Religion; hypnosis, delusion, illness?

--amadeus--

We all know that the human mind is powerful and incompletely understood. We also know that it has a huge capacity for deception and confusion.

Religious rituals have always struck me as being close to hypnotic in many ways. The very nature of a ritual involves repetition and many religious events have other elements that are (coincidently or by design) conductive to a suggestive or semi-hypnotic state - the use of pungent smells like incense to invoke pavlovian reactions, the repetitive movement, the chants, many take place in semi-darkened rooms, etc. This allows the attender to fall into a suggestible state and so many of the more outlandish events - speaking in tongues, exorcism, moving statues or whatever - can be explained away quite easily. In essence it all can seem a bit strange (to many a bit silly) but basically harmless.

But there is a line that many of teh more devout seem to cross. I'm not talking about the "ordinary" religious follower, or even the "fly a plane into a building" extremist.

What I'm thinking about specifically are those who claim to "speak" to God directly. This claim comes in various forms - often the chosen one will talk about "truth being revealed" and teh need to "listen to your heart" (I have, it goes "da-bump, da-bump"). They will talk of the joy of having Gods (or Allah or whoever) word revealed. There are books available where grown adults discuss angels and how to communicate with them. There are grown men and women who claim to consult (and I assume get guidance from) God on every major decision in thier lives.

Now if I said that I don't change jobs without first consulting Jimi Hendrix I would be locked up. Sam Harris has said "The President of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. Now, if he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ludicrous or more offensive.". Hearing voices in your head is at best delusional and at worst a possible indicator of severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia.

Now in the grand scheme of things if people have conversations with God but continue to function as "normal" law abiding citizens then what harm? It's no worse than having a furry fetish or whatever. But many of the people who claim this experience have positions of responsibility and many more push the concept of a dialogue with God as perfectly normal (several of my flatmates in college attended a prayer group where they all spoke to thier respective guardian angels and it was seen as no stranger than talking to a family member, for example).

So faced with this delusion - in real life or on an internet BB - what do you / should you do? Should you ignore it? Point out the absurdity of the claim ("an omnipotent, all knowing being helps you pick your socks in the morning???")? Ignore it / them? Try and argue them down with logic and reason?

This isn't an attempt at starting a flame war - there have been a few posters who have popped up here and there and I genuinely feel that they needed professional psychiatric help. But to say that would be "insulting their beliefs" so I'm curious as to what others think and how they react when they are confronted by views that they consider beyond the bounds of reality / sanity

studiorat

Regarding the first point. A useful analogy I find, is the fact that all our eyes actually see is about the size of our thumb-nail at arms length. Our brain fills in the rest to give us the full picture. It doesn't seem like it but it is in fact true. So all we think we see or know isn't in fact the case.

I'll attest to the hypnotic effect of religious ritual, meditation, music and chanting and no-doubt it has it's uses. I think we do it because it is enjoyable. And we do it, because it allows us to "step outside of ourselves" and feel more at one with the environment around us. I believe it's called a unitary state.

“The overcoming of the barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystical achievement”

Andrew Newberg, a physician and Eugene d’Aquili, a professor of psychiatry have done much work on the processes. Including much attaching of electrodes to the heads of nuns and Tibetan monks.

From relaxing in a tub after a hard day to the most profound prayer, the brain’s complex functions, evolved over millions of years, make possible this continuum of unitary states that culminate in the deepest religious experiences. Throughout human prehistory and history mystical techniques were intuitively devised by shamans, saints, gurus, dervishes and spiritual masters -- ways like prayer, chanting, meditation or ritual -- to trigger the process of deafferentation, leading to various degrees of unitary states, in turn perpetuating human spirituality.

Basically they identified specific areas of the brain that were stimulated during different forms of prayer and meditation and then examined the function of these areas in terms of issues experienced by people with damage to those parts of the brain.

On another point, why we believe certain things. William James' "Will to believe" is an interesting doctrine on the subject of why we believe or have faith. He justifies God as a hypothesis without evidence and verifies that by what fruits the belief brings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_to_Believe_Doctrine

In order to usefully interpret the realm of common, shared experience and history, we must each make certain "over-beliefs" in things which, while they cannot be proven on the basis of experience, help us to live fuller and better lives.

I really would love to know if deeply religious people have an extra internal monologue or do they just see a truth as that which suits their "beliefs" and the matching of these truths to be an affirmation of some sort.

CDfm

I can see it from your viewpoint.

Maybe you are looking at it the wrong way.

