unrealistically expect them to be perfect, and refrain
from despising or punishing them when they make inevitable mistakes and
errors.

     4. Acceptance of uncertainty.   The emotionally mature
individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world
of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably ever will
be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all
horrible, indeed--such a probabilistic, uncertain world.

     5. Flexibility.   He should remain intellectually flexible, be
open to change at all times, and unbigotedly view the infinitely
varied people, ideas, and things in the world around him.

     6. Scientific thinking.   He should be objective, rational and
scientific; and be able to apply the laws of logic and of scientific
method not only to external people and events, but to himself and his
interpersonal relationships. 

     7. Commitment.   He should be vitally absorbed in something
outside of himself, whether it be people, things, or ideas; and should
preferably have at least one major creative interest, as well as some
outstanding human involvement, which is highly important to him, and
around which he structures a good part of his life.

     8. Risk-taking.  The emotionally sound person should be able
to take risks, to ask himself what he really would like to do in life,
and then to try to do this, even though he has to risk defeat or
failure.  He should be adventurous (though not necessarily foolhardy);
be willing to try almost anything once, just to see how he likes it;
and look forward to some breaks in his usual life routines.

     9. Self-acceptance.   He should normally be glad to be alive, and
to like himself just because he is alive, because he exists, and
because he (as a living being) invariably has some power to enjoy
himself, to create happiness and joy.   He should not equate his worth
or value to himself on his extrinsic achievements, or on what others
think of him, but on his personal existence; on his ability to think,
feel, and act, and thereby to make some kind of an interesting,
absorbed life for himself.
  
     These, then, are the kind of personality traits which a
psychotherapist is interested in helping his patients achieve and which
he is also, prohylactically, interested in fostering in the lives of
millions who will never be his patients.
 
     Now, does religion-- by which again, I mean faith unfounded on
fact, or dependence on some supernatural deity--help human beings to
achieve these healthy traits and thereby to avoid becoming anxious,
depressed, and hostile?
 
     The answer, of course, is that it doesn't help at all; and in
most respects it seriously sabotages mental health.   For religion,
first of all, is not self-interest; it is god-interest.
 
     The religious person must, by virtual definition, be so concerned
with whether or not his hypothesized god loves him, and whether he is
doing the right thing to continue to keep in this god's good graces,
that he must, at very best, put himself second and must sacrifice some
of his most cherished interests to appease this god.   If, moreover,
he is a member of any organized religion, then he must choose his
god's precepts first, those of this church and it's clergy second, and
his own views and preferences third. 
 
                      NO VIEWS OF HIS OWN
 
     In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his
own; and it is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any.  In regard to
sex-love affairs, to marriage and family relations, to business, to
politics, and to virtually everything else that is important in his
life, he must try to discover what his god and his clergy would like
him to do; and he must primarily do their bidding.
 
    Masochistic self-sacrifice is an integral part of almost all
organized religions: as shown, for example, in the various forms of
ritualistic self-deprivation that Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, and
other religionists must continually undergo if they are to keep in
good with their assumed gods.
 
    Masochism, indeed, stems form an individuals's deliberately
inflicting pain on himself in order that he may guiltlessly permit
himself to experience some kind of sexual or other pleasure; and the
very essence of most organized religions is the performance of
masochistic, guilt-soothing rituals, by which the religious individual
gives himself permission to enjoy life.
 
     Religiosity, to a large degree, essentially is masochism; and
both are forms of mental sickness.
 
    In regard to self-direction, it can easily be seen from what just
been said that the religious person is by necessity dependant and
other-directed rather that independent and self-directed.   If he is
true to his religious beliefs he must first bow down to his god; to the
clergy who this god's church; and third, to all the members of his
religious sect, who are eagle-eyedly watching him to see whether he
defects an iota from the conduct his god and his church define as
proper.
 
     If religion, therefore, is largely masochism, it is even more
dependency.   For a man to be a true believer and to be strong and
independent is impossible; religion and self-sufficiency are
contradictory terms.
 
     Tolerance again, is a trait that the firm religionist cannot
possibly possess.  "I am the Lord thy God and thou shalt have no other
gods before me", saith Jehovah.   Which means in plain English, that
whatever any given god and his clergy believe must be absolutely,
positively true; and whatever any other person or group believes must
be absolutely, positive false.
 
