Religion and Mental Illness (Page 3)

Aspect212: Even if something is imaginary, it doesn't prove it is untrue or unreal. Such an argument would be the genetic fallacy. How a person comes to belief says nothing about the validity (or lack) of that belief. Human's are hard wired to believe in God, because we are made in his image.

theHating: This entire thread is a red herring.

Zanjan: Why? There are people with mental illness everywhere you go, at all levels of society, in every organization, and from all walks of life. Not all of them are institutionalized.

There are more psychos walking the streets than healthy people.

cloudygrey33:

Strange how people with dysfunctional brains get labeled and stigmatized while the folks with other "real" health problems get all the empathy and love... At least in western culture.

Something seems (more than) slightly askew with that picture.

At least in the old days we had more facilities for these people to be. Now our streets and prisons are full of the mentally ill. Thanks in large part to Reagan era policies.

Zanjan: " while the folks with other "real" health problems get all the empathy and love"

Only the visible ones. Break a leg and walk around in a cast or cane and everybody is at your side with sympathy and assistance. Not if you have internal disorders, especially chronic ailments. You won't get a lift home.

Yeah, in the old days, they had places for people to be - certain kinds of people. Unwed mothers, blacks, Aboriginals, nuns, monks, the retarded, conscientious objectors, criminals, the aged and dying, men's clubs, and neighbourhoods for the rich, the poor, and a host of ethnic groups.

Everybody had their place, roped off from the rest. I'm glad that's mostly gone since many of us learned to accept natural diversity, realizing that our own qualities enhance the qualities of those around us.

cloudygrey33: I'm talking about the mentally ill specifically... The ones you called "psychos" in your earlier post.
And the lack of empathy and resources to care for people like that. Obviously asylums weren't ideal places... But I think they were still preferable to homelessness and prison which is where most end up these days. What we did is tear down all the places and cut all the programs that gave assistance to those people, and left them with little resources or places to be. But that's compassionate conservatism in action. Typical.

Zanjan: "the lack of empathy and resources to care for people like that"

There's no absence of supports. Many just don't use them, for whatever reason. I understand one has to pay for that in the USA; in Canada, we don't. Then there's the cost of drugs; in the USA, they're really steep. The physical side effects of the drugs are unpleasant, long term use leaves permanent neural damage. That would be 3 legitimate reasons.

You can't force anyone to take the medicine that would help them, especially those who don't believe there's anything wrong with them.

Asylums held people against their will and gave them experimental "treatments" that caused further damage. The reason they were closed is due to humanitarian reforms and legislation of "human rights" laws. No one goes to prison for being mentally unbalanced - they're there because they were convicted of breaking the law.

Those I call psychos are psychologically "disturbed" but they still function. Technically, they're sociopaths and that's a result of spiritual disease. Its a sign of the times.

cloudygrey33: In our town many of the homeless (who also happen to be mentally ill) commit low level crimes on cold nights in the winter just to get out of the cold. Many are in jail for drug offenses because they're self medicating their problems. It isn't as cut and dry as it seems. Many have extreme impulse control issues (because they're ill) and aren't good at regulating their behavior. All I'm saying is it would be nice if there were treatment faciliites these people could be that didn't cost the equivalent of a mortgage on a new house.

Again not condoning or saying some of the tactics of "asylums" were ideal and obviously in some cases they were absolutely awful. There are some programs in place to help people, but certainly not enough. And the problem there again is that some of these people aren't in the position mentally to even get the help because they don't trust people enough to even go to the office and fill out the proper paperwork. It is a real dilemma. I know because I've done work with the very people I'm talking about. I've seen the damage first hand, and when you are in there and see it you realize nothing is as cut and dry as it seems.

