THE BOOK 'IS FAITH DELUSION?' ARGUES FOR PSYCHOLOGICALLY HEALTHY RELIGION!!
Andrew Sims is the author of Is Faith Delusion? He is a former Professor of Psychiatry and President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and has also been Chairman of their Spirituality and Psychiatry Special Interest Group, so is exceptionally well qualified to address the subject.
Here are his ideas from the book claiming that faith is psychologically good for us and good for people who have mental health struggles.
To argue that believers are not deluded because "Believers understand that others may not accept their beliefs and that they might be wrong" is a strange argument for people in asylums try to convince others that their crazy beliefs are true.
COMMENT: SOME RELIGIONS CLAIM TO BE ALL FACTUAL AND
EVERYBODY ELSE IS WRONG BUT THEM. THE VATICAN STILL DOES THAT. AND MANY
BELIEVERS DENY THAT THEIR FAITH COULD BE WRONG AND STATE THAT THEIR DOCTRINES
ARE NOT REALLY BELIEFS BUT FACTS. JESUS COMMANDED US TO BE CERTAIN THAT HIS
TEACHING IS CORRECT.
If religion does strange things at worship it does not do similar things in ordinary daily life. For example, priests claim to turn bread into Jesus. The priest does not claim that his doorstop is really his father.
COMMENT: AT LEAST HE ADMITS THAT RELIGIOUS PEOPLE DO
THINGS THAT AROUSE A SUSPICION OF DELUSION OR MENTAL ILLNESS. BUT HE SEEMS TO
ARGUE THAT QUANTITY NOT QUALITY MATTERS - A STRANGE STANCE! THE MAN WHO RANTS
AND RAVES FOR FIVE MINUTES EVERY DAY AND WHO IS FINE OTHERWISE WILL NOT BE
REGARDED AS A WELL MAN. THE PRIEST MIGHT TURN BREAD INTO JESUS ONCE A DAY FOR A
LITTLE WHILE AND THAT IS STRANGE BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ATTITUDE HE CARRIES ABOUT
ALL DAY? IF HIS ACTION IS STRANGE SO IS HIS ATTITUDE THAT HE CAN TURN BREAD INTO
JESUS AT WILL. THE ATTITUDE IS THERE ALL DAY EVERY DAY. IT IS A BIGGER ISSUE
THAN THE LITTLE TIME HE SPENDS CELEBRATING MASS.
Sims should know that believers who fuse reason and
evidence and faith and who are careful to be open to new light are the only ones
who might not be delusional. But he is silent on it. He is just an apologist for
blind faith or reckless faith.
Page 130 lists illnesses and forms of derangement that are not delusion. One
item on the list is the overvalued idea. This is when somebody values an idea
too much. For example, if a person thinks it is a sin to be gay, they may go and
murder gay people.
Page 118 tells us that to say religious faith is a delusion is to say that not
only is the faith untrue or false but that the person who has faith is mad.
Page 150 tells us that if being a religious believer is a sign of mental illness
then all religious activities are signs of mental problems.
Agreed - on both counts!
Page 140 says that since Jesus offered his message to the broken-hearted,
Christian faith is a crutch but it helps us outgrow the crutch and stand on our
own two feet.
A true professional would know that faith cannot be a crutch for everybody. Some
will try to embrace the crutch and not be able to. And because they tried they
will feel worse. Others won't want a crutch.
Jesus offering his message of comfort does not mean that he wanted religion to
be a crutch. You can be comforted by something without using it as a crutch.
He did not promise happiness but warned his true follower will have
misery, live with the threat of death and have to fear God who can
destroy body and soul in Gehenna. And he only mentioned love
about 13 times in the gospels and it was their writers putting that
into his mouth. Most of what he said was threatening and
judging and angry. And the love references are recycled which
gets the numbers up.
Page 142 states that a person would be seriously mentally disturbed at the least
for believing a belief that his reason tells him is false.
If Christianity is absurd and the evidence for it is
inadequate, then the sillier it is then the bigger the chance is that the
believer is at least a bit disturbed. Sims should argue that Christian faith is
a delusion but not for those few experts who know the rationality of the faith
and the evidence for Jesus being what he claimed to be. But if he thought that
he would not have written his book. And the experts do not exist for the
Christian faith is untrue and improbable.
