analyze me

My faith has been severely challenged this past year, and a lot of it had to do with the classes I took and the books I’ve read and the conversations I have had with intelligent, influential people in my life. This year I took two philosophy classes: Comparative Religions, and History of 19th and 20th Century Philosophies. I also took two psychology classes: General Psychology and Personal and Social Adjustment. Along with these classes I put myself in counseling for (self-diagnosed) depression and overall discontentment. I have never been someone who is easily stressed out, but this year I have experienced more stress than ever before. All these factors, and many others that would take to long to go into detail about, contributed to my spiritual journey through the deconstruction of my religion.
Where psychology comes into the picture in all of this is this semester’s quest for reason and rationality within religions. I originally was interested in psychology because I wanted to know how to better relate to people, how to understand them better, but what happened, like so many other classes and subjects, is that it did not answer ANY questions, but only created more confusion and more questioning. I thought that by knowing how the brain works and learning about developmental theories I could figure some things out about people and about myself, and hopefully gain a better understanding of the nature of humanity, but alas, I am further away from understanding than I thought I was to begin with.
Psychology has been nothing more to me than science, and theorizing, and what W. V. O. Quine called ‘naturalized epistemology.’ Being the science that it is, psychology attempts to gain that understanding of human reasoning and decision-making by studying the anatomy of the brain, and observing human behavior and theorizing about it. This is a big conflict for me, because in these theories all I see are generalizations and assumptions about narrow groups of people, but are never solidified. And the scientific (anatomical/ physiological) aspect does nothing more than eliminate the magic and supernaturality of human emotion, love, and intimacy. And to me, since nothing can be proven, and we cannot be certain of anything, I would rather stick with philosophy, specifically the beauty and mystery of metaphysics and think of the mind as something spiritual, not just a bunch of neurons firing inside of my head.