I took an advanced drivers course a few years back and the instructor talked about talking thru the road. Many drivers talk a route as away to keep alert. Little children do it when playing games etc to conjure up the reality of a situation.Others sleep on a problem.

So if a person evaluates a situation with reference to their God on the basis that it helps them to evaluate the pros and cons in a totally honest way that they otherwise cant do. What is so terrible about that. While it may not be empirical by your standards but it has methodoligy.

So if you look at this internal dialogue with God as using God as a tool to totally honestly weigh up the pros and cons of a situation without bias-then it is a lot more positive then you make out and is very logical.

bnt

It can be a bit disconcerting to see someone you know, who seems "normal" and sensible, suddenly start talking about his/her religious beliefs. You don't want to start sticking labels on them, or insult them directly or indirectly. I got in to a discussion with a friend of mine, a qualified engineer, while visiting him a few years ago: I wasn't really prepared for it, but it still ended with him falling back on the old "well, I have faith, and I can't explain it" position.

At the risk of stating the obvious: I think one problem that we face, when discussing religion with believers, is that we tend to see religion as something they do, separate from who they are. The subtext there is that if people can see that they're doing something they can't justify, they can just stop doing it, and still be themselves.

However, if people strongly identify with their religion, you can't attack the religion without seeming to attack the people themselves. They can't just stop doing it, because it's not just something they do, it's part of who they seem themselves to be. Islam is a classic example of this, since being Muslim doesn't just mean that you follow the religious practices of Islam, it means you subscribe to a wider Islamic world view that includes all sorts of things we Westerners don't normally associate with religions: banking, personal hygiene, diet, government, etc.

On the question of religions as delusions, well, I use an analogy from the computer world: garbage in = garbage out. A child brought up in a religion is fed a controlled subset of information about the world, the subset that indoctrinates them in that religion. A Muslim child is taught that Jews are evil and must be exterminated, and will believe this to be true, despite never actually meeting a Jewish person. The person grows up and lives in the Gaza Strip, watching only Al Jazeera... I don't know if "delusion" is the right word: I see a life only half-lived, stunted, unprepared for the real world: cannon fodder. :mad:

CDfm

bnt wrote: »

I got in to a discussion with a friend of mine, a qualified engineer, while visiting him a few years ago: I wasn't really prepared for it, but it still ended with him falling back on the old "well, I have faith, and I can't explain it" position.

Its a mystery - but your friend would be equally unable to comprehend your unbelief.

Im a believer and Christian.- and philosophically I would have a lot in common with unbelievers in terms that we are Westerners but not with Muslims or Hindus etc. I used to find existentionalist writings very thought provoking.

What type of discussion did you have with your engineer friend and are you still friends. Are you still friends?

philologos

Or could we argue that most healthy people on the face of the earth actually have some form of religion, and that those who do not are deluded, ill, etc. However, I generally don't think it's a reasonable start point in the first place.

CDfm: weren't many Christians not existentialists, such as Soren Kierkegaard?

Húrin

--amadeus-- wrote: »

Religious rituals have always struck me as being close to hypnotic in many ways. The very nature of a ritual involves repetition and many religious events have other elements that are (coincidently or by design) conductive to a suggestive or semi-hypnotic state

Lots of things both secular and religious are conducive to a suggestive or semi-hypnotic state. Concerts, for example.

- the use of pungent smells like incense to invoke pavlovian reactions, the repetitive movement, the chants, many take place in semi-darkened rooms, etc. This allows the attender to fall into a suggestible state

This is patronising. This is far from universal in religion. Most protestant denominations wouldn't involve any of the above in their rituals.

I'm no expert at the reasoning behind these rituals, and neither are you. I imagine it may have the aim of providing a contrast with the mundane material world, to help tap into the metaphysical world beyond. This is a tendency that runs through nearly all world religions.

and so many of the more outlandish events - speaking in tongues, exorcism, moving statues or whatever - can be explained away quite wishfully.

Corrected. :pac:
You can't credibly explain away phenomena like speaking in languages you do not know as the result of smelling some incense in a dark room. Additionally, to my knowledge the denomination whose believers seek the phenomenon of speaking in tongues the most, the Pentecostals, do not use incense, darkened rooms or any other kind of sensory tricks.

What I'm thinking about specifically are those who claim to "speak" to God directly. This claim comes in various forms - often the chosen one will talk about "truth being revealed"

If God does not want to communicate with his people there is no purpose to us knowing about him.

and teh need to "listen to your heart" (I have, it goes "da-bump, da-bump").

Heart is used as a metaphor. How drily unimaginative are you?