There is increasingly nowhere for these people to be other than the streets or the prison system and that is because we threw the baby out with the bath water in the name of "human rights"... You cut and get rid of all of these sort of programs without a replacement plan and that has left people desolate. And the other sad part is that a lot of these people are still being given "experimental treatments" you mention just in a new way--- Via pills and medications that aren't properly vetted or tested with any proper time frame to know the long term impact... Some of these "treatment" pills people are given create far worse issues than the actual problem they go in to get help for. Some of them help too... Again not a black and white thing. There is nuance.

But it is easy to sit back and make judgements when you haven't walked a mile in someone's shoes or gotten to the place of desperation that many of these people are in.

And by the way... What if the spiritual disease is more about the lack of compassion or love for humanity that has permeated the hearts of the "spiritual"... Churches are supposed to be hospitals for the hurting and the broken. Instead they've increasingly become social clubs for a very specific type of person who ticks all the right boxes economically/politically/sexually/even racially in some circumstances ...If you aren't that person, you don't belong. It really is just that simple. But from the safety of that building surrounded by people just like ourselves, it is easy to look out at all the evil people and feel superior, isn't it? Easy to say everyone else has the spiritual disease...

Anywho ... I'll let you have the last word if you want to. Not gonna beat this in to the ground. I'm sure we disagree and that's ok.

Zanjan: I agree with you, in general, about the churches; however, not every church is the same. Some have valuable outreach programs.

We're each setting this issue in the venue of our own country. I, too, have worked with the mentally ill - all different types and levels of function, in non-institutional settings. We have institutions; they're government-funded long term care facilities and one doesn't get into them easily - there's legalities and courts to navigate; they judge the severity of the illness.

You see, in our cities, we have free homeless shelters where people can come in out of the cold and sleep on cots; there are hot showers and several bathrooms, and a soup kitchen offering 3 full hot meals daily. These are all located near the city's downtown core. There's no homeless people in the suburbs - they don't like to go there.

Every person has an income from welfare or disability payments; this is why it's illegal to panhandle. They're not the starving poor, they just have certain needs and we respect those needs because they're functional individuals.

Neverthess, there are some who don't use those facilities because they can't be near people and the cots aren't gender - separated. Some die outside, frozen to death; but, oddly, some make it through - 40 C (-40 F) because they've learned how to do that. It shocks us but is preferable to them. They aren't experiencing sudden distress, running around screaming. If someone did that, police would pick them up and bring them to the hospital.

In rural areas, there are no shelters - special services has set them up in small apartments with support visits or in a local hospital. They sometimes live with a roommate or with family members. There are no homeless rurals, no one camps out on the back streets of the local towns.

I don't think the issue is what we do with the mentally ill; our concern is how to prevent the illness from getting a grip. The biggest problem is spotting the signs and obtaining a correct diagnosis. Anything could happen during that time.

Onyx95: my sins are between me and god, my medical diagnosis is between me and my doctor. You can take your meddling and find a new cause.

Zanjan: Of course they're your own business...until you break the law or cause harm.

bonzono: the mental illness that is religion is certainly a personal one.

The problem arises when people suffering from this mental illness attempt to demonise science and reason - such as Zanjan does. The problem arises when people suffering from this mental illness attempt to insist faith and doctrine are an intellient substitute for reason and fact - start imoposing laws etc. on the basis of their religion - start villifying whole slews of society on the basis of their religion.

Religion is fine if religious people kept their mouths shut, but they insist on opening it and pretending that it's not a demonstrated fact that humans are animals, they insist on using their dogma to justify rejection of sanity, to justify bigotry and homophbia, to justify scaring children with their arbitarily selected god, etc. etc. etc.

By all means, pretend what ever fantasy you want is real in the privacy of your own disrupted mind - as soon as you open your mouth and puke ignorant mythology as if it's fact, deal with people exposing exactly how absurd and dishonest you're being.


you have two solutions.
1. shut your mouth
2. allocate a little time to considering honestly, reasonable, defensibly and intelligently all the hysterical nonsense surrounding yours, and other religions, and figure out exactly how dishonest, unreasonable and indefensibly intelligent you're being.. then move on and be prepared to deal with a real world where mythology is justifiably considered absolute lunacy.

