SPIRITUAL/ RELIGIOUS IS A PERSONALITY DISORDER
THE ROLE OF FAITH AS PLACEBO
Faith can be a placebo for those who wish to do bad things and downplay them.
It may be used to deal with the bad things your co-religionists do. It can be
used as a tool to make you think your mental or physical or psychological health
is better than what it is. The evidence is that religious faith is always a
placebo. When faith is a placebo then it should be challenged for another
placebo should be as good if not better. But it is wiser to get the guts to face
the truth. That will work like a placebo without being a placebo. You see your
own strength. The danger with placebo is that the person ends up thinking that
it does not matter what the belief is as long as the placebo works. The person
who is leaning on a placebo needs you to affirm the placebo for no placebo works
if the friends are negative about it. So have the right not to lie. You have to
be honest and challenge the placebo. You have to challenge the crutch for the
sake of your own integrity. Lack of integrity in you will be perceived and that
will destroy their placebo anyway so you have to challenge it. It is a good
placebo when you challenge for you are saying, "I believe you can come out of
this better than before."
A placebo is a lie and it seeks to pollute others and get them on board with
lies. Lies lead to lies so your placebo will hurt somebody else.
Interestingly, the idea that human nature can choose the misery of Hell forever
instead of being happy with God suggests that the sinner is staying under some
kind of illusion. There must be some kind of placebo in Hell to keep you there.
THE NOTION THAT FAITH WILL NEVER FAIL YOU
Saying faith never fails is just telling people to turn it into a placebo.
The idea that faith will never fail is in need of translation, “I think this
faith came from God and God is bigger than humankind. Nobody can defeat God. So
my faith is my eternal rock for it is how God is being with me as my eternal
rock. God uses the faith to tell me he will never let me down. But what if I am
wrong and my faith comes from natural causes? Or from human nature? Whatever! I
am going to take a chance and make sure it persists forever. I am comforted now
by how my faith will be that reliable.”
If there is no God supporting the religion then you are just being stubborn.
Obstinacy is what you stand for. Keeping it up may make the cure worse than the
disease. And reality will bite and bite hard.
Your seeing faith as a gift from God threatens those who realise that what you
are loyal to is not the truth or completely true. The perception you have is
that your brand of faith or religion is persistence and has a rocklike quality –
Jesus said Christianity was the immovable rock. To say that of faith suggests
magic. Or it suggests you as the creator of the faith and the owner are the rock
so what do you need the faith for? It is you making the rock of faith so it is
you not faith.
The rock of your faith then is you boasting that you have faith and make faith
but as this is embarrassing you backtrack and treat faith as if it is doing the
work not you.
GOD AS PROJECTION AND SYMPTOM OF A PERSONALITY DISORDER
Freud said that we have a sense of being helpless in life and that is why we
need a father God to look after us. We need the feeling that we are going to be
okay. Christians say that if that is true it does not show that God is merely
something that is not real but is just in our heads. But it does show we are
abusing God. We only want him for us not for himself. This God is abused. If so
that explains why believers can be so vicious and hate atheists. Those who
exploit God will soon start using everybody else too!
So if we are abusing God then we need to be corrected firmly. Why? Surely we do
not become a threat to others through thinking an angel guards us or Santa Claus
or the Tooth Fairy! But it is only believers in a God that become such a threat.
We as believers are a threat and also a potential threat.
God leads to a temptation to persecute. Why do you not want to persecute the
person who steals your rabbit's foot charm? Why do you want to persecute the
person who rejects God or your version of God? The answer is that in thinking
something loves you infinitely and knows all things and has all power, only God
is like that, inherently makes you selfish. The other entities are not as
involved and so not as useful to you.
If you become atheist, the bad trait put in you by God belief may remain or you
may believe in God or programmed by ideas about him more than you realise. Some
atheists persecute believers and that could be down to them seeing, or learning
from experience - perhaps their own as a former believer - that there is
something about belief in God that is obnoxious and a threat.
If faith in God is motivated not by love of truth but by the wish for a father
figure then it is a placebo for loneliness. We have no right to advocate that
specific placebo - a placebo by definition may not be the best for your children
even if it is for you. Only the placebo matters not God.
MINIMALIST ATHEISM
Do atheists who say atheism essentially is the absence of belief in God rather
than outright denial think that we need the belief to be absent or lacked? If
they do then their lack of faith is in a sense also a denial. It is not the same
thing as the absence of belief/faith in the existence of the fairy in the pond.
To need there to be no evidence for God so that you need not believe is a
rejection of God. It is not an outright one but a rejection all the same.
This kind of atheism however is not a projection. Hard atheism where you deny
God outright and call God a lie can be a projection. Maybe you hated your father
and this hate has got caught up in the God idea making you turn against it.
If there was a scale, atheism as in lack of belief would be zero in terms of
being suspected of projection. Atheism as in denial sounds like a far-fetched
candidate for projection. It is difficult and the atheist has no pipe-dreams.
Faith in God is the biggest candidate for projection.
IT IS NOT IN A BOX!
There is more to faith than religion. There is more to faith than religious
faith. Religious faith and non-religious faith can be in the same cooking pot.
It is by faith that you trust your car not to fall apart and leave you stranded
in the middle of nowhere.
It is by faith that you think other cars will not crash into you.
It is by faith that you think a tree or something won't fall on you when you go
out for a drive.
There are hundreds of other faiths, many that you don't realise you have - eg
faith that lightning will not blow up your car with you in it. It is not faith
but faiths. It is plural. Thus you cannot say that somebody's religious faith
may not impact you. You cannot say that faith is fine as long as it is not
religious for the religious person's faith in God is intertwined with other
faiths that the person has. You cannot box it off.