     Democracy, permissiveness, and the acceptance of human
fallibility are quite alien to the real religionist--since he can only
believe that the creeds and commands of his particular deity should,
ought, and must be obeyed, and that anyone who disobeys the is
patently a knave.
 
     Religion, with its definitional absolutes, can never rest with
the concept of an individual's wrong doing or making mistakes, but must
inevitably all to this the notion of his sinning and of his deserving
to be punished for his sins.   For, if it is merely desirable for you
to refrain from harming others or committing other misdeeds, as any
non-religious code of ethics will inform you that it is, then if you
make a mistake and do commit some misdeeds, you are merely a
wrong-doer, or one who is doing an undesirable deed and who should try
to correct himself and do less wrong in the future.   But is it is
god-given, absolute law that you shall not, must not do a wrong act,
and actually do it, you are then a mean, miserable sinner, a worthless
being, and must severely punish yourself (perhaps eternally, in hell)
for being a wrongdoer, being a fallible human.
 
     Religion, then, by setting up absolute, god-given standards,
must make you self-deprecating and dehumanized when you err; and must
lead you to despise and dehumanize others when they act badly.   This
kind of absolutistic, perfectionistic thinking is the prime creator of
the two most corroding of human emotions:   anxiety and hostility.

     If one of the requisites for emotional health is acceptance of
uncertainty, then religion is obviously the unhealthiest state imaginable:
Since its prime reason for being is to enable the religionist to believe
a mystical certainty.

     Just because life is so uncertain, and because millions of people
think that they cannot take its vicissitudes, they invent absolutistic
gods, and thereby pretend that there is some final, invariant answer to
things.   Patently, these people are fooling themselves--and instead of
healthfully admitting that they do not need certainty, but can live 
comfortably in this often disorderly world, they stubbornly protect
their neurotic beliefs by insisting that there must be the kind of
certainty that they foolishly believe that they need.

     This is like a child's believing that he must have a kindly
father in order to survive; and then, when his father is unkindly, or
perhaps has died and is nonexistent, he dreams up a father (who may be
a neighbor, a movie star, or a pure figment of his imagination) and he
insists that this dream-father actually exists.

     The trait of flexibility, which is so essential to proper emotional
functioning, is also blocked and sabotaged by religious belief.   For the
person who dogmatically believes in god, and who sustains this belief
with a faith unfounded in fact, which a true religious of course must,
clearly is not open to change and is necessarily bigoted.

     If, for example, his scriptures or his church, tell him he shalt not
even covet his neighbor's wife--let alone have actual adulterous relations
with her!--he cannot ask himself,  "Why should I  not lust after this
women, as long as I don't intend to do anything about my desire for her?
What is really wrong about that?"    For his god and his church have
spoken; and there is no appeal from this arbitrary authority, once he has
brought himself to accept it.

     Any time, in fact, anyone unempirically establishes a god or a set
of religious postulates which have a superhuman origin, he can
thereafter use no empirical evidence whatever to question the dictates of
this god or those postulates, since they are (by definition) beyond 
scientific validation.

     The best he can do, if he wants to change any rules that stem from
his religion, is to change the religion itself.   Otherwise, he is stuck
with the absolutistic axioms, and their logical corollaries, that he
himself has initially accepted on faith.  We may therefore note again
that, just as religion is masochism, other-directedness, intolerance, and
refusal to accept uncertainty, it also is mental and emotional
inflexibility.

     In regard to scientific thinking,it practically goes without saying
that this kind of cerebration is quite antithetical to religiosity.   The
main canon of the scientific method--as Ayer (1947), Carnap (1953), 
Reichenbach (1953), and a host of other modern philosophers of science
have pointed out--is that, at least in some final analysis, or in
principle, all theories be confirmable by some form of human experience,
some empirical referent.   But all religions which are worthy of the name
contend that their superhuman entities cannot be seen, heard, smelled,
tasted, felt, or otherwise humanly experienced, and that their gods and
their principles are therefore distinctly beyond science.

     To believe in any of these religions, therefore, is to be 
unscientific at least to some extent; and it could be contended that the
more religious one is, the less scientific one tends to be.   Although a
religious person need not be entirely unscientific (as, for that matter,
a raving maniac need not be either), it is difficult to see how he could
be perfectly scientific.

