Thursday, August 23, 2018

Is Faith a mental disorder?

Of course one has to guard against pathologising belief systems or human behaviour in general for that matter - the Jordan Peterson expression 'ideologiclly possessed' comes to mind and the word Islamaphobia as it can all to easily be a way of dismissing ideas without having to give a reason for such dismissal other than it's mad! Yet I have lately decided through Rod Liddle's comments to appropriate Islamaphobia and admit to having the condition myself on the grounds that Islam is so invidious and evil a construct that to fear it is a normal natural human response to evil.

So I do think the question is religious faith a mental disorder a legitimate one, with some caveats. The religious commentator and author Scott Peck observed that most religious beliefs are 'neurotically determined' and of course I think Freud dismissed the whole field of faith in those terms.

One thing is for sure, faith and mysticism are very harmful to human psychology and mental stability. (I make particular reference here to the most brilliant essay on this subject I have ever come across namely Nathaniel Branden's Mysticism versus Mental health in the collection of Ayn Rand's essays The Virtue of Selfishness which I cannot recommend highly enough).

The total corruption of one's cognitive faculties, the epistemological corruption of one's thinking, the metaphysical corruption -faith is a toxic concoction that will impair the mental functioning, lead to passivity of thought, atrophy of the will, fatalism, death of ambition, mistrust of human beings not to say misanthropy, contempt for reason and rational discourse, hostility to all worldly considerations, hatred and excoriation of natural sexual expression, an obsession with other's supposed deviant sexual orientation, a dictatorial authoritarian disposition, a hostility to freedom and liberty, small mindedness, conspiracy mania and near total dismissal and hostility to human invention, creativity, self confidence and human  achievement, militant anti intellectualism, - all and much more, can rightly justifiably and accurately be laid at faith and mysticism's door. Who in their right minds could possibly see any of that as to conducive to mental health?

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