[Home]  [Headlines]  [Latest Articles]  [Latest Comments]  [Post]  [Sign-in]  [Mail]  [Setup]  [Help] 

Status: Not Logged In; Sign In

Tucker Carlson Reveals He Was Clawed By a Demon While Sleeping, Even Started to Bleed

Top Kamala Harris Surrogate Mark Cuban Faces Intense Backlash From #WomenForTrump

Kamala Harris Is Insane & Cannot Be Trusted

Israel-Hezbollah Ceasefire Possible Within 'Days': Lebanese PM

‘We were totally betrayed’ – 500 migrants for tiny German village of 600 will nearly double population

Hezbollah tactics, weapons stall Israeli advance

President Kennedy's Final Address to the United Nations General Assembly

RFK Jr. Explains Plan For Reforming The CIA

Harris Campaign Recruits Foreign Volunteers, Tells Noncitizens How To Skirt Donation Rules

Lame Yuck! With Nothing To Lose, Biden Goes On Baby-Mouthing Spree At White House Halloween Party

The Fastest Way To Reverse A Fatty Liver Naturally | Dr. William Li

CIA Advisor Warns: This is the beginning of the 2025 Civil War

When Evil Is Allowed In, Evil Stays

US layoffs rose 42% in three years, reaching 1.83M in September.

Iran Will Carry Out 'Definitive, Painful' Retaliatory Strike, Likely Before Election: CNN

How 2024 Election Will Lead To Second Civil War

Tulsi Gabbard Drops a Killer Trump Ad

Israel Genocide Tracker Account Sparks 'Panic' Among Israeli Soldiers

Battleground Voting Shift: Hispanic Voters Now Driven by Issues, Not Party Lines

North Carolina Appeals Court Rules to Allow Voters Who have Never Lived in the U.S. To Vote in State Elections

The 5 Tiers of Stolen Elections (Dems already did 1 & 2)

A Palestinian Family Goes to Pick Up Olives. It Ends in an Execution by Israeli Soldiers

Israel Suffers A Multimillion Dollar Economic SUCKER PUNCH!

The Babylon Bee Endorses Communist Harris

Nosy NY Times Journos Uncover Elon Musk's Secret Luxury Compound In Austin

A 20% surge in gov't spending inflates the national debt, inflation, and interest rates, now reaching 10% of GDP

MI EARLY VOTE SHOCKER! An Excess of 125,428 Votes Cast!

DMSO is the ivermectin for strokes and neurological damage

The Curious Case Of Ariane Tabatabai

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Projects Are Foundering In Five-Eye Nations. What Gives?


Religion
See other Religion Articles

Title: Religious fundamentalism could soon be treated as mental illness
Source: [None]
URL Source: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/351347
Published: Jul 7, 2013
Author: JohnThomas Didymus
Post Date: 2013-07-07 13:22:09 by farmfriend
Keywords: None
Views: 133
Comments: 4

Religious fundamentalism could soon be treated as mental illness

By JohnThomas Didymus

Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist at Oxford University, said that recent developments suggest that we will soon be able to treat religious fundamentalism and other forms of ideological beliefs potentially harmful to society as a form of mental illness.

She made the assertion during a talk at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday. She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder. She said new developments in neuroscience could make it possible to consider extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals.

She told The Times of London: "One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated. Someone who has for example become radicalized to a cult ideology -- we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance."

Taylor admits that the scope of what could end up being labelled "fundamentalist" is expansive. She continued: "I am not just talking about the obvious candidates like radical Islam or some of the more extreme cults. I am talking about things like the belief that it is OK to beat your children. These beliefs are very harmful but are not normally categorized as mental illness. In many ways that could be a very positive thing because there are no doubt beliefs in our society that do a heck of a lot of damage, that really do a lot of harm."

The Huffington Post reports Taylor warns about the moral-ethical complications that could arise.

In her book "The Brain Supremacy," she writes of the need "to be careful when it comes to developing technologies which can slip through the skull to directly manipulate the brain. They cannot be morally neutral, these world-shaping tools; when the aspect of the world in question is a human being, morality inevitably rears its hydra heads. Technologies which profoundly change our relationship with the world around us cannot simply be tools, to be used for good or evil, if they alter our basic perception of what good and evil are."

The moral-ethical dimension arises from the predictable tendency when acting on the problem, armed with a new technology, to apply to the label "fundamentalist" only to our ideological opponents, while failing to perceive the "fundamentalism" in ourselves.

From the perspective of the Western mind, for instance, the tendency to equate "fundamentalism" exclusively with radical Islamism is too tempting. But how much less "fundamentalist" than an Osama bin Laden is a nation of capitalist ideologues carpet bombing civilian urban areas in Laos, Cambodia and North Korea?

The jihadist's obsession with defending his Islamic ideological world view which leads him to perpetrate and justify such barbaric acts as the Woolwich murder are of the same nature as the evangelical obsession with spreading the pseudo-religious ideology of capitalism which led to such horrendous crimes as the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in four years of carpet bombing operations by the Nixon administration caught in a vice grip of anti-communist paranoia.

The power to control the mind will tend too readily to be used as weapon against our jihadist enemies while justifying the equally irrational and murderously harmful actions we term innocously "foreign policy."

Some analysts are thus convinced that neuroscientists will be adopting a parochial and therefore ultimately counterproductive approach if they insist on identifying particular belief systems characteristic of ideological opponents as the primary subject for therapeutic manipulation.

On a much larger and potentially more fruitful scale is the recognition that the entire domain of religious beliefs, political convictions, patriotic nationalist fervor are in themselves powerful platforms for nurturing "Us vs Them" paranoid delusional fantasies which work out destructively in a 9/11 attack or a Hiroshima/Nagasaki orgy of mass destruction.

What we perceive from our perspective as our legitimate self-defensive reaction to the psychosis of the enemy, is from the perspective of the same enemy our equally malignant psychotic self-obsession.

The Huffington Post reports that this is not the first time Taylor has written a book about extremism and fundamentalism. In 2006, she wrote a book about mind control titled "Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control," in which she examined the techniques that cultic groups use to influence victims.

She said: "We all change our beliefs of course. We all persuade each other to do things; we all watch advertising; we all get educated and experience [religions.] Brainwashing, if you like, is the extreme end of that; it's the coercive, forceful, psychological torture type."

She notes correctly that "brainwashing" which embraces all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways "we make people think things that might not be good for them, that they might not otherwise have chosen to think," is a much more pervasive social phenomenon than we are willing to recognize. As social animals we are all victims of culturally induced brainwashing whose effectiveness correlates with our inability to think outside the box of our given acculturation.

Post Comment   Private Reply   Ignore Thread  


TopPage UpFull ThreadPage DownBottom/Latest

Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.

#1. To: farmfriend (#0)

Chemical lobotomies coming to your doctor's office soon.

Lod  posted on  2013-07-07   13:32:02 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


Replies to Comment # 1.

        There are no replies to Comment # 1.


End Trace Mode for Comment # 1.

TopPage UpFull ThreadPage DownBottom/Latest


[Home]  [Headlines]  [Latest Articles]  [Latest Comments]  [Post]  [Sign-in]  [Mail]  [Setup]  [Help]