     While a person may be both scientific and religious (as he may be
at times sensible and at other times foolish) it is doubtful if an
individual's attitude may simultaneously be truly pious and objective.

    In regard to the trait of commitment, the religious individual may--
for once!--have some advantages.   For if he is truly religious, he is
seriously committed to his god, his church, or his creed; and to some
extent, at least, he thereby acquires a major interest in life.

     Religious commitment also frequently has its serious disadvantages,
since it tends to be obsessive-compulsive; and it may well interfere with
other kinds of healthy commitments--such as deep involvements in sex-love
relations, in scientific pursuits, and even in artistic endeavors.
Moreover, it is a commitment that is often motivated by guilt or
hostility, and may serve as a frenzied covering-up mechanism which masks,
but does not really eliminate, these underlying disturbed feelings.   It is
also the kind of commitment that is based on falsehoods and illusions, and
that therefore easily can be shattered, thus plunging the previously
committed individual into the depths of disillusionment and despair.

    Not all forms of commitment, in other words, are equally healthy.
The grand inquisitors of the medieval catholic church were utterly
dedicated to their "holy" work, and Hitler and many of his associates were
fanatically committed to their Nazi doctrines.   But this hardly proves
that they are emotionally human beings.

     When religious individuals are happily committed to faith, they often
tend to be fanatically and dogmatically committed in an obsessive-compulsive
way that itself is hardly desirable.    Religious commitment may well be
better for a human being than no commitment to anything.   But religion,
to a large degree, is fanaticism--which, in turn, is an 
obsessive-compulsive, rigid form of holding to a viewpoint that
invariably masks and provides a bulwark for the underlying
insecurity of the obsessed individual.

     In regard to risk-taking, it should be obvious that the religious
person is highly determined not to be adventurous nor to take any of
life's normal risks.   He strongly believes in unvalidatable assumptions
precisely because he does not want to risk following his own preferences
and aims, but wants the guarantee that some higher power will back him.

     Enormously fearing failure, and falsely defining his own worth as a
person in terms of achievement, he sacrifices time, energy, and material
goods and pleasures to the worship of the assumed god, so that he can at
least be sure that this god loves and supports him.   All religions worthy
of the names are distinctly inhibiting--which means, in effect, that the
religious person sells his soul, surrenders his own basic urges and
pleasures, so that he may feel comfortable with the heavenly helper that
he himself has invented.  Religion, then is needless inhibition.

     Finally, in regard to self-acceptance, it should again be clear that
the religious devotee cannot possibly accept himself just because he is
alive, because he exists and has, by mere virtue of his aliveness, some
power to enjoy himself.   Rather, he must make his self-acceptance utterly
contingent on the acceptance of his definitional god, the church and
clergy who also serve this god, and all other true believers in his
religion.

     If all these extrinsic persons and things accept him, he is able --
and even then only temporarily and with continued underlying anxiety--to
accept himself.    Which means, of course, that he defines himself only
through the reflected appraisals of others and loses any real, existential
self that he might otherwise keep creating.   Religion, for such an
individual, consequently is self-abasement and self-abnegation--as, of
course, virtually all the saints and mystics have clearly stated that it
is.

     If we summarize what we have just been saying, the conclusion seems
inescapable that religion is, on almost every conceivable count, directly
opposed to the goals of mental health--since it basically consists of
masochism, other-directness, intolerance, refusal to accept uncertainty,
unscientific thinking, needless inhibition, and self-abasement.   In the
one area where religion has some advantages in terms of emotional
hygiene--that of encouraging hearty commitment to a cause or project in
which the person may vitally absorbed--it even tends to sabotage this
advantage in two important ways: (a) it drives most of its adherents to
commit themselves to its tenets for the wrong reasons--that is, to cover
up instead of to face and rid themselves of their basic insecurities; and
(b) it encourages a fanatic, obsessive-compulsive kind of commitment that
is, in its own right, a form of mental illness.

     If we want to look at the problems of human disturbance a little
differently, we may ask ourselves, "What are the irrational ideas which
people believe and through which they drive themselves into severe states
of emotional sickness?"


