The shocking hidden psychological mechanisms of religions and spirituality are:

1) Happiness and fulfillment are displaced to the transcendental life (after death) instead of realizing them as psychical and spiritual values in this world.

2) Deviance of beliefs is punished as against God in order to sustain one’s system of beliefs and the religious institution.

3) The identification with the almightiness of God or the founder of the religion – and with the religious teaching – serves as a compensation of a weak self-identity.

4) Constrained sticking to beliefs is based on a magical defense of sexual drive and of the innermost devotion to the partner in a love relationship between man and woman.

5) The immature tie in the adult age to the parents is transferred to the church and the religious teachings.

6) Autonomous intelligence, reason and the Spirit are powerless in front of fundamentalist and dogmatic beliefs. This extinction is produced with the purpose that emotions can bind unhindered identifications.

7) Believing in salvation through God and the founder of a religion together with real and suggested guilt produce an act of slavish obedience up until complete self-abandonment.

8) Defense of belief serves the need for power, the greed to “know it all”, the narcissistic obsession to be recognized, and the protection of benefit.

9) Expectation of salvation is projected (displaced) to the founder of a religion and the church and its representatives as a result of rejecting the psychical-spiritual evolution – the inner process of salvation.

10) The per se valuable readiness to devote one’s being and life to God is forced with menace through blind believing and with restrained indoctrination.

Religion and spirituality without elaborating the Archetypes of the Soul with the inner Spirit, experienced with dreams and meditation, is a morbid confusion!