When you supposedly have a relationship with God!

 

Religion is that which tries to reach God or create a sense of divine. Christianity is held not to be a religion in that sense for it is about God reaching down to humanity. It is not about giving doctrines and rules to help people rise above their dark sides. Religion that does that is about control. That is clear enough.

But Christianity still has to use doctrine first and then you try to reach God through it. A religion with one dogma or a million is still dogma. Saying it is all God is just another way of man reaching for God.

 

Many religions such as Christianity allege that they are about having a relationship with God.  If religion is delusion then the God bit is where most delusion lies.  The rest is perhaps an offshoot of such delusion.

 

It is difficult to call Christianity a religion when it claims to be not a mere list of things to believe and do and things to avoid. It claims to be a relationship between humankind and God. Religion implies reaching up to God like the Tower of Babel. Relationship implies that if we cannot relate to God then he can make the first move and start a relationship with us. Christianity holds that God did the work to connect with us and it is not the other way around. A creature full of sin cannot really find or earn its way to God. A beetle cannot work itself up so that it becomes the same to you as your brother. Same idea except the mismatch with man and God is bigger – endless. Only God can build the bridge. Only people can choose to use the bridge.

 

What do the experts say?

"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires" Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1933.

"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis" Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 1927.

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. ... If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity "Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 1939.

 

Love does not have a completely good side. It is about protecting the loved one and by implication you are resolving to destroy whoever or whatever threatens to hurt that person. It is about discriminating against yourself by agreeing to be hurt so somebody else might not be hurt. It does not matter if God cannot be hurt. Even though God cannot be hurt loving God means you treat him as if he can be and hurt badly. The more you are to love God the more resolved you are to be to destroy whatever hurts him. Loving God creates the fear of what others will do to God. The more you are trying to or succeeding in loving God the more intense the fear will get. The religious say that God has put fear in us for a reason so that we might recognise and desire and battle evil. Fear and love are incompatible. Those who love do not love as much as they say. Some flip-flop between what they see as love and outright fear. The bad side of love could be why religions of love lead to violence and are weak in handling violent situations and virtually make cruelty seem okay. Loving God and thinking you get his love are not good either.
 
If God's worthiness of your love and his reality can be reasonably shown then there are problems as we have seen. But imagine how much worse they will be if you don't care enough if God and his love are true or not. The more your God is a psychological projection or an invention the worse it is and it is outright evil to be religious in such a circumstance!

Going into a relationship of any kind is you giving the other responsibility for your wellbeing as far as possible and as far as you allow. A relationship then involves self-love. If you give God responsibility for you then what if there is no God? Someone is responsible for that and it is you and you alone!!  But it is grossly unfair then in itself and in terms of the risks to give a fiction God the responsibility of your happiness and spiritual wellbeing.  And there is humility in having a relationship with a human being and loving yourself and you will grow but if you imagine the greatest and most wonderful being of all is linked to your self love then that is not faith but arrogance. 

 

SAINT OR INSANE? http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2015/06/saint-or-insane-2/  

The Question - is a person sane who thinks God is talking to her or him?

 

Man must be wiser than God when man is able to decide if God is talking to him and if others are able to decide the man is right. There is no real humility in a prophet no matter how well humility is simulated. If you want power over people and the feeling of power, there is no greater ego buzz than getting people to think you are God's spokesperson.

God and religion are simply masks. Man cannot claim to be God so man does the next best thing - claim to be inspired to speak for God. Though we are not to condemn something just because it can be abused, we can condemn religion for the harm it has done because religion is an abuse. Let me explain.

Hearing a voice does not mean it is God’s and only God can know if he is really speaking. Even the person who hears cannot be sure but can only guess. If anyone claims to be hearing the voice of God and giving his message to others he is a liar. To think that you don’t know where the voice comes from means it is not from you is arrogant. It is, “I don’t know where this inspiration comes from so it comes from God.” It makes no sense. By spreading your message you inspire a worse arrogance in others. The arrogance takes the form of "X has a voice in his heart or head and doesn’t know where it comes from therefore it is from God." That is not logical. The more your faith in a prophet is based on hearsay the worse the problem gets.

Is morality morality because God says so or is morality a standard that does not depend on God? In practice, the believer acts as if morality is created by God. The danger with that is that it opens the door to people who give evil commands in the name of God. If moral rules are merely invented by God then a prophet can command genocide in the name of God. Indeed Moses and Joshua did just that in the Bible. Jesus himself gave out to the Jews for not obeying God's law to kill people who cursed their parents.
 
God by definition should be infinite good - any other definition is faulty. If God fails to give us sufficient evidence for his existence, then clearly there is no God. A God that loves us will not hide himself completely. Agnosticism cannot be a state of being because if you weigh "There is a God", against, "There is no God." you have to favour one more then the other. It cannot be 50/50. The theist has to develop belief and so theism is not a state of being.

Posted 2013
 
God by definition is goodness and has personal characteristics so that we can have a relationship with him. God by definition is impossible and it is immoral to care what he wants. Should we help a sick baby because God asks us to or should we just do it for we want to help the baby? Religion says goodness is a personal being - God. So we are to do it callously for God. We are evil if we do it to help the baby and not because God wants it. Goodness is not a person. Even if God did not exist, goodness would still exist. It would be good that there are no people to suffer. God does not make goodness. The standard is there whether he accepts it or not. You do not need God to be good. God is not even a help. Religion dilutes a lot of the nastiness but that does not make religion good but makes it charmingly disingenuous.

