Cosmology, Religious Fanatacism, And Insanity

April 8, 2008

It bothers me when people on exC claim that Christians are schizophrenic, have a mental illness, are insane, etc. I think the term they want is religious fanaticism. Religious people have a very different cosmology from secular people. Cosmology is how we see the cosmos, our world view. The fundy Christian sees a heaven and hell with God in control of all and believes life must be arranged to accommodate these. The secular person sees the natural universe as primary; God, heaven, hell, etc. are seen as superstitious or supernatural items that do not belong in serious conversations regarding how the world works.

The Problem

Perhaps people make these claims about insanity or mental illness because they have never seen true mental illness in which a person is detached from the real world of the here and now; I am not talking about the level of cosmology but of everyday life in our homes and work. Or perhaps making such claims/accusations is a way of lashing out at the institution that has caused them so much hurt, from some of which they will never fully recover.

Different Levels of Reality

I think it is very important to recognize the various levels and to understand which level it is we are talking about. There is cosmology. There is everyday life of here and now. There is the level of the group and the level of the individual. There is the level of the community at large and the level of the family. On the level of the individual there is emotional, intellectual, religious, and spiritual.

There is also something called interpersonal. Communities are held together by interpersonal feelings of kinship and shared interests. For secular people to relate to religious people, or vice versa, it is necessary for both to forego the religious level--to stay out of that compartment; I think we all know that. To determine that someone is mentally ill both religious and non-religious people need to forego, or stay out of, cosmology. We have to stay within the everyday level of the here and now.

Religious Fanaticism

Religious fanaticism does not equal mental illness and should not be treated as such. I think we have a better chance at recovery if we know what it is we are recovering from. I think we have a better chance at protecting ourselves from further harm if we know the nature of the beast against which we need to protect ourselves. I also know that some of us have suffered--and continue to suffer--mental illness or mental health issues as a result of religious abuse. I am one of these and do not expect ever to fully recover.

Cosmology

To provide a better idea of what is meant by cosmology I will discuss a few different types of cosmology and provide links for further study in case anyone is interested.

Encarta.msn defines cosmology as the "study of the universe as a whole, including its distant past and its future." This is an easy-to-read online article that looks at the universe from a scientific perspective. It shows how theories developed over time as to whether the sun or the earth is at the centre of the universe, and similar matters.

This article describes the Christian versus the scientific cosmologies. This is the classical creation vs evolution debate. This looks like a good site for anyone interested in further reading; it has a list of links down the side with the names of scientists and science topics. I have not read enough to be sure whether it is a Christian site, or but I think it is. There is a link God and Time; I doubt that a secular site would have that. It could, however, be a site meant to educate people about Christian views.

Here is NASA's Universe 101 page with some easy-to-read explanations and a link to FAQ.

And finally there is always Wikipedia.

Religion as a Tool

In my own family I think it is important to recognize that some of the mental health issues are primarily based on unresolved grief transmitted across the generations in the form of chronic depression. Religion has been used as a tool to mediate the depression. The grief has been absorbed as the feeling of worthlessness and sin that requires God's grace and mercy of Jesus' salvific death. A psychologist helped me identify the depresssion, and various university professors and courses helped me identify the family patterns. Some of what follows was presented in another form to my class where it was discussed.

Sources of Emotional Pain/Distress

The sources of grief I know about in my family are of the deaths of two female ancestors of mine--a great-grandmother and a grandmother. Both these are on my mother's side of the family. My mother was three years old when her mother died. With the help of a professional I did a bit of research on this and I have reason to believe that my mother's grief was never dealt with.

Her grandmother, who took care of the family when the mother died, was herself a very young child when her own mother died many years earlier. Her father had farmed his children out to the neighbours. I have reason to think she lost all contact with her biological family of origin--her father and siblings. What issues of pain and unresolved grief might have been passed on to her children and grandchildren? She was an orphan in every sense of the word.

Some Background Information on the Family

When this orphan grew up she married a neighbour's hired hand and set up housekeeping. My grandfather was one of her children. My mother was born in her house many years later, one of the younger children of my grandfather's very large family. As stated, her mother (my grandfather's wife) died when she (my mother) was three years old.

My point is that my mother and her siblings were born and grew up in the same house as their grandmother lived who had been orphaned and farmed out at a very early age. I have since childhood noticed a level of deep sadness or other-worldliness (didn't know a name for the atmosphere but it was a distinct attitude/atmosphere) that I did not notice on my father's side of the family.

The Two Sides of My Family

My father's side of the family was very much into making money and living up the pleasures life had to offer within the confines of the church rules. Resentment at the law-makers might be expressed and then life would continue. His side of the family had not been without its sadness and trajedies. There had been deaths of mothers--my grandfather saw two mothers die, and lost several children to death. My father was the second of nine children, six of whom grew to adulthood. Both his parents lived to relative old age--his mother died around age 70 and his father over age 90.

On my mother's side of the family there is a long tradition spanning many generations of excommunication within families due to religious differences and church splits. On my father's side of the family there is no such history. Some people left the church but they still get together for family reunions and fun times no matter what church they go to. No tradition for family reunions ever existed on my mother's side of the family. Our church decided the family reunion thing was getting out of hand so my mother broke up the tradition on dad's side of the family and we no longer attended all the reunions.

Conclusion re Religion as a Tool

Because there are obvious reasons for the depression I do not think that religion caused the depression or mental health issue in my family. Religion was used as a coping strategy. And it worked for many generations. I think it would have worked for me, too, had I not been one notch too smart and seen right through the theology.

Also, the two sides of my family are incompatible. The otherworldliness of my mother's side of the family and the this-worldly focus of my father's side of the family caused endless contention in my family of origion. I think this accounts for at least part of the abuse I suffered, and which produced a severely confused Ruby whom nobody trusted with responsible work. This eventually forced me to decisions that got me crowded out of the community and family. However, this is not really part of the argument I am making here.

I think the comparison and contrast between the two sides of my family show that religion can indeed be used as a tool.

Let us now look at what insanity really is.

Insanity

The following was originally (wrongly) posted in the Testimonies, where it didn't belong and could not be discussed. I will copy it here with some changes.

Ever since childhood, I have been exposed to genuine malfunctioning brains as in developmentally challenged people, Alzheimers, general senility, and mental illness, in which individuals saw and heard things that did not correspond with the "real world" that other people saw and heard on the level of everyday life. But they did not know that they saw and heard things others didn't see and hear.

THAT is what I think of when I hear the word insanity...Okay, it occurs to me to look the word up. Here is Answers.com:

1. Mental illness or derangement. No longer in scientific use.

2. Law.

a) Unsoundness of mind sufficient in the judgment of a civil court to render a person unfit to maintain a contractual or other legal relationship or to warrant commitment to a mental health facility.

b ) In most criminal jurisdictions, a degree of mental malfunctioning sufficient to relieve the accused of legal responsibility for the act committed.

Those are the criteria by which I argue that Christians do not as a group qualify as insane. I recognize that religion can exacerbate mental illness and a batch of other ailments, but I know enough Christians to be perfectly sure that the vast majority do not fall into the category of insanity as described in either of those definitions.

3. a) Extreme foolishness; folly.
b ) Something that is extremely foolish.

This is the ONLY criteria by which it is logically possibly to judge Christians as insane. However, foolishness is subjectively defined. One's culture may have much to do with it. Folly itself is relative to the situation. Thus, I reject the argument that Christians are insane. In addition, I have done enough reading and study of religion and spirituality in sociology, anthropology, and Christian theology to conclude that it it logical for humans to believe that there is "something more" "out there." More recently I have been introduced to the work of behavioural psychologist Michael Persinger who has proven--more or less--with high technology that it begins and ends in the human psyche. In other words, he has proven my argument that it is logical for humans to think there is something out there. It is far more real than imagination.