(the 3rd option here is that your demonstrate your arbitrary religion is in fact, defensible, but we've been waiting hundreds of thousands of years for anyone to do that, and the evidence is very, very strongly against it... oops).

Zanjan: "start villifying whole slews of society on the basis of their religion."

You seem to be doing just that.

bonzono: "start villifying whole slews of society on the basis of their religion"
or more completely:
Ah - no, you've failed to interpret that sentence correctly.
"The problem arises when people suffering from this mental illness ... start imoposing laws etc. on the basis of their religion - [and] start villifying whole slews of society on the basis of their religion."

In this case Zan, you are suffering from the mental illness, you (or people like you) are attempting to impose laws on the basis of your mental illness (i.e. religion)

YOU are villifying people on the basis of YOUR religion.

I dont villify people on the basis of their religion. I villify people when they attempt to assert some mythology or misinformation is fact - As one should. When you're imposing nonsense on others as law, then yes, Zan, we have a problem.

katie26r: The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

bonzono: oh god, you're quoting movie lines and thinking you're making an intelligent point?


If only some all-powerful god could pull a trick that could convince the world he DOES exist...

At this point you get to ask 'which god'? because there are 10s of thousands of them, millions even, and all of them - every.. single..one.. including your satan, has EXACTLY the same amount of intelligent basis demonstrating their existence behind them.

So, whatever tricks your devil is pulling - your god... all the gods (including the ones you think dont exist) - are all pulling the same tricks.


If only god could do something, anything at all distinguishable from pure random chance now?

(perhaps get one of these PhDs in to help you figure out how to be honest and reasonable about your nonsense religious claims? - stomping and pouting your food sure doesnt seem to be producing much in the way of a defensible claim for ya. Just saying).

katie26r: I am but it's actually a quote from Charles Baudelaire, thank you google.

I am still waiting for proof God doesn't exist. random chance doesn't cut for most people when it's evident even to those without a PhD that the universe and life are way too complex for any atheist to simply dismiss as an accident.

Satan incidentally is not a God, he is a fallen angel who was kicked out of heaven for egotism.

bonzono: "I am still waiting for proof God doesn't exist."
who's making the claim? and why does that matter anyhow? you're claiming a god exists. great. show your claim is more than desperate puffing. seriously.

"it's evident even to those without a PhD that the universe and life are way too complex for any atheist to simply dismiss as an accident. "
wrong again, it's not evident for them. it's not evident to anyone. there is.. no.. evidence.
I'm happy for you, or for those PhDs to show ANYTHING that is 'evidence'. anything at all.
Just one of them, just one of the thousands produce something that is a reasoned, defensible argument leading to an objective conclusion, based on objective data.
Anything.. just one. go on. off you trot.

"Satan incidentally is not a God, he is a fallen angel who was kicked out of heaven for egotism. "
that's your mythology. you can make it up any way you like. or to make sure you dont pop a neurone, you can just read something that some douche wrote a few thousand years ago, and pretend it's real because you lack the intellectual integrity to think defensibly about it.
The point being, of course, that as is supposedly 'all knowing' (again, just one manifestation of your infinitely variable mythology, you personally might not consider god is) then of course, he'd know exactly what satan was going to do, even before satan apparently existed.
it's just what 'all' means, in 'all knowing'.

katie26r: I have shown you the evidence, you ignored it. The atheist position is circular, if atheists ignore the complexity and design clearly visible in the universe and life then they are rejecting reason and science.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

bonzono: "The atheist position is circular"
Ah yes, the merits of a substandard education is you can actually weaponise ignorance.
no, katie, the atheist position is nothing more than 'i dont worship a god'. That's it. nothing else. that is literally the sum total of the atheist position. Atheists can be palm readers, they can be - and in fact are in some cases, even religious (i know this is going to blow your tiny mind, but atheism is about god worshippin - religions that dont have gods therefore, are atheist religions, 'k?) You're going to have to learn the meanings of the words you use, before you use them.

