No logically you are either blocking a construct of the mind from something totally internal OR you are blocking the ability to sense something external.
Again what you suggest is pretty much brainwashing through drugs.
But hang on a second… we do actually treat psychological disturbances, including hallucinations, with therapies that include drugs. Shouldn’t we do this?
Perhaps, but it would be a case by case basis, and one has to be very careful in forcing it on someone, especially when their hallucination was a visit by a angel telling them to spread love of God to man.
No, I propose curing a disorder of the mind; hallucinations in this case. You just don’t want to admit that your precious spirits are nothing more than a delusion; they would vanish if a cure for hallucinations was applied, because that’s all they are, and that’s all they’ve ever been. There’s no need for any “brainwashing”, just a fix for whatever is broken.
Why "especially ? There’s no reason, beyond the power of the religious, to consider seeing an angel any less insane than seeing a talking frog or your fingers turning into worms.
What harm is in this message of love? Should people be ‘cured’ of beneficial traits? For that matter should homosexuals be cured?
OK, let’s say the talking frog proclaimed a message of universal love and brotherhood - should a person suffering delusions of seeing/hearing the frog, be cured of them (assuming a cure is possible)?
The “message of love” is, at best, the sugar coating on the avalanche of hate and madness that is religion. The only difference that might come from preaching love is that the believers might bother to claim that they are doing it for their victim’s own good when they tyrannize, assault and kill them.
No, and no. Hallucinations, at least those that you believe are real, are not beneficial. And homosexuality isn’t a disease, so there’s nothing to “cure”; you might as well “cure” a taste for apples. It’s a subjective preference, not a delusion like a hallucination is.
Yes. First, if the message isn’t able to stand without a delusion to back it, it isn’t worthwhile. And second, there’s nothing admirable about “universal love and brotherhood”; some people are scum, and some are your enemy and will use an overture of friendship to attack you, among other problems. Universal love is no saner than universal hatred.
And there’s no reason to assume that the imaginary frog won’t suddenly tell you to forget about love and start gutting babies instead. Delusions aren’t required to be consistant or moral.
It was meant to be a question for kanicbird, but thanks.
The last I heard, you might want to look it up, according to the Psychiatric Foundation people who hear voices and see visions are considered mentally ill unless these voices and visions come from God, then they are not mentally ill.
How do they determine whether the voices are coming from God, or if the patient merely thinks they are?
This tells me more about the sway religion has over the members of the Psychiatric Foundation than it does about the legitimacy of voices and visions from “God”. ‘All delusions are bad, except my delusions.’ :rolleyes:
I will keep in mind that if I ever go insane, I should refer to my worm-fingers and talking frogs as “God”, so as not to be restricted by the establishment from carrying out nefarious actions based on their random advice. (If god can be a burning bush or a pilliar of fire, then he certainly can be an anthropomorphic amphibian, right?)
Should a distinction be made here between people who repeatedly claim to speak directly with God or other supernatural beings, or those who are profoundly moved by an experience even they claim was a singular, one-time event?
I’ll admit I’m a little depressed about the direction of this thread. Not only has it taken the relatively interesting question raised in the OP and reduced it to the usual shouting match over the existence of God, but it now has some folks advocating what I have to assume is the forcible injestion of drugs to cure those we see as deviant. A strange argument coming from those who think religion is “an avalanche of hate and madness” whose effect on the conversion of believers is to “tyrannize, assault and kill them.”
That distinction may be warranted depending on other factors involved.
I can’t justify the irrational hate of religion displayed on this board other than maybe this is a sign of mental problems itself. Normal people just do not display this degree of hate constantly. Holding hate is not smart because it doesn’t bother the hated at all, but causes the one hating many emotional problems.
That is a good question. We are talking about a personal experience, and have only the say of the one experiencing. I would suggest observing the behavior of the individual for any signs that might help in establishing the truth of whether it was God or not. Many years ago “Psychology Today,” magazine ran a study on people who hear voices. After sampling several thousand individuals the study found that 5% of the people studied heard voices, and 98% of these voices were benevolent, helping voices that were desired. The other 2% heard malevent voices they wished to get rid of. I was surprised by the number of people hearing voices, something I had never done until my experience.