I have also talked with enough people on the individual level, in addition to observation from the anthropological/sociological perspective, to hypothesize that this neural activity that Persinger is experimenting with is stronger in some individuals than in others. I think this accounts for one shaman per tribe, one religious leader per community, etc. I think new religious movements or cults and megachurches are probably started and maintained by individuals who have high levels of this neural activity along with other personality traits such as, or including, natural charisma. Jesus, if he ever existed, must have been such a person. I have done very little formal study on this, but in my search for truth or reality, it addressed questions for me that needed to be addressed.

Rather than charging insanity, the way I make sense of it is that people think the effects of the religious experience come from outside of themselves. In addition, humans have from time immemorial needed to make sense of the universe. Since science has pretty much mastered the latter in the past several centuries, yet religion won't go away, I have a very strong suspicion it is because of these inner experiences of a significant portion of the population (perhaps ten percent? I don't know the stats). I further think that perhaps tradition plays a major role for those who do not have these experiences, or that some emotional crisis brought on the religious experience for such a person who does not regularly experience them, and this may have happened when the person was praying or doing some other "saving" action such as repenting or worshipping.

Religious Fanaticism

A Google search of religious fanaticism brought up A Psychiatric Case Study of Religious Fanaticism, about a man who later died in the Heaven's Gate tragedy, but who in 1995 was seeking castration for religious reasons. He received a psychiatric evaluation and was judged to be mentally sound.

In my opinion, excommunicating family members for holding to a different cosmology from oneself is just as irrational as getting castrated in the name of religion. I think cultural religion that allows people to be human, like my father's side of the family, is okay. But when it shuns and divides the human family and imposes on the normal functions of being human like my mother's side of the family, then religion is being over-done.

However, things are not so cut-and-dried and easy. There was a depth of character and warmth of human caring on my mother's side of the family that was absent on my father's side. His parents married and started farming during the Depression. And they were successful. Their focus on making money paid off. They had little patience for anyone with interests other than earning their bread by the sweat of their brow with hard labour from early till late 365 days a year, and an extra day on Leap Year.

The Day of Rest was fitted in between morning and evening chores every Sunday. Likewise family reunions. Vacations had to be planned so that someone else was home to take care of the farm. It's a way of life all of us were taught from the craddle and even now I find myself yearning for the "good ol' days." But some of us, like myself and my father, needed intellectual stimulation in addition to the hard labour and long hours.

The criticism and contention that arose because my father was forced into a mould that didn't fit was not fun, to put it mildly. The pressure on my mother was extreme. Scripture can be brought to bear on the matter. This, however, would seem like using religion as a tool. Disagreements around career and child-rearing would seem more like regular human problems than specifically religious problems, I think.

Question

That outlines some of my thinking and research on the matter. I have a feeling some people will still insist that Christians are insane even if they meet none of the criteria listed for insanity. My question would is why are Christians so often charged with being insane or mentally ill in some way or other when they are clearly in touch with reality on the level of everyday life, and able to conduct their day-to-day lives with equal efficiency to secular people?

With allowances for human foibles, our medical, legal, financial, educational, and other social institutions are functioning quite well irregardless of whether they are run by the state or church, and irregardless of whether they exist in a "Christian" nation such as the US, or a secular nation in Europe, or atheist nation such as Japan.

My problem is not so much the abuse of Christians who deserve it; we all know the atrocities committed in the name of religion. I have a problem when words such as insanity and their meanings are twisted out of recognition. Surely that detracts from the very real problem of fundamentalist religion and downplays the reality of documented mental illness.

April 8, 2008

There is a difference between mentally ill and being insane. A mental illness can mean just about anything having to do with the mind. I say Christians are mentally ill because they are delusional thinkers having auditory hallucinations. A person can be mentally ill without being insane. Either way, they should take their meds. and chill.

April 9, 2008

That was magnificently written, and I've had a hard time being able to express all this as well as this does. My respects. I've always argued against applying the term "delusional" to a cultural reality. That one or two may have auditory hallucinations, does not translate into "Christians are mentally ill", anymore than an Asian who killed someone makes the statement "Asians are murderers" valid. It doesn't. Doing so smacks of abusing the meaning of that term as a pejorative attack, and in my opinion makes the one who uses it that way look bad, not the one who it's being cast at.

To me a valid complaint would be regarding the 'relevance' or 'pertinence', of using that cosmology in society. The appearance of "insanity" would be in the perception of people continuing to use a system of language that no one else around them speaks, while they're trying to interact with them. You state this well in the example of when the secular and religious meet, "it is necessary for both to forego the religious level--to stay out of that compartment". But the slighting of the other group comes when those of the religious, or those of the secular systems cross over into the realms of each other.

The whole process of deconversion, or conversely conversion, is simple a switching of cosmologies for the sake of self-benefit. I see my deconversion being a case of finding that system wasn't working. It didn't speak in a way that made sense to me. It's that simple. I've come to see little reason to hold animosity towards another group the speaks a different language (about the same things quite often), except for when it seeks to impose itself on others.

Additionally I try to make an effort to extend respect towards those in the other group in an effort to express our common humanity. To me that is vastly more valuable then 'who's using the right words'. So long as they show respect, I see no justifiable reason to attack them abusively, and even so if they should, I would first attempt to promote understanding rather than running with misunderstanding and judging and condemning them in return. I hope to progress beyond one camp or the other, as I hope for them as well.

April 9, 2008

Why is a 'cultural reality' de facto 'sane'? Looking at the past of 'cultural reality' 'sanity' is a popularity contest, same as 'delusional'

April 9, 2008

How does one determine when something like say, prayer, turns from being "spiritual" to "insanity"? Like, for instance, what makes someone who believes God answers their prayers indirectly through using people and even sometimes natural events in the world "spiritual" yet when someone prays to God and believes God will answer their prayers directly through literally "talking" with them it's suddenly "insane"? Aren't they both essentially talking to yourself and trying to listen for an answer? So, how is one version of talking to yourself less sane than another version of talking to yourself when they're both talking to yourself?

Another example is when some Christians claim they can see Jesus in a spoon or the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, even most Christians will agree those people are insane and laugh about how illogical they are. But then those same Christians will turn around and talk about how we can see proof of God's existence in his very creation and the creation itself proves God is real and yet they'll be considered to be "spiritually deep" by their fellow xtians even though they're essentially using the same basic concept as the Christians who believe in Jesus spoons. When someone sees another person that has a superstition of walking under ladders, you don't normally see them suddenly at awe of how spiritual the superstitious person is. So, I don't see how religion is suddenly that different when aren't the basic concepts behind them are the same?

April 9, 2008

Why is a 'cultural reality' de facto 'sane'? Looking at the past of 'cultural reality' 'sanity' is a popularity contest, same as 'delusional'

I cannot match your knowledge on mental illness. However, the way I am using the word "sane" in my OP has to do with being in touch with reality as one's peers understand it.

To illustrate what I mean by being in touch with reality I will use an example of my grandmother when she was in the advanced stages of Alzheimers. She would be on her feet and focus on a point in space about 18-24 inches from her face as though looking at something interesting. She would reach out to touch that point, talking as though to nobody in particular and to everybody in general about this interesting item, what it was, etc. as she explored it. She would be unaware of being alone in her room (sometimes we would come into her room and find her doing this; she obviously thought she was in a houseful of family). When she could not connect with anything solid she would become confused. It was obvious that she saw something we could not see. There were also times when she would have conversations with people we could neither see nor hear. All of this occurred inside the context of everyday life in an Old Order Mennonite home.

