For a long time (in intellectual circles, well over a century) it has been common in the West to criticise the beliefs of Christians, in two ways: that they are wishful thinking; and/or that they are self-tormenting delusions.
Wishful thinking
Christians believe things, such as a happy life after death, because these beliefs make them happy. The beliefs are not true, but believing them is personally gratifying - and this is why they are believed.
On from this; Christians believe some things because these beliefs lead to the kind of society that Christian-type people want.
(Some other - not-Christian, maybe atheist - people want this kind of society as well; and these people may pretend to believe what Christians affirm, in order to get this kind of society.)
Christianity is therefore like a kind of daydream - Christians are foolish people who dream-up stuff they would like to be true, then make themselves believe it.
Self-tormenting delusions
Christians are mentally ill (either spontaneously, or because their religion makes them so); and therefore torment themselves with needless delusions that make them miserable.
Major examples include traditional Christian moral restrictions in relation to sex and sexuality.
On from this; unless they are prevented, Christians will inflict these misery-inducing delusions on the rest of society.
Christianity is therefore like a kind of nightmare - Christians are a mixture of self-destructive lunatics and psychopathic sadists, who make themselves ill with sick fantasies, then try to make everyone else as insane or depraved as they are.
These attitudes are - as I said - very common; either individually or, most often, both-together. They may seem - and indeed are in some ways - contradictory! After all, how can Christians be both happy-clappy wishful-thinking idiots, and at the same time crazed self-tormented tormenters?
But we are dealing with attitudes to Christian beliefs, not logic; and the attitudes are based on the assumption that Christians beliefs are wrong, and seeks various explanations of why.
And once it is assumed Christians are wrong; then it is not irrational to suppose that there may be a variety of explanations, applicable to different people, or at different times.
The Big Problem with this very common, indeed mainstream, critique is that it is self-destroying. It is applicable not just to Christianity, but to all - and apparently all possible - beliefs.
In effect psychology is thereby made the bottom line explanation, psychology gets used to explain everything else.
(This is, of course, an assumption - it is certainly neither evident nor obvious that psychology is the most profound of all forms of knowledge: supreme over all others!)
But then what explains psychology? It turns out that psychology explains psychology!...
Our choices of belief (apparently) depend on our psychology, and our type of psychology depends on the psychology of belief - on environment (type of society, geography, historical era, social class, sex etc.); on heredity including genetic inheritance etc.
It's circular, all-inclusive - meaningless.
If psychology has "proved" that traditional Christianity is non-objective; then psychology also "proves" that psychology itself is non-objective.
This means that psychology could not really have been the cause that has specifically disproved traditionalist Christianity.
That this self contradicting and circular psychological (or, mutatis mutandis sociological/ political) critique was incoherent; was pretty much the anti-secular critique of mainstream modern secularism made by the likes of GK Chesterton and then CS Lewis in the early and middle 20th century.
GKC and CSL believed, or hoped, that this clarification of the inadequacy of anti-Christian critique would then protect traditional Christianity and its churches from destruction. But this did not happen - in the event the churches and Christianity have both been eroded and corrupted.
Furthermore, all positive non-religious ideologies have been eroded and corrupted: nationalism, socialism, "back to nature" agrarianism, and all the utopias proposed from the 18th to mid twentieth century, have all lost their power and integrity - have either dwindled to socio-political insignificance (e.g. agrarianism); and/or have become co-opted into mainstream secular totalitarianism (nationalism, socialism) and become negative and oppositional in their motivations.
The anti-Christian intellectual crusade was real and powerful; and Christianity and the Christian churches have indeed been largely destroyed. But all kinds of belief in any purpose or meaning in life, personal significance, and any reason for life rather than non-life or death - have also been destroyed.
Furthermore, it is not just churches, but all functional social institutions that have been diminished and assimilated to a monopolistic bureaucracy - the legal system, economic activity, science, universities. police and the military; even clubs and hobby groups...
Nothing has been untouched by the institutional trends that afflicted the churches.
So, it seems that something else - some other big causal factor - was in fact going-on in the destruction of Christian belief; and that "something else" has affected secular ideologies in much the same way it affected religions.
My belief is that this causal-something-else was in fact the developmental change of human consciousness - broadly on lines as outline by Rudolf Steiner then Owen Barfield; and this is a Master Idea (a metaphysical assumption) that has permeated this blog for the past decades.
Of course, that too, is an assumption - but the advantage I claim for it, is that it is explicit and I acknowledge it is an assumption.