Page 146 says that all attempts to be objective or totally unbiased fall short in the sense that there will always be a bias or subjective aspect. In short, the unprejudiced observation does not exist.
Sims brings that up because he wants to make out you can have crazy religious beliefs and still be sane for it is normal to make errors or be misled. But that depends on how crazy the beliefs are and if you are going to act on them.
The bias needs to be contained not encouraged. The
scientist can reduce the bias but how can the religious person? There is
no reality check for the latter!
There could be somebody, a God, out there who really can do magic. But until
there is proof we assume there isn't. We can't go about making no decisions just
because we can't know everything. But if we assume there is a God then we
end up programming ourselves to imagine we are in an intensely important
relationship with him. That is as warped as marrying a non-existent spouse.
Page 150 states that a man heard evil voices. His Roman
Catholic mother told him to pray to God when they torment him. One day he jumped
out the window and committed suicide. Sims states that perhaps he didn't pray in
time. He wasn't thinking and thus he lost the chance to counteract the voices
with prayer.
He just won't admit that for all he knows the man might have went insane because
of religion!
Page 152 lists the five formal characteristics of self.
It's the awareness that I exist - the awareness of
existing.
The awareness that I am doing something even if it is
nothing!
The awareness that I am one person.
The awareness that I am me and wasn't somebody else a
while ago.
The awareness that I can distinguish myself from the
outside world.
Page 157 states that if a person does wrong and feels
nothing and feels no guilt then they may suffer from dissocial personality
disorder (page 157). Sims suggests that we need to be aware of our sins to be
healthy people, and states that sin should be understood as a failure in our
relationship with God and others (page 158).
We need to be aware of it when we do wrong. Sin is a legal concept in the sense
that it means that not only have you done wrong but you have broken divine law.
The atheist simply sees that he did wrong. He rejects the thought that he did
something extra bad, breaking divine law. Sin and doing wrong are not the same
thing. The first is about law. The second is about having hurt unnecessarily. We
do not need the concept of sin on top of our problems and our guilt.
Page 175 says that demonic possession never happens unwittingly. Demons only get
possessing a person because the person invited them in.
Sims cannot prove that everybody who is possessed asked the demons to enter.
Asking demons to enter in itself should not lead to possession. The possession
is never consented to. If an invitation is necessary to be possessed then that
is to say that consent leads to possession. But as you have not consented to the
possession then it follows then that you are possessed against your will. You
wanted demons in you to improve your life not to take over and abuse your body.
If you are possessed against your will then it follows that totally innocent
people can be possessed.
Sims won't admit that there are people who claim to be possessed without
inviting demons in. He is dishonest. He knows that if he teaches that demons
don't need to be invited that scares people and causes grave distress to the
mentally ill. He advocates belief in possession and then lies to stop the
doctrine doing extreme harm. That is a tactic that is not going to work. People
are not that easily lied to.
It is impossible to prove that anybody really has a demon. If our material
brains can fake demons and split personalities, then there may be unknown mental
abilities that can do even better. A person could be possessed by some
uncontrollable part of themselves. So even if you prove a person is possessed,
you cannot prove that they are possessed by any supernatural being or demon.
Also, possession is impossible to prove for many mental illnesses can simulate
it and also we can't know all there is to know about mental illnesses and their
varieties.
Believers argue that a person can be mentally
ill and have a demon at the same time. Imagine the danger of
such a doctrine! It will compound the person's self-doubt.
Page 214 says that prayer is the best means a person with mental illness can
take to cope with the illness.
Where is Sims' proof that this is correct? Prayer can't help everybody. If
medication or therapy can sometimes make a person worse surely prayer can as
well. He is blaming people who do not pray enough for their problems and he
should be struck off.
Page 216 has Sims denying that there is any causal relationship between faith
and mental illness/delusion.
Commonsense says that anything can contribute to the onset of mental illness.
Just as seeing a picture of a stick-thin model can be the start of anorexia so
religion can be the start of insanity.
If you are in the grip of grave mental illness, religion telling you God is with you when your experience is that he is not will only traumatise you. It is abuse.