Here is an example of how she was connected to reality but did not know how to express it. She still had some bladder control but needed help to find the bathroom. She did not know how to ask specifically for the bathroom but she would start "talking dirty"--using a kind of language she would not use otherwise, so that we knew what she wanted. This tells me that she was somewhat connected to everyday life reality.

Thus, the "cultural reality" she tapped into was a type of vocabulary that all of us connected with "going to the bathroom." The "cultural reality" of the first example is "sharing interesting observations in the environment with family." The shared reality is language, culture, environment, physical needs, etc.

Even her intelligence was obvious. She would speak English at times because she thought she was with English-speaking people. Most of her conversation was in our mother-tongue, Pennsylvania German, but occassionally we would come into her room and find her conversing with her invisible friends in English. I'm sure she could see and hear these friends though we couldn't.

This is what (one of the things) I think of when I think about a person being detached from reality. I would have probably rebelled against anyone calling her insane, but I could better accept her condition as insanity than I can that of people who obviously are in solid contact with reality, and simply have accepted a different cosmology.

April 9, 2008

Excellent questions, Neon. I think you're talking about different branches or denominations of Christians judging each other.

I will go through your post and respond as I think. Others might have other insights.

How does one determine when something like say, prayer, turns from being "spiritual" to "insanity"? Like, for instance, what makes someone who believes God answers their prayers indirectly through using people and even sometimes natural events in the world "spiritual" yet when someone prays to God and believes God will answer their prayers directly through literally "talking" with them it's suddenly "insane"? Aren't they both essentially talking to yourself and trying to listen for an answer? So, how is one version of talking to yourself less sane than another version of talking to yourself when they're both talking to yourself?

I don't think either is insane. Not if the individual is in touch with reality in all other life functions. I understand mental health professionals have ways to measure whether a person is in touch with reality. They measure on many different scales for all the known mental illnesses and disorders.

Another example is when some Christians claim they can see Jesus in a spoon or the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, even most Christians will agree those people are insane and laugh about how illogical they are. But then those same Christians will turn around and talk about how we can see proof of God's existence in his very creation and the creation itself proves God is real and yet they'll be considered to be "spiritually deep" by their fellow xtians even though they're essentially using the same basic concept as the Christians who believe in Jesus spoons. When someone sees another person that has a superstition of walking under ladders, you don't normally see them suddenly at awe of how spiritual the superstitious person is.

I think anyone with imagination can see Jesus in a spoon or the Virin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich--or just about anything else the human brain is accustomed to see. The house in which I grew up had lots of chipped plaster and paint. I saw the map of Hudson Bay on the wall of the upstairs hallway. In another place I could see the face of the full moon. Optical illusions are built on this innate human ability. Religion and superstition take advantage of it, too. What I consider sad, not to mention cruel and inhumane, is when one group of people (in your example one group of Christians) ridicule another group for seeing and revering things that they themselves do not see and revere. However, I don't think anyone is insane.

So, I don't see how religion is suddenly that different when aren't the basic concepts behind them are the same? I'm not asking to be mean or anything, I sincerely want to know how this is determined because it just annoys me to know end when even Christians start making fun of each others' level of sanity and it drives me insane.

I think it's WRONG of Christians to call each other insane so long as actual mental illness is not part of the situation. I will never know exactly how large a role this had in my deconversion. I suspect it was significant.

I think it will be best for your and my mental health to steer clear of such disagreements among the Christians. It's all the same to me whether they see the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich or God in nature. However, I am best off not to comment on either unless I am prepared to debate.

April 9, 2008

How does one determine when something like say, prayer, turns from being "spiritual" to "insanity"? Like, for instance, what makes someone who believes God answers their prayers indirectly through using people and even sometimes natural events in the world "spiritual" yet when someone prays to God and believes God will answer their prayers directly through literally "talking" with them it's suddenly "insane"?

Aren't they both essentially talking to yourself and trying to listen for an answer? So, how is one version of talking to yourself less sane than another version of talking to yourself when they're both talking to yourself?

In a word, functionality. A lot of times someone will use the language of saying "God spoke to them", and it simply is that "still small voice", which is for all intents and purposes learning to listen to that 'sense' of your own voice through the noise of thoughts and fears. It's a human thing that some might choose to use the word, your 'intuitive' voice. To me it's understood as a collective knowledge of your own experiences and knowledge and personality (wisdom) that you learn to listen to as part of a background process of all these disparate bits of info blended together in an aromatic-type stew pot. So to me, I ask the question "What are they saying by those words, 'God spoke to me'"? Is it that? Then is that insanity, or a language system?

Now if the person is having auditory hallucinations, full blown 'voices speaking in the mind', then it falls outside the median experiences of what would be called 'normal'. Even so, it doesn't necessarily make them insane, if at the end of this they are functional human beings. Labeling something "insane" that is off-center of the mean, is not something that trained professionals will easily say. But if these audible voices are telling them things that make them become dysfunctional, now we're talking a real 'illness'. By definition the word illness means they are dysfunctional. I agree with Ruby that your average religious believer is as functional as the average person, and thus not ill.

Another example is when some Christians claim they can see Jesus in a spoon or the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich, even most Christians will agree those people are insane and laugh about how illogical they are.

Seeing Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich is not insanity. Facial pattern recognition is a well known psychological feature of normal, sane people. We're all about pattern recognition. That someone interprets these patterns as part of their cultural mythology, is also not insane, but pretty understandable. We're wired to fill in the gaps with related information in order to function. That some people, namely those in the more educated societies who have access to information that explains this normal psychological feature, are able to take that information and apply to this, does not make those who lack this more specialized understanding to be insane people. Ignorant, yes. Insane, no.

But then those same Christians will turn around and talk about how we can see proof of God's existence in his very creation and the creation itself proves God is real and yet they'll be considered to be "spiritually deep" by their fellow xtians even though they're essentially using the same basic concept as the Christians who believe in Jesus spoons.

I see the argument of seeing God in creation to be similar to what goes on in seeing Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. Pattern recognition. The watchmakers argument. Is it ironic that they will laugh at the grilled cheese folks, while not recognizing themselves falling into the same trap? Yes, but as with everything in almost any area of life it's easier to see the mistakes and errors of others, while it's harder to recognize it when we're doing the same thing! This is not insanity either. Ignorance is the best word.

When someone sees another person that has a superstition of walking under ladders, you don't normally see them suddenly at awe of how spiritual the superstitious person is. So, I don't see how religion is suddenly that different when aren't the basic concepts behind them are the same?

I wouldn't consider the examples of superstition or pattern recognition to be examples of 'spirituality'. They are more part of cultural folklore, if anything. But as such, they're not 'insane'.

April 10, 2008

Very interesting topic. I've been both a religious fanatic AND mentally ill, partially concomitant (props to Grampa H).

This is how I would describe the difference: people look out the same window together.

1. The "normal" person sees trees and clouds, etc. Some of it is beautiful, some is ugly, but it's all pretty clear.

2. The extremely mentally ill person sees 3 badgers in biohazard suits playing castanets while whistling "Stairway to Heaven".

3 The fanatic fundy is looking through a stained window. This unfortunate person cannot see anything other than that diffuse colored light. It is vital to bdefine that what actually lies on the other side of the window as "heaven", and the light shining through as "god". That belief saves this person from fearing the unknown.

4. The former fundy has broken out a few panes from the stained glass and begins to see like # 1 again, taking in both the beauty and ugliness as it comes.

5. The mentally ill fundy can't actually see the badgers because of the stained glass windows. The craziness only appears to them as specters whose shadows skew the light as it hits the window. Ssomething's not right with their perception. The fact that the rays of light are disturbed they perceive to be their own fault, because if they truely believed, that wouldn't be the case. SO they try to ignore the shadows, rebuke them, whatever. When that doesn't help, they blame themselves for lack of faith, and the process continues ad nauseum. Meanwhile the badgers get out the LSD.