Basically, we have to rely of the honesty of the person.
I’d say the people who have only one profoundly moving experience are what we’d call “normal”. People react in all sorts of ways to things all the time; some people can have profound experiences just by looking at nature. People can have dreams that impact them profoundly. People can get in near-fatal accidents that rock their world. I gather that a lot of atheists have such experiences too. The difference is that they don’t decide that their personal internal experience supplants objective reality.
In my observation, a person can train themselves to have religious experiences regularly; on demand, even. A religious experience for most people is little more than basking in a particularly moving feeling, after all. The problem isn’t that the people are manipulating their own feelings and causing themselves to daydream chats with their diety; it that (again) they decide that these internal experiences override what they know or can learn from objective reality.
I think that the drug thing was presented as a possible test for whether religious experiences were real. It wasn’t until kanicbird referred to it as ‘brainwashing’ that the possiblity of the use of drugs as a cure came up. From there, of course, it snowballed.
The real weak point in the drug argument (as a testing method, not a “cure”) is that Der Trihs referred to the drugs as ‘anti-hallucination’ drugs with the implicit assumption that they worked specifically and only on hallucinations. And, sure, if we knew that that’s all they effected, they’d be a good test. The problem is it’s sort of hard to know what effects a drug actually has; maybe it also by the sheerest coincidence dulls the ‘spiritual vibe’ center of the brain…not that any REAL God would be balked by a mere drug, but there’s still enough actual uncertainty in determining the effects of actual drugs to make this a somewhat valid counterargument. (And one that kanicbird essentially made, not that that was acknowledged.)
The best test I can think of for whether religious experiences are hallucinations is whether all persons who have religious experiences report having observed the same things, which one would expect if they were actually observing something with objective existence. (That is, were religious experiences actually windows onto another objective reality, there would essentially be one religion in the world, with splinters and subdivisions over minor points of confusion, but in general agreeing about the whole. This isn’t the case, of course.)
People who see hallucinations honestly think they’re seeing what they’re seeing. This does not mean they they actually are seeing talking frogs (or talking burning bushes). So, honesty really has little to do with it - a liar is probably leading you wrong, but a person can be honestly wrong too.
Yes. IIRC, one in five people will have a hallucination during their lifetime. Apparently, it’s perfectly possible for something to go wonky in the brain, make you hallucinate, and then correct itself. While the one-time people will have screwed up judgment because they are following a figment of their hallucination, it seems likely that they are less likely to get worse and worse because they are not constantly taking advice from a mental disorder.
Unless their one time experience leads them to listen to someone who is listening to his own madness, that is.
So we should just abandon the insane ? The problem isn’t that they are “deviant” in society’s opinion; society agrees with them. The problem is that their brains are malfunctioning, that they are seeing things that aren’t there, and the religious are willing to sacrifice such people’s sanity on the altar of their religion. So much for the alleged compassion of the faithful.
Assuming these statistics to be true, that doesn’t prove which if any voices come from God ( none do, but . . .). Just as you have no evidence for God, you have no evidence that he/she/it is benevolent or even sane either.
That’s kind of the whole point of the (recent) discussion here. How would it be possible to tell? Is there some test, or observation, that would sort them out?
So in your view, we have two kinds of people who hear voices: the insane, and people who hear God. And you’re saying that we have to rely on the honesty of the insane people, as well as the God-hearing?
As long as the insane one’s don’t claim to be sane, we’re home and dry.
Well, first, see, you decide what kind of god(s) you believe is/are real. Then you compare their experiences to that standard; the ones whose visions contradict your beliefs are the nutters. Simple!
I swear that first apostrophe wasn’t there when I posted - it was inserted by angels, or demons, or you’re all just imagining it, or I am.