Religion is the most hideous invention in the history of Mankind. It makes us create a convoluted mental construct, in which we imagine that we are talking with a deity. This is what children do, and if they do not grow out of it, they will become schizophrenic......This Mental Masturbation consumes a lot of brain cycles and returns almost nothing back to us; our resulting confusion however makes us docile and easily used by the capitalist managers.
The managers are using pictures of Truth to convey their own selfish truths.
@DavidNoel
Exactly! and I am very aware of that!
Please also study mental health if you wish to comment on it. The scenario you describe does not lead to schizophrenia.
I corrected my post, please check it
I was an Angry Young Atheist once. Now I'm an Old Tired Atheist. I don't worry much about religion any more. Just stying alive, and enjoying the company of others, is sufficient.
Very good words. I am going through a stressful time right now and I am using it to get to understand my psyche.
I feel like this word salad could use some croutons.
religion is annoying and how people use it can be awful, but the single most horrible thing ever? seriously? worse than the guillotine? there is only one way to use a guillotine and you have to take it seriously. people who go to church and listen to the music and donate to the church food drive (i'm guessing; i am not christian; i know synagogues have drives for local food shelves) and go home and act like normal people and don't hurt anyone and don't proselytize, or vote based who will reverse roe v wade, and don't tell people they're going to hell, are worse than a guillotine? and that's just ONE example.
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That was beautiful.
Interesting you mention the guillotine … compared to the Spanish garrote it looks relatively benign (Do not google picture for "garrote"!)... Imagine this bloke Jesus would have been decapitated by guillotine … Christians would pray to a guillotine ...
@PontifexMarximus and they'd wear little guillotines around their necks, without a hint of irony.
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@genessa and a sharp blade
Talking Snakes, Walking on Water, Parting the sea, Curing the Blind, Raising the Dead.Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, All Fundamentally pounded into your head as soon as you learn to read. Christians, Jews and Muslins all practice along the same path of indoctrination. Reinforced with fear and trepidation along with various garments of recognition for reinforcement.
ha none of those were meant to be taken literally tho. That is "wisdom hidden from the wise"
I think it Hass to be understood that knowledge was a closely guarded secret back then. The bronze age collapse is largely about the dissemination of knowledge via an alphabet available to the common man, and the priests who made the bronze are just kind of a symbol of that
Vitriolic rhetoric doesn’t present a good argument. Breaking your sentences down, for your reflection, their content comes across as this.
Opinion, speculation, falsehood, incomprehensible statement, generalisation
What are you saying that can be substantiated or denied?
Not sure why a Freudian psychoanalytic illustration has been used.
But it is a haven for the non-thinkers. That is the general happenstance i have come to see. However, I do know some compassionate, thinking individuals who love their Christianity. While i like your statement, I find that generalizations do not work.
Yes, religion and thinking are mutually exclusive.
Am I making generalizations or cause effect relationships. I dated a lady who had a 5 foot tall, 4 foot wide oil painting of Jesus on the wall at the end of her bed. When I first met her I just thought that she was a little quirky, but after several years, she came to my house unannounced at 5:00 in the morning and told me that she had been up all night and that early in the AM Jesus had married the two of us. She said that it was beautiful.....what do you call that.
@DavidNoel I suspect she may have had a mental health issue which is not religio-specific.
“This is what children do, and if they do not grow out of it, they will become schizophrenic”
A false statement. A cousin of mine died in his nineties and he was very religious for his whole life. Never once was he schizophrenic. It only takes one case to disprove a general statement like you have made.
He was also a business owner and was not docile and easily used by “the capitalist managers”.
Such sweeping claims need to be backed up with scientific studies. Do you have sources?
I am talking from my own experience and knowledge; I come from a deeply religious background. My maternal grandmother became blind and bedridden when she was 50, and she spent the remainder of her life (35 years), memorizing the bible. She was out of touch with reality, that is what schizophrenia is. Neurotics create castles in the sky, schizophrenics go live in them.
@DavidNoel Being around a schizophrenic person can be disturbing and difficult for an adult and I would imagine that for a child it would be very traumatic.
I can only say congratulations for enduring and surviving.
Actually there is a connection between schizophrenia and spirituality, but the spirituality is intensified AFTER the onset of schizophrenia. There is a very good book called “Rethinking Madness” that delves deeply into that issue. You would not know it from reading his book, but Paris Williams actually overcame schizophrenia, going on to become a psychiatrist.
@DavidNoel, @kodimerlyn Congratulations for fulfilling your duty and surviving.
@WilliamFleming Can you tell me more about schizophrenia and spirituality.
@WilliamFleming Does schizophrenia lead to spirituality or religiosity?
@DavidNoel according to Williams people create their own mental breakdown as an attempt to escape from life situations that have become unbearably fearful and tense. They reorder their way of perception, creating sights and sounds out of the mass of incoming stimuli that no one else detects. If, at that point they are given support and empathy they generally work through the reorganization of their minds and become healthy, successful, and deeply happy. Williams would label it as spiritual but I think also that many of them become religious in a more traditional sense. Too often society shuns them and they are given harsh medications. Those are the ones who tend to not get better
According to Williams there is a gradient in our lives between radical individualism and total immersion in others. At the first extreme lies loneliness and fear. Immersion with others represents loss of self or death. Those subject to schizophrenia can be anywhere on the gradient but they have little tolerance to change. A healthy, adaptable person can move back and forth along the line between the two extremes without fear.
I can’t really do the book justice—I’m telling you what I remember. It is one of those books that sticks in my mind and I’m glad I read it but I wish I could have read it thirty years earlier—it wasn’t written yet. Because the book is anti-medication I expected that many psychiatrists would be harshly critical, but try as I might, I couldn’t find a single negative review.
@WilliamFleming Thanks for that, I personally feel that the three major disorders (borderline personality, bipolar and schizophrenia) are really just the emotions that we have after we have been traumatized as a child and our emotional development has been stopped. The 3 major types are really used by psychiatrist to give them some idea of what medications to use. What really helps is to treat and heal the wounds (release the energy and information), and get the energy in the trauma flowing again.......You will not read about this because it is hard, takes a long time and requires deep emotional insights.