I hope this makes sense. If not, it's the badgers' fault.

April 10, 2008

L&L you illustrate my point beautifully. Thank you.

April 10, 2008

Very interesting topic. I've been both a religious fanatic AND mentally ill, partially concomitant (props to Grampa H).

This is how I would describe the difference: people look out the same window together.

1. The "normal" person sees trees and clouds, etc. Some of it is beautiful, some is ugly, but it's all pretty clear.

2. The extremely mentally ill person sees 3 badgers in biohazard suits playing castanets while whistling "Stairway to Heaven".

3 The fanatic fundy is looking through a stained window. This unfortunate person cannot see anything other than that diffuse colored light. It is vital to bdefine that what actually lies on the other side of the window as "heaven", and the light shining through as "god". That belief saves this person from fearing the unknown.

4. The former fundy has broken out a few panes from the stained glass and begins to see like # 1 again, taking in both the beauty and ugliness as it comes.

5. The mentally ill fundy can't actually see the badgers because of the stained glass windows. The craziness only appears to them as specters whose shadows skew the light as it hits the window. Ssomething's not right with their perception. The fact that the rays of light are disturbed they perceive to be their own fault, because if they truely believed, that wouldn't be the case. SO they try to ignore the shadows, rebuke them, whatever. When that doesn't help, they blame themselves for lack of faith, and the process continues ad nauseum. Meanwhile the badgers get out the LSD.

I hope this makes sense. If not, it's the badgers' fault.

An interesting conversation came up over this last night where I raised the question, 'what is it about religion that attracts the mentally ill to latch onto it, to attach all those types of symbols to their illness? And is this an indication of something about that system that may suggest somewhat that is inherently delusional in nature, and thus makes it attractive?"

The discussion uncovered that the mentally ill, first of all, are usually attracted to more of the fringe religions and not the mainstream. The mainstream's perceptions of religious symbolism is more rooted in normal, functional reality for them - the ethical standards, devotional aspects of family and culture, etc. But the more fringe groups create a place where these "badgers in bio-hazard suits" can be called Jesus and the saints and what-have-you. To the mentally ill, these symbols are a different animal (no pun intended), than they are to even the most rabid of 'normal' fundies.

I know in our little cult, we some some pretty fringe stuff for even us fringe folks. I think one reason perhaps it's easier for the Badger-as-Jesus people to gravitate to the fringe religious groups is because those in the fringes are culturally more accepting of seeing things in the uber-spiritual/supernatural light, whereas the Badger/Jesus people would not find as much acceptance around say, your typical Lutheran soccer mom. Even so, the ones that rode the fringes in our group never really quite fit in as it was. But this doesn't make the fundies themselves mentally ill, even though they looked through an extremely narrow hole through the wall at life.

I should add a correction to something I said above in a previous post that relates to this. I had said that the reason that people who see Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich is more pronounced in other countries is due to a lack of exposure to higher-education. I wish to modify that to state that it's less to do with that and much more to do with what is part of that particular culture in how they choose to perceive things. Even educated people within those cultures will tend to perceive things that way because they have a desire to blend in and be part of that culture.

That explains very well why you have plenty of Creationist like thinkers existing in a highly educated society such as our own. I recall myself being part of the fanatical Christian group that I was with, adopting that language and way of looking at things to fit into that group. I'm really convinced that intelligence, education, and mental health have not nearly as much of an impact on one's religious views, as it does where one sees themselves fitting into the world.

That brings it back to the genuinely mentally ill and why they gravitate to the fringe religious. They're both on the fringes of society, and so they have a certain connection - though not enough to establish a true community, which is why I've contended all along that even fundi's cant be considered delusional. But even all this is a bit of an oversimplification.

P.S. I should add that I've always had a dislike for the rhetoric that calls belief in God a delusion (The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins). It's sensationalism to sell books, not an accurate definition. It would be like Rush Limbaugh putting together his political "thoughts" into a book and calling it "Idiot Democrats". People who don't like Democrats would gobble it up. Same sort of thing. It's pejorative, and exploitative.

April 10, 2008

This is not insanity either. Ignorance is the best word.

I can see your point and I should probably work on getting into the habit of using the word ignorant more than delusional, but it doesn't have quite the same effect when you're dealing with certain xtians in certain threads who think it is justified to murder innocent children of Islamic families that are being abused.

April 10, 2008

I found an article on the Secular Web, "Happy is the Man that Feareth Always": Psychology vs Religion (2005), by Daniela Kramer and Michael Moore.

The first paragraph of the article provides sources (authors of books and dates of publication; not live links) of discussion on the relationship between religion and mental illness.

I'm not sure that the main article is totally relevant to this thread--not sure that it's either for or against my argument--but it might be food for thought. I found it somewhat heavy reading and yet the concepts are simple for those of us familiar with Abrahamic religious thought.

Kramer and Moore look at prayer books and sacred texts of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and what these teach on self-esteem, social values, and status of the family. They show how religion undermines all of these. This is stuff we've discussed a lot on these forums. I just figured others might be like me, and like to see their own thoughts confirmed in scholarly articles and supported by formal research.

April 10, 2008

This is not insanity either. Ignorance is the best word.
I can see your point and I should probably work on getting into the habit of using the word ignorant more than delusional, but it doesn't have quite the same effect when you're dealing with certain xtians in certain threads who think it is justified to murder innocent children of Islamic families that are being abused.

I guess I'm not familiar with the situation you are referring to but...murdering innocent children in the name of religion. There's got to be mental illness involved...delusion on some level. Or out and out fanaticism. It's WRONG!

I also have a belief that there is much undiagnosed mental illness among religious people. Like the article on Brother David, the monk who wanted castration, argues the line between religious fanatacism and genuine mental illness is very thin and difficult to identify.

April 12, 2008

I've been thinking about this thread. Someone mentioned Dawkins's God Delusion. I have not read that book, but I do agree with the general focus of Dawkins, Harris, et al. In no way do I defend religion. If I seem to be doing that then I'm doing something wrong and we need to talk.

All I'm getting after here is words--using the right words for the right situations. Maybe I'm over-doing it. *shrugs*

BTW, I'm not sure whose idea it was to pin this thread. If others are like me, they just won't post to pinned threads. It's like they're off-limits where only management can post or for "read only" or something.

I'm just an ordinary person and I had meant this for an ordinary discussion.

April 13, 2008

I've been thinking about this thread. Someone mentioned Dawkins's God Delusion. I have not read that book, but I do agree with the general focus of Dawkins, Harris, et al. In no way do I defend religion. If I seem to be doing that then I'm doing something wrong and we need to talk.

I mentioned Dawkins. In challenging Dawkins, it does not translate into someone defending religion. One does not follow the other. It's certainly is not a case of "if you're not for Dawkins then you're for religion". If anything, it's defending language and discourse against political rhetoric. I find Dawkins being a tad sensationalist in his use of the word Delusional.

BTW, I'm not sure whose idea it was to pin this thread. If others are like me, they just won't post to pinned threads. It's like they're off-limits where only management can post or for "read only" or something.

That would be me. I don't think others assume what you are about pinned topics. You only need look at the other topics that are pinned to see a proliferation of posters in them. The point of pinning this is because this topic has come up several times in the middle of other threads, and seeing how you articulated it here, I feel it would be beneficial for it to remain visible for a time, as opposed to slipping down the forum into obscurity. That's generally the purpose for pinning topics. I do not believe it's diminished by being pinned, quite the contrary actually. I feel it's an important perspective that deserves to be pinned for a time.

