Salvation isn't found in a shared psychosis
In order to belong to pretty much any religion you must first accept certain statements as fact. This is done so that new believers are ready to accept not only ideas, but also commands.
Religious ideas are very rarely (if ever) placed in reality. They are fantastical. Amazing. Miraculous. They are not bogged down in the mundane reality that the rest of us find ourselves in. This in itself is what makes religion so enticing to so many people. It is an escape from reality. Instead of death, you are offered eternal life. Instead of poverty, riches. Instead of sinking into the sea, you can walk on water.
However, when we take key tenants of religions like Christianity at face value, we can see that stories of miracles and other fantastic events are most likely parables. They are stories designed to grow people’s faith and (more importantly) to bring people into the flock. However, when we blindly accept that men can be raised from the dead (among other Christian beliefs), we risk taking on psychotic ideas.
Jesus themselves likely suffered from a psychotic disorder (as I myself do) which is evident in his belief that he lived in the end of times and was in a war between “good” and “evil”. There is also the story about Jesus being tempted by “the devil” in the wilderness. Since there is no such thing as demons, it was a hallucinatory experience most likely exacerbated by Jesus’ fasting.
Writing in this way about my faith makes me feel like I am an unbeliever. However, with the experiences I have had in my life and my own testimony of faith, I have to say I believe in a God. I write this way about Christian faith because I was indoctrinated into it and it played such a central role in my own psychotic episodes. So much so that I now recognise that it was religious ideas that helped “feed” the psychosis from the beginning.
So where do we draw the line between religious belief and psychosis?
Well, we can’t and psychiatric professionals can’t either because religion just isn’t in the diagnostic manuals as a mental illness. Because it isn’t. That doesn’t mean that religion isn’t filled with psychotic ideas of angels and demons and epic battles between good and evil. We can as believers (or unbelievers!) choose to recognise psychotic ideas as they exist within religious texts, practices and beliefs.
When we are reading many religious texts and the stories they contain we are often hearing accounts of psychotic illnesses and other mental illnesses. This can be in regards to both demon possession and “holy” men and women. We can read Old Testament stories about psychotic prophets who, left untreated, recorded their thoughts for later generations to interpret.
When we look to certain religious texts for guidance we are often looking at someone else’s suffering. In the case of Jesus we have a man obsessed with God and all things holy. We also have a man tortured and misunderstood and quite possibly mistaken as “holy” due to their own psychotic beliefs. Unsurprisingly, Jesus’ psychotic beliefs were all based on Jewish teaching and mythology. There is very little that is original in psychosis.
Our psychosis will be influenced by our religion (if we have any) and so we see shared psychotic symptoms common throughout the Christian world. People who believe they are saints. People who believe they are angels. People who believe they are at war with demons. People who believe they are Jesus Christ themselves.
All of these ideas begin with religious indoctrination which is why it is so important to remove indoctrination from your faith. It is even more important to remove indoctrination processes from your children. You can teach and live a full and complete faith knowing that Salvation comes forth from sanity, not from the madness of psychotic delusions.
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