The pressure on church leaders to teach/preach religious doctrine in the face of more and more evidence to the contrary, must be excruciating.

The cognitive dissonance this must cause strikes me as unbearable.

Someone once said, " A lie is a lie, no matter how many times you tell it ".

Living a lie that impacts your core causes extreme angst.

How many Church leaders are any of you aware of that seek therapy in dealing with these issues?

I have no personal knowledge of church leaders, or if they are experiencing cognitive dissonance.

However, they MUST know of the historical and problems in the B of M and B of A that we know of. And I'd venture to guess that they know that God isn't speaking to them, and telling them how to resolve these problems.

Judging from my own experience with unanswered prayers, I'd guess that some of them blame themselves for not being 'worthy enough' to get answers.

On the other hand, there may be some that don't really care, as long as they get to enjoy the adulation of adoring church members and free travel around the world. Maybe they are 'past feeling' guilt over giving the false impression that they speak to God.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/25/2017 11:15PM by imaworkinonit.

There is no such thing as false knowledge, only false beliefs.

Or so the philosophers say.

Rock star status and millions of adoring sycophants can smooth over a lot of cognitive dissonance.

No one is immune from it and we all have to deal with reducing it because cog dis is so uncomfortable. There are three ways we reduce cog dis:

"First, individuals can change one or more of the attitudes, behavior, beliefs etc. so as to make the relationship between the two elements a consonant one. When one of the dissonant elements is a behavior, the individual can change or eliminate the behavior. However, this mode of dissonance reduction frequently presents problems for people, as it is often difficult for people to change well-learned behavioral responses (e.g. giving up smoking).


A second (cognitive) method of reducing dissonance is to acquire new information that outweighs the dissonant beliefs. For example, thinking smoking causes lung cancer will cause dissonance if a person smokes. However, new information such as “research has not proved definitely that smoking causes lung cancer” may reduce the dissonance.

A third way to reduce dissonance is to reduce the importance of the cognitions (i.e. beliefs, attitudes). A person could convince themself that it is better to "live for today" than to "save for tomorrow." In other words, he could tell himself that a short life filled with smoking and sensual pleasures is better than a long life devoid of such joys. In this way, he would be decreasing the importance of the dissonant cognition (smoking is bad for ones health)."
https://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html

Have you ever met a person that was exceptionally good are justifying their actions, thoughts, words? And wondered how they do it with a clean conscience? I think the leaders of the cult are just exceptionally good at reducing and justifying their cog dis, they've been at it for so long.