April 13, 2008

This is a very interesting topic, and I'm still trying to figure out my position in the subject. Just some thoughts:

I would like to think that people are religious just because they have a deficit or "problem" in their brain, but it's hard for me to do so, since I used to be a religious person myself. I seriously thought it was all true. So if I was mentally ill for 30 years, and now I'm not, how can that be explained? I didn't do it through self-medication, or changed diet or anything else, but just pure chance that my emotional state changed, the feeling of "belief" diminished and I realized I had to base my beliefs on knowledge and reason instead. I could stretch my view to accept that it is a mental state of mind to be religious, and that in some cases - like mine - it's possible to fix over time, but to generally assume that religious people must have a physical brain disorder would be to go too far. However, I've seen there is something amiss in many Christians who tries to argue for their religion. Some of them are definitely deeply rooted, or caged, in a thought process they can't break out from, and yet some are able to break out, like our famous good Christians we have on the site. I'd say there are different levels of corruption of the mind, some is physical and require help from experts to handle, but the rest is rather just meme based corruption, in other words, people have corrupted minds because they have learned and only know corrupted ideas. I might have more to say about this, but I'll add it later...

April 13, 2008

and yet some are able to break out, like our famous good Christians we have on the site. I'd say there are different levels of corruption of the mind,

If I understand you correctly you are suggesting that there are some exceptions to the rule--that there are Christians who demonstrate real intelligent thought. That's one of the things I've been basing my observations on. And then there's creative and original thought that has nothing to do with formal education and everything to do with survival in an alien environment.

Hans, I know something of your story as you told it in various posts and thread on these forums. I would attribute your change from religion to nonreligion not to a physical change in your physical brain, but to an intellectual and emotional change in your psyche. Changing life situations caused you, as they do most of us, to take a hard look at previously held beliefs. It seems at this stage the majority of the human population does one of two things: either explain away/deny the new insights or reality or adjust the old beliefs to accommodate them. Instead of doing this, you adjusted your foundational belief system to fit your revised understanding of reality.

What accounts for this different reaction to the same situation?

That is the billion-dollar question that specialists in various disciplines are seeking to answer.

April 13, 2008

If I understand you correctly you are suggesting that there are some exceptions to the rule--that there are Christians who demonstrate real intelligent thought. That's one of the things I've been basing my observations on. And then there's creative and original thought that has nothing to do with formal education and everything to do with survival in an alien environment.

I do think there are Christians that have brought very intelligent thoughts into our world, and our history, but saying this without conceding to what they said is always 100% correct. Newton didn't figure out relativity, but his formulas still work in the right context.

I don't think it's a physical mental problem that causes religious attachment in general, but I can however admit that there is a strong chance that some with real mental problems are attracted to it. Like some people who have "visions", and they think it's real, and they start a congregation and such (signs of schizophrenia and control). But the Christians in general are more of the misled or misinformed mind that could be "saved" from the cult if they only wanted to question it. I think the problem in religion lies in the unwillingness of people to be honest and truly look into their own lives and belief-systems. (Like they say, people in general spend more time looking for a new house or a new car than looking into their own religion.) It's faith by laziness. If people wanted to grow, they could (most of them), but yet, a handful of them might be incurable. And also I think they depend more on emotions than reason, so they get stuck in a "feel-right" mode.

-edit-

This thread is very interesting: http://www.ex-christian.net/index.php?show...c=23125&hl=

The explanation to the delusional and non-rational behavior from religious people can also very well be explained in how the religion seems to act as a drug. It creates an addiction, it makes them ignorant and unwilling to learn anything outside their own little box, they become pushers and want to sell the drug to reinforce their own doubts about how good it really is, and so on. The drug however, creates a behavior that is very much like a mental illness. Maybe that's the explanation to it? People don't become religious because they're mentally ill, but they adopt a behavior of a mentally ill because they become religious?

April 15, 2008

Hans, the experience I had with my thesis supervisor at the oral exam yesterday has dealt me a blow from which I may never recover regarding confidence that there are good and intelligent Christians who think outside the box where it regards their religion. I was so full of it last night I posted all over the place. Probably won't serve any good purpose to go into detail here other than to say I agree with you. He's not mentally ill but I think he limits himself intellectually.

April 15, 2008

BTW, I'm not sure whose idea it was to pin this thread. If others are like me, they just won't post to pinned threads. It's like they're off-limits where only management can post or for "read only" or something.

....The point of pinning this is because this topic has come up several times in the middle of other threads, and seeing how you articulated it here, I feel it would be beneficial for it to remain visible for a time, as opposed to slipping down the forum into obscurity.

Thank you for this clarification.

I suggested in an earlier post that I think insanity means to be detached from reality. In my last post in this thread I mentioned my thesis supervisor limiting himself intellectually with his religion. Today I encountered a young man at the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum.

By all appearances this young man is as intimately in tune with reality as it is possible for a human being to be, and also stretching himself intellectually as far as he possibly can. He appears to be severely limited in his capacities and to be operating at perhaps the level of a two or three year old. He has barely mastered the art of speech. However, he was traveling by bus on his own.

The point of this post is to show how I know he was in touch with reality, with his environment.

I was sitting on the bench at the bus stop, with my bags parked on the bench beside me. This exuberant young man appeared out of nowhere and parked himself on the one empty spot at the other end of the bench. Normally I hang onto all my belongings just in case someone decides to take off with something. But I was in the middle of the process of digging out my bus ticket. It was rather unusual for anyone to set himself down so fast without "asking" permission to sit beside me, either with look or gesture or word. I've basically trained myself to remain calm in emergency because that is the only way to be safe; can't think if I panic. I forced myself to remain calm.

Then I became aware of what he was saying. He was speaking in the poorly formed words of one who has not yet mastered language, like a little child. And I knew that he was innocent and harmless. Eventually I was able to make out the approxiamte words, given the context of the bus stop. "Versity! Numa telv!" he was saying "Versity! Numa telv!"

"Are you going with the Number 12?" I asked. It seemed he was. He used the thought or speech pattern of a person I had worked with twenty years ago, which helped me understand what he wanted. I wasn't sure what he meant about "versity." Did he want to get off at University Avenue? Or at one of the universities? Either could be true for this bus stop. I assumed he was repeating the instructions someone had given him before he went out the door. But if he was getting off at University Avenue, at what part of University Ave. was he getting off? I kept listening carefully for any syllable or partial syllable that could indicate the name of a common stop on that street.

Then the bus came. I let him get on first. The bus was empty except for one young woman. He told the driver where he was going. He repeated it a few times. The driver tried to make out what he meant. Suddenly the young man said, "Yes, yes!" and headed for a seat. I got on and the driver asked me where he was going. I explained that I had only just met him and did not know either. I took a seat across the aisle from him and assumed that whoever let him travel alone knew that he would be okay.

About three stops within the first university he started talking again. He was looking at me as though he trusted me to know where he was supposed to get off, as though he wanted assurance from me that he had it right. This time he included something that resembled the name of that school. We were traveling at a good clip and I knew time was running out fast.

I did something I'd never done before. I abandoned my belongings on my side of the bus. I went and sat myself in the seat directly in front of him so I had his full attention. This was serious and time was running out fast.

I asked him, "Are you getting off at the University of Waterloo?"

He said, "Bus driver knows."

I looked at him and said, "No, the bus driver does not know. Do you know the name of the person you will be seeing?"

I was grasping at straws. The chances of him going to see a person I knew in that huge school was less than one in a thousand. I could only hope that it would stimulate helpful information. Suddenly from the front of the bus the driver asked, "Do you know what the building looks like?"