                          EXPLORING THE QUESTION
 
 
     After exploring this question for many years, and developing a
new form of psychotherapy which is specifically directed at quickly
unearthing and challenging the main irrational ideas which make people
neurotic and psychotic, I have found that these ideas may be
categorized under a few major headings (Ellis, 1962;Ellis and Harper,
1961a, 1961b).   Here, for example, are five irrational notions, all
or some of which are strongly held by practically every seriously
disturbed person; here, along with these notions, are the connections
between and commonly held religious beliefs.
 
     Irrational idea No. 1 is the idea that it is a dire necessity
for an adult to be loved or approved of by all the significant figures
in his life.   This idea is bolstered by the religious philosophy that
if you cannot get certain people to love or approve of you, you can
always fall back on god's love.   The thought, however, that it is
quite possible for you to live comfortably in the world whether or not
other people accept you is quite foreign to both emotionally disturbed
people and religionists.
   
     Irrational idea No.2 is the idea that you must be thoroughly
competent, adequate, and achieving in all possible respects, otherwise
you are worthless.   The religionists say that no, you need not be
competent and achieving, and in fact can be thoroughly inadequate--as
long as god loves you and you are a member in good standing of the
church.   But this means, of course, that you must be a competent and
achieving religionist--else you are no damned good.
 
     Irrational idea No.3 is the notion that certain people are bad,
wicked, and villainous and that they should be severely blamed and
punished for their sins.   This is the ethical basis, of course, of
virtually all true religions.   The concepts of quilt, blaming, and
sin are, in fact, almost synonymous with that of revealed religion.
 
     Irrational idea No. 4 is the belief that it is horrible,
terrible, and catastrophic when things are not going the way you would
like them to go.     This idea, again, is the very core of
religiousity, since the religious person invariably believes that just
because he cannot stand being frustrated, and just because he must
keep worrying about things turning out badly, he needs a supreme deity
to supervise his thoughts and deeds and to protect him from anxiety and
frustrations.
 
     Irrational idea No. 5 is the  idea that human unhappiness is
externally caused and that people have little or no ability to control
their sorrows or rid themselves of their negative feelings.  Once
again, this notion is the essence of religion, since real religions
invariably teach you that only by trusting in god and relying on
praying to him will you be able to control your sorrows of counteract
your negative emotions.
 
     Similarly, if we had time to review all the other major
irrational ideas that lead humans to become and to remain emotionally
disturbed, we could quickly find that they are coextensive with, or
are strongly encouraged by, religious tenets.
 
     If you think about the matter carefully, you will see this close
connection between mental illness and religion is inevitable and
invariant, since neurosis of psychosis is something of a high-class
name for childishness or dependency; and religion, when correctly
used, is little more that a synonym for dependency.
 
     In the final analysis, then, religion is neurosis.   This is why
I remarked, at a symposium on sin and psychotherapy held by the
American Psychological Association a few years ago, that from a mental
health standpoint Voltaire's famous dictum should be reversed: for if
there were a god, it would be necessary to uninvent him.
 
     If the thesis of this article is correct, religion goes hand in
hand with the basic irrational beliefs of human beings.   These keep
them dependant, anxious, and hostile, and thereby create and maintain
their neuroses and psychoses.   What then is the role of psychotherapy
in dealing with the religious views of disturbed patients?  
Obviously, the sane and effective psychotherapist should not--as many
contemporary psychoanalytic Jungian, client-centered, and
existentialist therapists have contended he should--go along with the
patients' religious orientation and try to help these patients live
successfully with their religions, for this is equivalent to trying to
help them live successfully with their emotional illness.
 
 
                    EXCLUSIVE HOMOSEXUALITY
 
 
     If a man is fearfully fixated on exclusive homosexuality, or
obsessively engaged in hating his boss, or compulsively dependant of
the love of his mother, no sensible psychotherapist would try to
enable him to retain his crippling neurotic symptoms and still lead a
happy life.
 
     The effective therapist, instead, would, of course, try to help
this man live successfully without his symptoms--and  to this end
would keep hammering away at the basic irrational philosophies of life
which cause the patient to manufacture and to hang on to his
manifestations of emotional illness.
 
     So will the therapist, if he himself is not too sick or gutless,
attack his patient's religiosity.    Not only will he show this
patient that he is religious--meaning, as we previously noted, that he
is masochistic, other-directed, intolerant, unable to accept
uncertainty, unscientific, needlessly inhibited, self-abasing, and
fanatic--but he will also quite vigorously and forcefully question,
challenge, and attack the patient's irrational beliefs that support
these disturbed traits.
 