 

DELUSION - WHY IS RELIGION NOT CONSIDERED A DELUSION BY MOST THERAPISTS?

 

A delusion is about what you believe or think is true not about what you perceive.  If you believe the fridge is full of flies and argue that they are invisible or there is something wrong with your eyes so that you cannot see them that is delusion.  If you see the flies when they are not there that is hallucination not delusion.

 

It could be argued that certain delusions are also hallucinations.  You can hallucinate that your eyes are not perceiving the flies that your belief tells you are there.

 

There are no rules with psychosis.  It can take any form whatsoever.  So in theory a person being religious might be a symptom even though a person can be religious in the same way without having any psychosis.

 

Why can't a psychosis trigger a delusion so that you can believe something that might be true but not because you really think it is true but because of an illness?  Sometimes a psychosis accidentally lines up with reality but it is still psychosis.  If the information given to you by the victim matches the truth that does not mean it is not psychotic.  The cause is still a mental illness.  A psychosis can tell you the truth though this is usually by accident.  A psychosis may be able to torment the person internally without anybody else being aware of it.

 

A psychosis has complicated causes and delusions can contribute to it.  They can empower and prolong a psychosis even if they do not cause it.  They could be the one thing that tips your illness over the precipice into psychosis.

 

A delusional belief will not lessen or evaporate when disproven. This immunity to anything that shows it is silly or risky or wrong is the main evidence that it is indeed a delusion.  The better the evidence the bigger the delusion.  When a delusion contests something that is known for certain it is very obvious that the person is not well.  It can be harder with matters that are less certain.

 

We can be sure that there are many people suffering from delusions but we do not have the insight and the means to tell that they are.  If we are to take a guess then we must hold that those people definitely include those who have supernatural and magical beliefs.  If such beliefs are not delusions then what is?

 

Why is religious belief not classed as a religious delusion that takes professional help to get out of?

 

Sometimes it is when it gets too strong and takes over a person's life.  The main answer is that if a person who has no interest in religion suddenly starts claiming visions of God or to be God or to be hearing God's voice or sets about to become an evangelist that is too contradictory to what they believed just before.  If it is contradictory not just to what they believe but to what they know it is even worse. 

 

Some forms of delusion are considered to be illnesses for they go too far.  If somebody, religionist or atheist, goes into a nuclear bunker to hide for he or she thinks nuclear annihilation is only a half an hour away that person needs urgent help.  What if the person says that God is about to kill us all?  Who is the biggest delusional - the believer in God or the atheist?  It does not matter.

 

The believer in the supernatural should in fact have a bigger list of possible delusions to get afflicted with than the atheist!  The atheist should be more treatable.  You can help her revisit her atheist beliefs and wisdom to get out of the delusion.

 

IF NOT REGARDED AS DELUSION IS IT SUSPECTED AS POSSIBLY DELUSIONAL?

 

If therapists won't commit to saying religion is always a delusion, it is certainly true to say they suspect it is delusional when faith is strong.

 

Parable: "John meets beautiful Miriam for two minutes.  He does not really know her but feels as if he does.  After that he claims she is the one person he loves and that he and she will have their compartment in Heaven together for all eternity.  He claims her soul is reaching out to him perhaps without her even realising it.  It is giving him grace and he feels he is a more forgiving person and feels at peace in his soul."  Therapists will say that this is a man who is not right in the head.  It may be presumed though that his problem is of a nature that it is not up to a therapist to fix but for him to hopefully grow out of it.  The therapist cannot do much for John has no reality check.  Nothing can prove him wrong.

 

Parable: "John hears of a wonderful God. He does not really know him but feels as if he does.   After that he claims God is the one person he loves and that he and God will be forever together in Heaven for all eternity.  He claims God's soul is reaching out to him.  It is giving him grace and he feels he is a more forgiving person and feels at peace in his soul."  The exact same problems occur as with Miriam and how can we be expected to believe he is right in the head?

 

Delusional relationships touch the core of what a person is about.  A person who imagines a relationship should be wheeled to the therapist faster than the person who feels that they have a tumour on their face that is not there.

 

If John starts to follow Miriam about he will be asked to take professional help.  That is not fair for what if he starts to pray the rosary every day and go to Mass every day for that is following God about?  Delusion leads to delusion the same way as a mistake in a long mathematical equation leads to nonsense.  We cannot wait until the person starts doing something to somebody else or digging a pit of more delusion for themselves before taking action.

 

To look at something normal but slightly unusual and say it could be a sign to you from God or the universe or something else looks minor but in fact you are claiming that something is communicating with you.  To say it is a sign is terrible but to say it could be is risky.  You put your reality detectors in danger.  It is also arrogant to argue that something that may not be a communication is in fact a God or something tampering with nature and controlling it - all of it for everything depends on everything else and all things effect each other - just so that you can GUESS at a message.

FINAL THOUGHTS

 

A relationship conducted through hearsay and your internal notions which are like self-induced hearsay is not a relationship and the idea of a God as in moral being is mad.  Those who get messages from a moral God are indeed insane.