We were in front of the campus by that time. There was a really good view from the street and he recognized the buildings. He knew this was where he was supposed to get off. As we got closer to the main entrance where he could see the steps of the building where he was supposed to go in he knew he was at the right place. When we pulled up to the stop he happily got off the bus.

What I noted was that he was so in tune with his environment that when he saw where he was--when he saw the landmarks near his destination, the name of the school came to his memory. Someone must have trained him to travel this route so that he recognized the landmarks. But when he tried hard enough and focused hard enough--in other words, when he stretched himself intellectually, he was able to identify landmarks and find his way alone.

I'm asking myself: Where would humanity be if everybody believed in stretching themselves intellectually to the limits like this man does? if everyone was as deeply in tune with their environment as this man was?

April 19, 2008

It bothers me when people on exC claim that Christians are schizophrenic, have a mental illness, are insane, etc. I think the term they want is religious fanaticism. Religious people have a very different cosmology from secular people. Cosmology is how we see the cosmos, our world view. The fundy Christian sees a heaven and hell with God in control of all and believes life must be arranged to accommodate these. The secular person sees the natural universe as primary; God, heaven, hell, etc. are seen as superstitious or supernatural items that do not belong in serious conversations regarding how the world works.

The Problem

Perhaps people make these claims about insanity or mental illness because they have never seen true mental illness in which a person is detached from the real world of the here and now; I am not talking about the level of cosmology but of everyday life in our homes and work. Or perhaps making such claims/accusations is a way of lashing out at the institution that has caused them so much hurt, from some of which they will never fully recover.

Different Levels of Reality

I think it is very important to recognize the various levels and to understand which level it is we are talking about. There is cosmology. There is everyday life of here and now. There is the level of the group and the level of the individual. There is the level of the community at large and the level of the family. On the level of the individual there is emotional, intellectual, religious, and spiritual.

There is also something called interpersonal. Communities are held together by interpersonal feelings of kinship and shared interests. For secular people to relate to religious people, or vice versa, it is necessary for both to forego the religious level--to stay out of that compartment; I think we all know that. To determine that someone is mentally ill both religious and non-religious people need to forego, or stay out of, cosmology. We have to stay within the everyday level of the here and now.

Religious Fanaticism

Religious fanaticism does not equal mental illness and should not be treated as such. I think we have a better chance at recovery if we know what it is we are recovering from. I think we have a better chance at protecting ourselves from further harm if we know the nature of the beast against which we need to protect ourselves. I also know that some of us have suffered--and continue to suffer--mental illness or mental health issues as a result of religious abuse. I am one of these and do not expect ever to fully recover.

Cosmology

To provide a better idea of what is meant by cosmology I will discuss a few different types of cosmology and provide links for further study in case anyone is interested.

Encarta.msn defines cosmology as the "study of the universe as a whole, including its distant past and its future." This is an easy-to-read online article that looks at the universe from a scientific perspective. It shows how theories developed over time as to whether the sun or the earth is at the centre of the universe, and similar matters.

This article describes the Christian versus the scientific cosmologies. This is the classical creation vs evolution debate. This looks like a good site for anyone interested in further reading; it has a list of links down the side with the names of scientists and science topics. I have not read enough to be sure whether it is a Christian site, or but I think it is. There is a link God and Time; I doubt that a secular site would have that. It could, however, be a site meant to educate people about Christian views.

Here is NASA's Universe 101 page with some easy-to-read explanations and a link to FAQ.

And finally there is always Wikipedia.

Religion as a Tool

In my own family I think it is important to recognize that some of the mental health issues are primarily based on unresolved grief transmitted across the generations in the form of chronic depression. Religion has been used as a tool to mediate the depression. The grief has been absorbed as the feeling of worthlessness and sin that requires God's grace and mercy of Jesus' salvific death. A psychologist helped me identify the depresssion, and various university professors and courses helped me identify the family patterns. Some of what follows was presented in another form to my class where it was discussed.

Sources of Emotional Pain/Distress

The sources of grief I know about in my family are of the deaths of two female ancestors of mine--a great-grandmother and a grandmother. Both these are on my mother's side of the family. My mother was three years old when her mother died. With the help of a professional I did a bit of research on this and I have reason to believe that my mother's grief was never dealt with.

Her grandmother, who took care of the family when the mother died, was herself a very young child when her own mother died many years earlier. Her father had farmed his children out to the neighbours. I have reason to think she lost all contact with her biological family of origin--her father and siblings. What issues of pain and unresolved grief might have been passed on to her children and grandchildren? She was an orphan in every sense of the word.

Some Background Information on the Family

When this orphan grew up she married a neighbour's hired hand and set up housekeeping. My grandfather was one of her children. My mother was born in her house many years later, one of the younger children of my grandfather's very large family. As stated, her mother (my grandfather's wife) died when she (my mother) was three years old.

My point is that my mother and her siblings were born and grew up in the same house as their grandmother lived who had been orphaned and farmed out at a very early age. I have since childhood noticed a level of deep sadness or other-worldliness (didn't know a name for the atmosphere but it was a distinct attitude/atmosphere) that I did not notice on my father's side of the family.

The Two Sides of My Family

My father's side of the family was very much into making money and living up the pleasures life had to offer within the confines of the church rules. Resentment at the law-makers might be expressed and then life would continue. His side of the family had not been without its sadness and trajedies. There had been deaths of mothers--my grandfather saw two mothers die, and lost several children to death. My father was the second of nine children, six of whom grew to adulthood. Both his parents lived to relative old age--his mother died around age 70 and his father over age 90.

On my mother's side of the family there is a long tradition spanning many generations of excommunication within families due to religious differences and church splits. On my father's side of the family there is no such history. Some people left the church but they still get together for family reunions and fun times no matter what church they go to. No tradition for family reunions ever existed on my mother's side of the family. Our church decided the family reunion thing was getting out of hand so my mother broke up the tradition on dad's side of the family and we no longer attended all the reunions.

Conclusion re Religion as a Tool

Because there are obvious reasons for the depression I do not think that religion caused the depression or mental health issue in my family. Religion was used as a coping strategy. And it worked for many generations. I think it would have worked for me, too, had I not been one notch too smart and seen right through the theology.

Also, the two sides of my family are incompatible. The otherworldliness of my mother's side of the family and the this-worldly focus of my father's side of the family caused endless contention in my family of origion. I think this accounts for at least part of the abuse I suffered, and which produced a severely confused Ruby whom nobody trusted with responsible work. This eventually forced me to decisions that got me crowded out of the community and family. However, this is not really part of the argument I am making here.

I think the comparison and contrast between the two sides of my family show that religion can indeed be used as a tool.

Let us now look at what insanity really is.

Insanity

The following was originally (wrongly) posted in the Testimonies, where it didn't belong and could not be discussed. I will copy it here with some changes.

Ever since childhood, I have been exposed to genuine malfunctioning brains as in developmentally challenged people, Alzheimers, general senility, and mental illness, in which individuals saw and heard things that did not correspond with the "real world" that other people saw and heard on the level of everyday life. But they did not know that they saw and heard things others didn't see and hear.

THAT is what I think of when I hear the word insanity...Okay, it occurs to me to look the word up. Here is Answers.com:

1. Mental illness or derangement. No longer in scientific use.

2. Law.

a) Unsoundness of mind sufficient in the judgment of a civil court to render a person unfit to maintain a contractual or other legal relationship or to warrant commitment to a mental health facility.

b ) In most criminal jurisdictions, a degree of mental malfunctioning sufficient to relieve the accused of legal responsibility for the act committed.

Those are the criteria by which I argue that Christians do not as a group qualify as insane. I recognize that religion can exacerbate mental illness and a batch of other ailments, but I know enough Christians to be perfectly sure that the vast majority do not fall into the category of insanity as described in either of those definitions.