     This is what is done in my own system of psychotherapy, which is
called rational-emotive psychotherapy, which is called
rational-emotive psychotherapy.    Where other systems of therapy
largely try to give the patient insight into the origins of his
self-defeating beliefs (as, for example, the Freudians do) or try to
help him accept himself with his self-sabotaging behavior (as the
existential and client-centered therapists do), in rational therapy we
give him insight and accept him in spite of his failings--but we also,
and I think more importantly, clearly show him how he keeps
maintaining his early-acquired irrationalities by indoctrinating
himself over and over with nonsensical internalized sentences which
sustain this nonsense; and show him how he can concretely challenge
and contradict these internalized philosophies, by logically parsing
and analyzing them, and by convincing himself that he must give up if
he is to regain emotional health.
 
     Rational-emotive psychotherapy, in other words, goes distinctly
beyond the usual insight-producing and patient-accepting methods of
treatment in that it actively depropagandizes the patient and teaches
him how the highly irrational and essentially superstitious and
religious beliefs that he acquired from his parents and his culture
can be thoroughly combated until they are truly non-existent.
 
 
                        THE DISTURBED INDIVIDUAL
 
 
     RT, as rational therapy is called for short, literally teaches
the disturbed individual how he can apply the methods of scientific
thinking to himself and his personal relationships with others;  and
it usually does so with many fewer sessions of psychotherapy than the
more conventional psychoanalytic and other schools use.   It is,
however, an unusually depth-centered and thoroughgoing form of
treatment, in that it is not interested in symptom removal or in
release of feelings, but in an extensive and intensive reorganization
of the patient's basic philosophy of life.   While valuing the patient
himself and his inalienable, existential right to happiness, it
vigorously and most directly attacks his self-sabotaging values and
his self-repeated irrational internal verbalizations which uphold
these.  This is not the place to give the details of the theory and
practice of rational-emotive psychotherapy, since they may be found in
my book Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy.
 
     Not that RT is the only method of helping human beings to change
their fundamental irrational and superstitious ideas about themselves,
others and the world.   Various other  depropagandizing techniques,
including books, lectures, and works of literature, as well as other
modes of psychotherapy, can also be most useful in this respect.   The
main point is, however, that the vast majority of people in
contemporary society are basically irrational and religious in their
thinking and feeling--and hence are more or less emotionally sick.
 
     All true believers in any kind of orthodoxy--whether it be
religion, political, social, or even artistic orthodoxy--are
distinctly disturbed, since they are obviously rigid, fanatic, and
dependant individuals (Hoffer, 1951).   And many liberal religionists
of various groups are distinctly less, but still quite definitely,
emotionally childish.   For that, again, is what all manner of
religion essentially is: childish dependency.   And that is what
effective psychotherapy, along with all the other healing arts and
informative sciences, must continue uncompromisingly to unmask and
eradicate.
 
 
 
 
 
 
                             REFERENCES
 
Ayer, A.J., Language, Truth and Logic.   New York: Dover
Publications, 1947.
Brasten, Leif J., The Main Theories of Existentialism from the
View-point of a Psycho-therapist.  Mental Hygiene, 1961,45,10-17.
Carnap,  Rudolf, Testability and Meaning.   In Feigl, H., and M.
Brodbeck, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Science.   New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953.
Dreikurs, Rudolf, The Adlerian Approach on the Changing Scope of
Psychiatry.   Chicago: author, 1955.
Ellis, Albert, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy.  New York: Lyle
Stuart, 1962.
Ellis, Albert and Robert A. Harper, A Guide to Rational Living. 
Englewoods-Cliffs, N.J.:  Prentice-Hall, 1961.
Fromm, Erich, The Sane Society, New York: Rinehart, 1955.
Hoffer, Eric, The True Believer, New York: Harper, 1951.
Maslow, A.H., Motivation and  Personality, New York: Harper, 1954.
Reichenbach, Hans, The Verifiability Theory of Meaning.   In Feigl,
H., and M. Brodbeck, eds.,Readings in the Philosophy of Science.   New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,1953.
Rogers, Carl R. The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic
Personality Change, Journal of Consulting Psychology, 1957, 21,
459-461.