freeinfidel

Once programmed by the self-loathing rituals of religion, can you ever be truly happy? Guilt, low self-esteem and a permanent sense of inadequacy are integral components of many religions. And maybe when they’ve got you, they’ve got you for ever.

I logged onto Authentic Happiness (AH) the other day.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, AH is the brainchild of psychologist Martin Seligman. He had come to feel that although psychology can be helpful in understanding the ‘bad’ side of our minds - depression, psychosis, etc - the study of what makes us happy had been sorely neglected and was worth a closer look. The Authentic Happiness site has a series of tests you can fill in, which not only help to provide data for Seligman’s team at the University of Pennsylvania, they are illuminating on a personal level.

I last looked at AH in December 2006 and I scored pretty badly. Depressed, pessimistic and - to my surprise - ungrateful. I was upset by that one. I don’t want to be ungrateful - not nice, is it? It was suggested, however, that grateful people are happier people, and that being grateful is a skill that you can learn in order to make yourself happier, so I decided to put this into practice.

Objectively speaking, it was no surprise that I had low scores in December 2006. All my adult life I had suffered from depression, but at that particular time I had been through, and was still facing, a number of other extremely trying circumstances, including two deaths.

It is now just over a year later, and my happiness scores are fantastically higher. Things have calmed down somewhat in my personal life, so there were objective reasons for this - the bereavements are over, and along with them, that intense period of mourning. I had also worked on my low gratitude index, trying hard to count my blessings each day and make sure to thank people who had done things for me - there had been improvement there, though not as much as I might like.

But…

On one score I actually tested lower than before - that of optimism. Try as I might, it would seem, according to these tests, my pessimism scores are firmly at the lowest end of the scale. That is to say, I may be happy, but I remain hopeless. And here, I believe, is where religion comes in.

I now call myself an atheist and a Humanist, but I was raised in a very religious household. Although my father was a lapsed Catholic agnostic, he left the spiritual welfare of his children to his wife. Raised in the Salvation Army, my mother died a High Anglican, but in between had worked her way through Spiritualism, Pentecostalism, Low Church of England and Catholicism, and back to the Salvation Army once more. She also had a soft spot for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, buying the Watchtower whenever it came around, and for Mormon missionaries, who were always welcomed with a cup of tea. However, it was probably the Catholic period that had the greatest effect on me personally.

If you asked me what the results of my upbringing were, prominent among them would be ‘inability to take pride in my achievements’. When you are raised a Catholic, pride is never justifiable. No matter how hard you work, you do not deserve your accomplishments. Pride is a sin. In fact, it’s the sin - the sin that led to our fall from grace in the Garden.

Being raised this way has a devastating effect on a psyche - not so much humbling as abasing. How dare you think you’re good at anything? God will strike you dead for such pride. How dare you think that you can get in this car/train/aircraft and it not crash? God will punish you for such arrogance. You may laugh now, but tomorrow you’ll weep. It’s not within your power to change anything, it is God who disposes, not you. Don’t be so full of yourself.

A religious upbringing is a great way to suck the confidence out of a child, and incidentally, in case you were wondering, I am not naturally a modest person. In fact I score very high on lack of modesty. Pretty much, on the quiet (or perhaps not on the quiet), I like to think I’m the cleverest person in the room. But I was raised to double-think myself into acting modestly. It’s a kind of Catholic two-step that, when performed often enough, becomes a subconscious tic. You constantly correct yourself and, over a lifetime, this can be truly crippling. Even writing this now, there is a tiny part of my brain that expects God to strike me down for it.

If you’re an optimist you think bad things are temporary and good things are permanent. If you’re a pessimist, you think good things are temporary and bad things are permanent. For instance, to the question: ‘You fail an important examination because A: I wasn’t as smart as the other people taking the exam, or B: I didn’t prepare for it well’, my answer is A. In other words, I am dumb, and my being dumb is a permanent state of affairs, not something that can be remedied by studying - to think so would be prideful, which is a sin. To live a life like this is, indeed, a counsel of despair.

When faced with questionnaire options such as being given a work project because: A: ‘I am good at my job’ and B: ‘I am an efficient person’, I feel actual visceral clutch at being asked to choose either. It took me 20 years to admit that I was good at my job, which I am, but I don’t know when I will ever feel confident enough to say ‘I am an efficient person’. At the back of my mind, I can hear that mantra: “Don’t you be so full of yourself…”

To be raised a Christian is to be raised in guilt. Guilt for your actions, which can be bad enough, but also guilt for your thoughts. It is chastening to me at mid-life to have it so clearly brought home to me that despite my conscious atheist protestations, the church has still got my subconscious firmly by the balls.

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