3. a) Extreme foolishness; folly.
b ) Something that is extremely foolish.

This is the ONLY criteria by which it is logically possibly to judge Christians as insane. However, foolishness is subjectively defined. One's culture may have much to do with it. Folly itself is relative to the situation. Thus, I reject the argument that Christians are insane. In addition, I have done enough reading and study of religion and spirituality in sociology, anthropology, and Christian theology to conclude that it it logical for humans to believe that there is "something more" "out there." More recently I have been introduced to the work of behavioural psychologist Michael Persinger who has proven--more or less--with high technology that it begins and ends in the human psyche. In other words, he has proven my argument that it is logical for humans to think there is something out there. It is far more real than imagination.

I have also talked with enough people on the individual level, in addition to observation from the anthropological/sociological perspective, to hypothesize that this neural activity that Persinger is experimenting with is stronger in some individuals than in others. I think this accounts for one shaman per tribe, one religious leader per community, etc. I think new religious movements or cults and megachurches are probably started and maintained by individuals who have high levels of this neural activity along with other personality traits such as, or including, natural charisma. Jesus, if he ever existed, must have been such a person. I have done very little formal study on this, but in my search for truth or reality, it addressed questions for me that needed to be addressed.

Rather than charging insanity, the way I make sense of it is that people think the effects of the religious experience come from outside of themselves. In addition, humans have from time immemorial needed to make sense of the universe. Since science has pretty much mastered the latter in the past several centuries, yet religion won't go away, I have a very strong suspicion it is because of these inner experiences of a significant portion of the population (perhaps ten percent? I don't know the stats). I further think that perhaps tradition plays a major role for those who do not have these experiences, or that some emotional crisis brought on the religious experience for such a person who does not regularly experience them, and this may have happened when the person was praying or doing some other "saving" action such as repenting or worshipping.

Religious Fanaticism

A Google search of religious fanaticism brought up A Psychiatric Case Study of Religious Fanaticism, about a man who later died in the Heaven's Gate tragedy, but who in 1995 was seeking castration for religious reasons. He received a psychiatric evaluation and was judged to be mentally sound.

In my opinion, excommunicating family members for holding to a different cosmology from oneself is just as irrational as getting castrated in the name of religion. I think cultural religion that allows people to be human, like my father's side of the family, is okay. But when it shuns and divides the human family and imposes on the normal functions of being human like my mother's side of the family, then religion is being over-done.

However, things are not so cut-and-dried and easy. There was a depth of character and warmth of human caring on my mother's side of the family that was absent on my father's side. His parents married and started farming during the Depression. And they were successful. Their focus on making money paid off. They had little patience for anyone with interests other than earning their bread by the sweat of their brow with hard labour from early till late 365 days a year, and an extra day on Leap Year.

The Day of Rest was fitted in between morning and evening chores every Sunday. Likewise family reunions. Vacations had to be planned so that someone else was home to take care of the farm. It's a way of life all of us were taught from the craddle and even now I find myself yearning for the "good ol' days." But some of us, like myself and my father, needed intellectual stimulation in addition to the hard labour and long hours.

The criticism and contention that arose because my father was forced into a mould that didn't fit was not fun, to put it mildly. The pressure on my mother was extreme. Scripture can be brought to bear on the matter. This, however, would seem like using religion as a tool. Disagreements around career and child-rearing would seem more like regular human problems than specifically religious problems, I think.

Question

That outlines some of my thinking and research on the matter. I have a feeling some people will still insist that Christians are insane even if they meet none of the criteria listed for insanity. My question would is why are Christians so often charged with being insane or mentally ill in some way or other when they are clearly in touch with reality on the level of everyday life, and able to conduct their day-to-day lives with equal efficiency to secular people?

With allowances for human foibles, our medical, legal, financial, educational, and other social institutions are functioning quite well irregardless of whether they are run by the state or church, and irregardless of whether they exist in a "Christian" nation such as the US, or a secular nation in Europe, or atheist nation such as Japan.

My problem is not so much the abuse of Christians who deserve it; we all know the atrocities committed in the name of religion. I have a problem when words such as insanity and their meanings are twisted out of recognition. Surely that detracts from the very real problem of fundamentalist religion and downplays the reality of documented mental illness.

Interesting ideas. I read an article once about mental illness. The article cited a psychologist from about 100 years ago, who believed that mental illnesses can usually be connected to what we call today Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Basically, when people experience things that are out of the ordinary, they develop characteristics that help them survive these incidents. Then, when the incidents have passed, they can't get out of the routine or thought-processes.

Basically, what I'm saying is that fanaticism can be caused by underlying mental illness. However, there are two factors that must be considered:

- many people think that, just because a Christian believes in the Bible, that the Christian is fanatical. That stops them from paying attention to what the Christian has to say, and shrugging it off as mental illness.

- Christianity is all about moderation. Paul admonished Timothy to do all things in moderation. Ecclesiastes says that there is a time for everything, and a season for all things under Heaven. Christ Himself said we should enter through the narrow gate, because the way is straight and narrow. When is the path to the left or right straight or narrow? Also, we must remember that, in Christ's day, the Pharisees were like today's conservatives, and the Sadducees were like today's liberals. The Pharisees were right in their faith, but were wrong in putting ritual before what it stood for. The Sadducees were right in believing that ritual is largely useless without faith, but were wrong in their secular beliefs. Christ proposed the middle of the two paths, both of which were derived from the teachings God (Christ) gave to Moses: the faith of the Pharisees, with the sincerity of the Sadducees. Essentially, the Pharisees and Sadducees, like the conservatives and liberals of our day, took the right Way, and tore it in half; each one taking the half that suited them, and mixing it with their own brand of theological and philosophical filler. Then, God was born as Christ, and Christ restored the Way by taking the two halves together to make the true whole (and eliminating the filler from both beliefs).

Does that mean that Conservatives (Christians) and Liberals (Non-Christians) are right, or wrong? Yes, and no. Each and every idea has some facts in it, but not entire truth. People are prone to take the evidence, find the facts they propose, and combine the facts with fiction that suits them best to create a false or wrong idea. The key is to take the facts that are so obvious to everyone else, and eliminate the fictions people come up with from them. Then, the last part of the task is to try to understand where the authors of the books are coming from. Once you can figure that out, you can understand what they were trying to say, but perhaps couldn't say so efficiently, and get to the truth they proposed. Think of Einstein's Wheel of Truth.

April 19, 2008

- many people think that, just because a Christian believes in the Bible, that the Christian is fanatical. That stops them from paying attention to what the Christian has to say, and shrugging it off as mental illness.

No-- I wouldn't make that assumption. There are some tolerant and moderate types of Christianity.

- Christianity is all about moderation. Paul admonished Timothy to do all things in moderation. Ecclesiastes says that there is a time for everything, and a season for all things under Heaven.

Despite what I said above, I do wonder if Christianity is about moderation then why do we see all these Christians in the real world telling us all what we need to believe and how we should live? How about live and let live? Don't see too many of them doing that.

I like the book of Ecclesiastes. Its world view is not Christian.

Christ Himself said we should enter through the narrow gate, because the way is straight and narrow. When is the path to the left or right straight or narrow? Also, we must remember that, in Christ's day, the Pharisees were like today's conservatives, and the Sadducees were like today's liberals. The Pharisees were right in their faith, but were wrong in putting ritual before what it stood for. The Sadducees were right in believing that ritual is largely useless without faith, but were wrong in their secular beliefs. Christ proposed the middle of the two paths, both of which were derived from the teachings God (Christ) gave to Moses: the faith of the Pharisees, with the sincerity of the Sadducees. Essentially, the Pharisees and Sadducees, like the conservatives and liberals of our day, took the right Way, and tore it in half; each one taking the half that suited them, and mixing it with their own brand of theological and philosophical filler. Then, God was born as Christ, and Christ restored the Way by taking the two halves together to make the true whole (and eliminating the filler from both beliefs).