They will talk of the joy of having Gods (or Allah or whoever) word revealed. There are books available where grown adults discuss angels and how to communicate with them. There are grown men and women who claim to consult (and I assume get guidance from) God on every major decision in thier lives.

I suppose it's unthinkable that these people are as intelligent and perceptive as you, and they are talking about something real?

Now if I said that I don't change jobs without first consulting Jimi Hendrix I would be locked up.

No you wouldn't. You would be looked on as weird because Jimi Hendrix was a man who didn't claim to be God, and hence did nothing to prove that he is worth trying to consult after his death.

Sam Harris wrote:

Now, if he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency.

How do you know that? Basing entire arguments on things that "would" happen is flawed. Sam Harris is an alarmist. He thinks that the 9/11 attacks demonstrate that we need to get rid of ALL RELIGION.

Hearing voices in your head is at best delusional and at worst a possible indicator of severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia.

What gives you the authority to say that? As usual, an atheist pretends to have the objective view.

Now in the grand scheme of things if people have conversations with God but continue to function as "normal" law abiding citizens then what harm? It's no worse than having a furry fetish or whatever. But many of the people who claim this experience have positions of responsibility

People who are of your view also have positions of responsibility.

and many more push the concept of a dialogue with God as perfectly normal

If there is a God, then dialogue with him is normal. It sometimes takes more mystical forms than something resembling a spoken conversation. So interpret the term "dialogue" in an expanded sense.

So faced with this delusion

So faced with a jumped conculsion...

- in real life or on an internet BB - what do you / should you do? Should you ignore it? Point out the absurdity of the claim ("an omnipotent, all knowing being helps you pick your socks in the morning???")? Ignore it / them? Try and argue them down with logic and reason?

Drop the pretence to objective authority. Your point of view is pretty much a uniquely western one that has developed in the past two centuries of a culture under the influence of the scientific method of Descartes. What Descartes probably did not intend was that his scientific method was to be universalised into all areas of life, and that is why we have such intellectual intolerance and brutality as expressed above.

Húrin

Jakkass wrote: »

Or could we argue that most healthy people on the face of the earth actually have some form of religion, and that those who do not are deluded, ill, etc. However, I generally don't think it's a reasonable start point in the first place.

CDfm: weren't many Christians not existentialists, such as Soren Kierkegaard?

yes, he was, as was the author of Ecclesiastes.

bnt wrote: »

It can be a bit disconcerting to see someone you know, who seems "normal" and sensible, suddenly start talking about his/her religious beliefs.

He is normal and sensible. What is not normal and sensible is to brand the search for the answers to metaphysical questions as illegitimate, or deluded. To do that is to deny a part of humanity.

At the risk of stating the obvious: I think one problem that we face, when discussing religion with believers, is that we tend to see religion as something they do, separate from who they are. The subtext there is that if people can see that they're doing something they can't justify, they can just stop doing it, and still be themselves.

Correct. Most seriously religious people (i.e. not just 'ethnic Catholics', etc) do see their religion as a core part of their identity. Well done on noticing this. Similarly, many atheists see their 'rational', 'scientific' world-view as an important part of their identity, and that is why they so often think themselves to be in possession of objective truth.

MrPudding

Húrin wrote: »

What gives your the authority to say that? As usual, an atheist pretends to have the objective view.

Go to you doctor and tell him you hear voices in your head that tell you, amongst other things, that homosexuals are evil. Don't mention god and see what happens.

MrP

CDfm

MrPudding wrote: »

Go to you doctor and tell him you hear voices in your head that tell you, amongst other things, that homosexuals are evil. Don't mention god and see what happens.

MrP

Some christians have a problem with homosexuality but its not limited to christians and in the real world you get weird coalitions.For example some feminists attached themselves to the far right in the US in opposition to pornography.

Its much debated and I imagine contentious in Catholicism because of the "celibate" or unmarried priesthood.

That doesnt mean that it does not preach tolerance or understanding.

I have never heard a priest describe homosexuals as evil. The Catholic view is based on scripture and "natural law"- but I dont think as a debate it has been finalised.Finalising something in the RCC can take centuries unlike some churches that operate "democratically" and you might say adopt approaches for popular support.

However -the debate is coloured by the "celibate" priesthood and that is what I imagine causes a skewed debate.We are told in the NT not to judge. So I imagine many interpretations until recently have been very harsh and causes stereotyping on both sides.Unfortunate but its how it is.

philologos

MrPudding wrote: »

Go to you doctor and tell him you hear voices in your head that tell you, amongst other things, that homosexuals are evil. Don't mention god and see what happens.