"I have shown you the evidence, you ignored it."
then
"You ignore the complexity and design clearly visible in the universe "
I see, so you pointed to a .. thing.. and said 'look, it's complex, therefore god'?

See, katie, you've done nothing more intelligent than the following.
"huh, that's a complicated thing.. I cant make complicated things and I'm super duper smart, so it must be REALLY complicated.. too complicated to occur naturally (and I'm SO smart i know it cant possibly be 'natural' right?)... so hmmm, i wonder how that complicated thing came into existence? i dunno.. I'll make up a thing called a god that makes complicated things... hey wow!, I just have proof for the thing I just invented!"

The reason that's not proof hun, is because as you can see, your argument is circular.
you've used your observation to justify the invention of a 'creator'.. and then used the existence of the thing to now claim existence of the thing you've invented.

You invented a god to make the thing you cant understand, and now the existence of that thing you dont understand is apparently proof for the god you just invented... ooops! Very... circular.

so no, making up an god to explain a gap in your ability to understand something does not a proof make. it simply kicks the idiot can down moron road- you're still to demonstrate your god can do, and does these things. and that, my droog, requires more than foot stomping and pouting.

The closest this kind of intellectually irreverent brainfart gets to rational thought is as an hypothesis. and it's an astonishingly pathetic one at that.

"design clearly visible in the universe "
Do first year biology, and tell me anything in the human body that indicates good design. It's not hard.. assuming you're in a country with access to functional education.

See, kaitie, people like you puke this nonsensical fluff up all the time: 'oh but it's sooo "complex"!' - as if complexity is something even close to an objective viewpoint. 'oh but there is design SO CLEARLY in the universe' - what design? what, exactly, is designed? if while you're answering it, tell me what it's designed to DO.

Great, humans are designed.
Come tell me how well humans are designed when you've given birth...or..just after you've nearly choked on something, sprained a tendon, stood up too quickly and become dizzy, or in fact, simply lifted something up and put your back out.
it's breathtaking people are so incredibly myopic and believe the human body is not a clanking heap of poorly assembled systems which only barely work together at all, and doesn't resemble a hodgepodge that was thrown together by pure trial and error....
...which is exactly how it WAS assembled... trial and error.
(again, something you'd not know if you came from a country with a disastrously poor access to functional education)

katie26r: Yep whatever.

I got to your "substandard education" then stopped reading, after that you were talking to yourself.

bonzono:

That's fine katie. You're the one who's made up an imaginary god and pretends it's real.
Like a lonely child who is otherwise starved for attention and information.

Religion did nothing for humanity for thousands of years. It's only after we started to get the wherewithal to dispense with that idiocy that we'd stopped hacking at each other with bits of metal blacksmithed in the middle of muddy villages.

Think about it katie, religion stymied humanity for THOUSANDS of years. It was only after people started to ask questions that we've managed to get beyond.

Enjoy your dependence on the science, fact, reason, logic and information that you pretend isnt there. People like me work to keep your worthless mythology alive, while people like you struggle to pretend your worthless religion isn't in fact. worthless.

The good news is that, as I said, your religion is dying in all first world western countries - including USA actually. The only places where religion continues to flourish are those with very poor social organisation, structure and - of course - poor access to education.

YOU katie, and people like you are the fly in the ointment. We're picking you out, and flicking you away.

katie26r: The imaginary God that millions more people believe in you mean, rather than the atheists nihilistic philosophy. Atheism as not really taken off as it, I guess believing in nothing but one's own ego doesn't appeal to most people.

As for a child "and he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" Matthew 18:3.

Zanjan: If the world is broken, why haven't atheists been able to mend it? If people are ignorant, unintelligent, or mentally ill, why haven't atheists succeeded in alleviating their misery?

Angry Beaver: 𝓟𝓸𝓼𝓽 𝓓𝓮𝓵𝓮𝓽𝓮𝓭