Excuse me, but this seems overly simplistic. You are dragging a situation out of the 1st century, through 2,000 years of Christian theology, and applying it to "liberals" and "conservatives" of today. A lot of labelling and assumtions.

Yes, and no. Each and every idea has some facts in it, but not entire truth.

So "God was born as Christ" - my question is why do you believe this, and why are you here?

April 19, 2008

Basically, what I'm saying is that fanaticism can be caused by underlying mental illness. However, there are two factors that must be considered:

- many people think that, just because a Christian believes in the Bible, that the Christian is fanatical. That stops them from paying attention to what the Christian has to say, and shrugging it off as mental illness.

See? This guy here shows you it IS MENTAL ILLNESS. It's called delusion to be more precise. It is a cureable illness, nobody has to suffer with it forever, look how many got "well" here!

Denying it is anything but delusion, is to deny the heart of the problem. It should not anger anyone to hear religion is a mental illness, because by calling it what it is, we are better able to start the healing.

Not many mental illnesses are cureable, but thankfully, this IS cureable.

Here is a quote from godisimaginary.com

I post it here, as we NEED to be aware of the harm religion causes in our world.

If God were to exist, wouldn't you expect there to be a huge benefit to those who follow and obey him? Why, instead, do we see the opposite?

For example, there is growing evidence that the delusion of religion causes significant social dysfunction. Statistical research is revealing the problems that go with religion. For example, a recent article in the Journal of Religion and Society points out that religion is correlated to the significant social difficulties that we can see in America:

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies (Figures 1-9). The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a â€œshining city on the hillâ€ to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. [ref]
The prevailing view is that religion is harmless even if it is delusional. That turns out not to be the case. America is the most religious country of those studied in the developed world. America also has the biggest problems in terms of things like homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion. This article by Sam Harris puts it this way:

While most Americans believe that getting rid of religion is an impossible goal, much of the developed world has already accomplished it. Any account of a â€œgod geneâ€ that causes the majority of Americans to helplessly organize their lives around ancient works of religious fiction must explain why so many inhabitants of other First World societies apparently lack such a gene. The level of atheism throughout the rest of the developed world refutes any argument that religion is somehow a moral necessity. Countries like Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on Earth. According to the United Nationsâ€™ Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate and infant mortality. Conversely, the 50 nations now ranked lowest in terms of human development are unwaveringly religious. Other analyses paint the same picture: The United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious literalism and opposition to evolutionary theory; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, STD infection and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious superstition and hostility to evolutionary theory, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. Of course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve questions of causality--belief in God may lead to societal dysfunction; societal dysfunction may foster a belief in God; each factor may enable the other; or both may spring from some deeper source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, these facts prove that atheism is perfectly compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil society; they also prove, conclusively, that religious faith does nothing to ensure a societyâ€™s health. Countries with high levels of atheism also are the most charitable in terms of giving foreign aid to the developing world. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is also belied by other indices of charity. Consider the ratio in salaries between top-tier CEOs and their average employee: in Britain it is 24 to 1; France 15 to 1; Sweden 13 to 1; in the United States, where 83% of the population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead, it is 475 to 1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to squeeze easily through the eye of a needle.
In other words, religion is harmful, not helpful. The reason is because God is imaginary and religious delusion is hurting all of us.

Delusion from wiki:

A delusion is commonly defined as a fixed false belief and is used in everyday language to describe a belief that is either false, fanciful or derived from deception. In psychiatry, the definition is necessarily more precise and implies that the belief is pathological (the result of an illness or illness process). As a pathology it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information or certain effects of perception which would more properly be termed an apperception or illusion.

Delusions typically occur in the context of neurological or mental illness, although they are not tied to any particular disease and have been found to occur in the context of many pathological states (both physical and mental). However, they are of particular diagnostic importance in psychotic disorders and particularly in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

From dictionary.com

1.an act or instance of deluding. 2.the state of being deluded. 3.a false belief or opinion: delusions of grandeur. 4.Psychiatry. a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact: a paranoid delusion.

If for some reason you STILL don't think religion is delusion, please watch these youtubes:

April 20, 2008

- many people think that, just because a Christian believes in the Bible, that the Christian is fanatical. That stops them from paying attention to what the Christian has to say, and shrugging it off as mental illness.

Not for any purpose other than establishing where I come from, I wouldn't not be among them who say that. People believe all sorts of things that are passed on to them in a certain light, and when it becomes part of their social realities and world views, to unseat that with another perspective is to try to extricate it from a whole personal investment. This is true of any belief someone is invested in, and that they resist it and/or become irrational in the defense of it is a human emotional thing, not mental illness. They may have lacking knowledge and understanding, but that doesn't make them delusional.

- Christianity is all about moderation. Paul admonished Timothy to do all things in moderation. Ecclesiastes says that there is a time for everything, and a season for all things under Heaven. Christ Himself said we should enter through the narrow gate, because the way is straight and narrow.

Well not entirely in agreement with you there. It depends who's saying it and when. I don't see a consistent message in Christianity. And I don't mean just the Bible, which isn't either, but the whole of the religion. It depends. You have the spiritual visionaries, and you have the political controllers, such as the Apostle Paul for instance. Then when you get to the church itself as an institution, you likewise have that impossible conundrum of the prophets and the politicians.

Only thing I can challenge you on this is to try to recognize that taking what has been evolved, shaped, and molded by this process of prophet and politician into a cannon and orthodoxy, as some sort of finished product delivered by God is both a bit naive, and laced with a healthy dose of modern post-enlightenment Romanticism. That that Bible is a consistent truth is nothing short of Idealism.

Essentially, the Pharisees and Sadducees, like the conservatives and liberals of our day, took the right Way, and tore it in half; each one taking the half that suited them, and mixing it with their own brand of theological and philosophical filler. Then, God was born as Christ, and Christ restored the Way by taking the two halves together to make the true whole (and eliminating the filler from both beliefs).

We are such products of Western thought. This is a top down view, assuming that we start with a finished truth and read it backwards into things and must reconcile them with this truth. I personally find a considerable amount more value and substance in starting from the bottom up! The Jesus movement was itself really not much different that any social/religious reform movement of today. What makes it so special is that it got adopted into the Roman Empire and became a defining face of civilization to carry the Empire forward beyond it's demise. Content wise, it's got some value as do any other reformist movements, but it's not some romantic ideal of ultimate truth.

Does that mean that Conservatives (Christians) and Liberals (Non-Christians) are right, or wrong? Yes, and no. Each and every idea has some facts in it, but not entire truth.

I agree with this to the point that no one has entire truth.

Then, the last part of the task is to try to understand where the authors of the books are coming from. Once you can figure that out, you can understand what they were trying to say, but perhaps couldn't say so efficiently, and get to the truth they proposed.

Well, considering there's no way to really fully grasp what any of those authors meant, due to the fact of language, culture, information, knowledge, etc is forever greatly removed from us, it sort of makes the whole notion of "what God said" null and void. Just as an aside logic argument, it doesn't make the romantic notion that the Bible is divine revelation, much of an act of God. If God were to actually be communicating with man, it would likely not be that way.

It's a dismally bad way for the Almighty God of the Universe to communicate to people he supposedly desperately wants to hear him, and pretty much makes the notion nothing better than either a claim of truth for control of others, or a romantic ideal for those desiring some ultimate truth to be attainable. Delusion? Or is it just romanticism?

Nice to meet you...

Cosmology, Religious Fanatacism, And Insanity

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