MrP

That's just proof to me that you do not understand the Christian POV on homosexuality.

If we have all fallen into sin (see Romans 3:23) or my signature actually, we are all just as "evil" as eachother.

The question is what are we going to do about it to restore our relationship with God.

CDfm

Jakkass wrote: »

That's just proof to me that you do not understand the Christian POV on homosexuality.

If we have all fallen into sin (see Romans 3:23) or my signature actually, we are all just as "evil" as eachother.

The question is what are we going to do about it to restore our relationship with God.

I think the word evil is bandied about too readily. In theoligy it has a lot of contexts in the same way that Jamicans have loads of words for bananas and Alaskans many for snow.

Original sin does not have guilt attached to it. In the Hebrew I believe it was a moral phrase about morality borrowed from somewhere like archery. I cant remember. But my point is that using words in a general sence that have a theological meaning is like trying to explain wireless upload and download speeds to me. I know they are there but.......................dont waste your time.

Isnt easier to say Homosexuals are not evil or that the churchs understanding is that its not moral. I think its viewed like fornication or sex outside marriage.

Zombrex

You are slightly missing the point :rolleyes:

Go to the doctor and tell him that a voice in your head informed you that a man you have read about rose from the dead and started walking around the place. Don't mention God. See what happens.

CDfm

Wicknight wrote: »

You are slightly missing the point :rolleyes:

Go to the doctor and tell him that a voice in your head informed you that a man you have read about rose from the dead and started walking around the place. Don't mention God. See what happens.

Being a man of science the Doctor will tell me not to tell anyone and hide the book. Wouldnt want anyone ruining his business doncha know.

However -Wicknight - how long have you been describing thought as voices in your head -us Christians are used to allegory but unbelievers are not as tolerant. I would keep that quiet if i were you.

Mena

My brother in law constantly had these private chats with "god". Luckily they've now diagnosed bipolar and it can be managed.

*runs for cover*

philologos

Wicknight wrote: »

You are slightly missing the point :rolleyes:

Go to the doctor and tell him that a voice in your head informed you that a man you have read about rose from the dead and started walking around the place. Don't mention God. See what happens.

Whoever said that most Christians interact with God through voices in the first place?

MrPudding

Jakkass wrote: »

That's just proof to me that you do not understand the Christian POV on homosexuality.

So there is only one Christian point of view on homosexuality? Besides, my point was not about homosexuality per se.

CDfm wrote: »

Some christians have a problem with homosexuality but its not limited to christians and in the real world you get weird coalitions.For example some feminists attached themselves to the far right in the US in opposition to pornography.

Anyway, the point of my post was to point out that if you went to your doctor complaining about voices in your head the response may not be to your liking. Perhaps the voices told me everything I read in a book was true and that the world was going to end. Is that better?

Jakkass wrote: »

If we have all fallen into sin (see Romans 3:23) or my signature actually, we are all just as "evil" as eachother.

I know, I have read the thread. Homosexuals are fine as long as they pretend to be straight. Got it.

CDfm wrote: »

I have never heard a priest describe homosexuals as evil.

Cool. As a matter of interest, how long did it take for you to hear the opinion of every priest on the subject of homosexuality?

MrP

CDfm

Mena wrote: »

My brother in law constantly had these private chats with "god". Luckily they've now diagnosed bipolar and it can be managed.

*runs for cover*

Mena -its great that your brother-in-law has had a diagnosis and can be treated. Didnt mean to joke about mental illness and I hope it didnt offend. The atheists started it -they are an insensitive bunch.

CDfm

MrPudding

CDfm wrote: »

The atheists started it -they are an insensitive bunch.

CDfm

Well of course we are. We don't have the benefit of being told how to behave by a bunch of self important sycophants using a 2000 year old book the origins of which, though it may not be admitted, are 100% known.

MrP

CDfm

MrPudding wrote: »

Well of course we are. We don't have the benefit of being told how to behave by a bunch of self important sycophants using a 2000 year old book the origins of which, though it may not be admitted, are 100% known.

MrP

I think Mena posted just to point out that delusions are different to beliefs.

I was just teasing when I posted that atheists were insensitive to mental illness but religous belief and faith is dintinguishable from an illness and delusions etc.

We do believe in that 2000 year old book as evidence for our beliefs.

Húrin

If anyone expects me to directly respond to them, they had better post a reply to my post that is not a borderline ad hominem, straw man, or any other kind of trolling.