This comprehensive, psychological, and naturalistic analysis of prayer offers an alternative to William James's model of prayer, represented in his work "The Varieties of Religious Experience," which links supplication to the divine or supernatural realm. Through his examination of prayer, and its connection to faith, Faber also analyzes religious faith psychologically and anthropologically, concluding that subjective prayer is finally an instance of homeopathic magical conduct. It ritualistically conjures up, according to the author, a version of the first, primal, biological situation, in which the dependent little one cries out to a parental big one for physical and emotional nourishment. Eventually, religion...and its expression of faith through prayer, provides us with a magical protective presence that is natural in its return to the primal, rather than supernatural, as James argues, in its presence and existence.

The very instructional details of individual prayer, Faber argues, are unconsciously designed to recreate the magical alliance through which our existence on the planet commences and goes forward. Over and over again, dozens of times each day, thousands of times each year, the little one asks and the big one sees to it that the little one receives. Such asking and receiving is the central feature of a child's existence. As we internalize this reality and seek to re-create it in our adult lives, religious conviction and faith--as it comes through prayer--helps us to achieve a sense of security and a psychic return to the parental alliance. Faber's compelling arguments will challenge readers to consider prayer and faith as a magical circle of religious belief and to examine afresh the underlying nature of supplication.

M. D. Faber presents a meticulous, unremitting inquiry into the psychological direction from which Christianity derives its power to attract and hold its followers. Becoming God's Children: Religion's Infantilizing Process was written, its author says, to alert readers to the role of infantilization in the Judeo-Christian tradition generally and in Christian rite and doctrine particularly. Because religion plays such an important role in so may lives, it is essential to understand the underlying appeal and significance of religious doctrines. To that end, Becoming God's Children offers the reader an in-depth account of human neuropsychological development, while unearthing the Judeo-Christian tradition's explicitly infantilizing doctrines and rites. This compelling perspective on the nature and meaning of religious behavior explores issues such as: to what extent religious faith is grounded in the mnemonic recesses of the worshipper's brain, whether believers are predisposed by both genetic makeup and environmental prompting to adhere to their religious convictions, and why some individuals are powerfully drawn to religious faith while others reject it. A final chapter explores the implications of religion's infantilizing process vis-a-vis the role of reason and scientific thought in the contemporary world.

Synchronistic events can be explained fully in naturalistic terms. They comprise an instance of the uncanny as they return the individual subjectively to a period when the world, as the good parent, was sympathetically attuned to the individual's wishes and requirements. Jung invoked the spiritual, or the supernatural, or the paranormal to explain synchronicity rather than exploring the early stages of human existence.

Faber offers a critique of Jung's theory of synchronicity that develops an alternative to demystify synchronistic happenings by explaining them in purely naturalistic terms. The book's larger purpose is to demystify Jung's archetypal psychology and to explain the whole Jungian approach to human behavior in naturalistic terms. Because Jung's psychology is ultimately religious in nature, the book touches generally upon the implications of religion and religious conduct. The book offers the reader an opportunity to ponder the psychological nature of synchronicity either as a spiritual occurrence with paranormal overtones or as a return of the repressed, a mnemonic trace of events that actually transpired in the life of the individual.