Quote:
kmisho wrote
One can be cured of christianity just by reading and thinking. This is not true of genuine mental illness.
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That's not true. Jim jones, Koresh, Doe of Heaven's gate were very intelligent, read books and they still went to 'see" jesus along their also well read followers. One must take into account that the cause of the vast majority of mental disorders ( schizophrenia, temporal lobe epilepsy et al) is unknown!
Many educated Christians that have not a full blown form of the illness have delusions which they OBEY and guide their lives by, just like the schizophrnia and TLE sufferer.
Carico is a perfect example. Take h/her along with an schizophrenia suffering from a mild form of the disease.
Explain to Carico along with other mentally healthy scientists in a class given 8 hours a day for 2 months, why Jesus , demons, angels do not exist and show h/her the evidence, backed up by empiricism.
Then, take the schizophrenic that believes aliens have placed devices in his brain to monitor his thoughts along other irrational concepts and also give him the same schedule of classes as Carico. The classes will be different because in this case the delusions are not caused by religious-psychosis as in Carico.
At the end of the classes, both Carico and the schizophrenia sufferer STILL will uphold their respective delusions. Carico will still believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior and the schizophrenia sufferers will still believe in those neurological implants placed in his brain by aliens.
What can be learned from this experiment is that the delusion produced by a Christ-psychosis infected brain creates identical irrational thinking as the one produced by the schizophrenia infected brain!.
Both subjects have to be very well educated for the experiment to be succesfull.
Hmmmm....It would be interesting to place, Benedictus XVI, Behe of ID, Pat Robertson,
an Iman and a Dine ( Navajo)medicine man in a room, a mild schizophrenia sufferer discusing their religious beliefs and see who could convince who his is the true belief!.
...:)