Religious belief is constructed by the brain’s normal processes. Understanding how the brain processes the world around you can you give insight into why religious belief can seem so overwhelming at times, particularly if you grew up in an environment that embraced Christianity as the only acceptable way to live life. Understanding how the brain constructs a sense of belief also provides answers in how to more easily put those old beliefs behind you.

#1 Are You Hardwired for God?

Yes and no. During the formative years, your brain is hardwired to take on the beliefs and values of your family and culture as your own. Your brain contains mirror neurons that compel you to mimic the behavior of people around you.

Your early identity is formed by your family and home culture. If you grew up in a Buddhist, or pagan environment; or God forbid, were raised by Atheist parents–gasp, you would take on those values and worldview as a child. That’s right, it wasn’t God that made you identify as a Christian at all, or the idea that he favored you and your family over the unbelievers; it was your biology that gave you your belief–plain and simple.

#2 “I Have Faith that My Church Neurons Will Save Me.”

So you were told that your unwavering belief in Jesus is a gift for valiantly toeing the religious line and following the prescribed biblical rules of conduct. Well, sorry to tell you this, but your testimony actually has little to do with God favoring you over anybody else, and more with how your brain puts things together as your preferred modus operandi. The more you hear, think, see, feel, or do something, the associated neuronal pathways in your brain grow and strengthen. Belief, therefore, becomes a matter of biology repeating itself. Neurons that fire together wire together and those repeated activities become the actions that your brain accepts and expects to experience as your reality. Your brain does not know the difference between fact or fiction and responds to every thought as is if it were real.

#3 Come Thou Fount of Faulty Thinking

The human brain likes predictably and a degree of certainty to feel safe, and it biases a persons’s perceptions to frame the world as he or she wants to see it, framing their own worldview as correct. Your brain’s need to see yourself as correct is often shaped by problematic, cognitive tendencies or biases that influence you and others to frame their worldview as being right and to see those who do not believe like you as wrong.

This tribal mindset compels people, of all walks of life, to see their group as favored and more deserving of good luck and abundance than those who substantially differ from them. The ancient idea of God hurling flaming fireballs to destroy the godless heathens, or creating devastating earth events to wipe out the people’s enemies, and thus preserving God’s chosen people, plays on these very biases—ones that can easily compel religious groups to create an evil “them,” so that there can be a chosen “us.” The caveman mentality via the tribal mindset is still alive and well today.

#4 Groupies for God

So your church told you that you are obligated to be your brother’s keeper and that the congregation will always watch out for you, as part of God’s plan; therefore, you owe them your life-long allegiance. Does the thought of doing your own thing and turning your back on your extended religious family fill you with dread or shame?

Humans have a strong need to fit in with their home groups, and when someone perceives something different than what their group believes, he or she will often doubt their own perceptions, and will subsequently modify their experience to conform with those people who are most important to them. Even though the church tells you to speak the truth, when your beliefs have clashed with your religious culture in the past, your cognitive biases have likely nudged you to squelch some emotional integrity and to silence your own authentic voice in order to fit in with the status quo. This is often referred to as confirmation bias.

#5 Blowing out the Flames of Hell

So you’ve probably heard numerous stories of how people who left your church were destroyed by Satan, and you have repeatedly been warned by stodgy, stern-eyed, prune-lipped congregants that leaving your faith will doom you to Hell and a life of misery. The facts don’t bear this out at all. If this logic were true, the 2/3 of the world’s population who are not Christians would all be unhappy and would not prosper. In fact the most secular nations report the highest levels of happiness when compared with other world nations. Secularism is also correlated with supporting gender equality, LGBT rights, higher education levels, greater social well-being, a lower divorce rate than other religious groups, and in being more open-minded and accepting of diversity in their communities.

#6 Retiring the God Puzzle

Years of learning to see the world through Christian filters have created numerous and well-established neuronal pathways in your brain. When you hear Christian music, for example, or pass people-filled chapels on Sunday, these actions are likely going to trigger those neurons to fire in your brain that are associated with your old beliefs—those that once reinforced the idea that doing Christian things is where you needed to be.

When this happens, take a deep breath and remember that the dissonance you may feel is really not God telling you to get your butt back on the pew; nor is it the Devil trying to make you feel miserable, it is just your brain doing its normal functioning. The good news is that over time, your brain will create new neuronal pathways connected to seeing life differently. Those old religious-based pathways will eventually atrophy and will go away due to lack of use.

7. Good and Bad: A Different Perspective

Many organized religions create a sense of identity by feeding off of the tribal mindset that your group’s way of seeing life is the best around and that it will keep you safe and happy. Often, this belief centers on the idea that your pursuit of good and your battle against evil is essential to your individual and group’s survival and heavenly reward.

You can learn to look at the concept of good and evil differently, as a way that is less likely to divide peoples and cultures. In the Aramaic language used during the timeframe associated with Jesus, good simply meant ripe and evil meant unripe. Goodness implied that if things were in place to create optimal learning then it would happen. On the other hand, if a lack of available resources, including sufficient time to allow the fruit to become ripe, or to even become spoiled, then that was framed as evil. In this sense, the juxtaposition of good and evil simply becomes one of process, learning, and maturation and releases the punitive and battle-like tone behind good and evil that is often taught today in many churches.

8. Hardwired, Yet Not Hopeless

Although it is true that we humans really have no choice but to take on the values of our cultures as children and to see the values of those around us as our reality, the brain provides an escape route. As children grow into adults, the prefrontal cortex matures in early adulthood, usually during the early to mid twenties. As this part of the brain fully develops, it allows us to think critically about life, to step back and to observe our exsitence from a different perspective.

Critical thinking allows people to look at the many ways that our brains bias us to see the world via the tribal mindset and how we naturally distort reality to support what we want to see and believe. Stepping back and observing how our biased perceptions affect our reality allows different choices to be made and greater consciousness and compassion to prevail.

© Cristi Jenkins 2015 All Rights Reserved

Cristi is a librarian and the author of Closing the Chapel Doors: A Guide to Letting Go of Religious Guilt and Fear