Faith-sufferer
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A Faith-sufferer is a label created to describe an individual of any religious persuasion displaying the following traits:
- Impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing.
- Typically make a positive virtue of faith's being strong and unshakable, in spite of not being based upon evidence.
- The conviction that "mystery," per se, is a good thing; the belief that it is not a virtue to solve mysteries but to enjoy them and revel in their insolubility.
- Behaving intolerantly towards vectors of perceived rival faiths, in extreme cases even killing them or advocating their deaths. May be similarly violent in disposition towards apostates or heretics (even when "heretics" espouse only a very slightly different version of the faith, such as the proliferation of Christian sects).
- May notice that the particular convictions that he holds, while having nothing to do with evidence, do seem to owe a great deal to epidemiology.
- If the patient is one of the rare exceptions who follows a different religion from his parents, the explanation may still be epidemiological.
- The internal sensations of the patient may be startlingly reminiscent of those more ordinarily associated with sexual love.
The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his seminal 1991 essay "Viruses of the Mind."
The phrase generally refers to the mental state of either irrationality or illogic attained with the introduction of faith into the mind and thought processes of a human. This psychosis is strongly associated with religious faith and some may consider them synonymous.
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[edit] Psychological affliction
This term is used in reference to what may be a specific mental illness or a collection of them. Specifically some medical conditions that are associated with "religious experiences" such as schizophrenia or temporal lobe epilepsy.
As early as 1927, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud categorized religious dogma as mere projections of childlike wishes and claimed that "mankind will overcome this neurotic phase"; by 1939, Freud had characterized all religions as mass delusions.
Isabel Clark draws inculpatory parallels in her essay, "Psychosis and Spirituality; Finding a Language," demonstrating that "spirituality and psychosis...both represent one way in which human beings can encounter reality, and the same way at that." She goes on to explain that "the difference in the experience, where difference there is, and I will question whether the difference has been exaggerated, comes with the experiencer rather than the experience."
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a delusion as "a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite...what constitutes incontrovertible evidence to the contrary." Such religious beliefs such as Young Earth creationism which run counter to verified scientific evidence, therefore, fit the pathological description of delusions. Evangelist Kent Hovind, for instance, is notorious for distorting and manufacturing scientific information in order to "prove" the beliefs he already maintains. While the DSM does give a kind of "cultural immunity" to religious beliefs, it presents no justifiable reason for doing so.
Recent studies have shown that in fact religious delusions are more common in religious patients suffering from psychosis than the non-religious 1. In a 1997 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Edgar Jones and JP Watson published their findings that non-schizophrenic individuals hold their religious beliefs as strongly as schizophrenic patients hold their delusional beliefs, and that both groups considered their respective beliefs to be equally objectively true 2.
[edit] Colloquial usage
Informal usage of the term is employed by antitheists, skeptics, and critics of religion in general to refer to those who they believe argue irrationally on a number of topics, commit atrocities, and commit social injustice because of their beliefs; examples include Jim Jones, David Koresh and Pat Robertson.
Perpetrators of social injustice, intolerance, slavery and murder who justify their atrocities specifically using the Bible, such as Westboro Baptist Church minister Fred Phelps, have recently been assigned the slightly more derogatory label "Christ-psychotics" by an outraged sector of the population. The term, however, need not apply solely to Christianity; a radical Muslim may be said to suffer from Allah-psychosis, while a radical Zoroastrian may be said to suffer Ahura Mazda-psychosis. Usage is generally determined, as Dawkins suggests, by epidemiological factors such as geography and community.
Usage in this way may have evolved out of the persecution of one particular religion by another, or the persecution of atheists by Muslim and Christian persecutors, among others. Another contributing factor may be the heightened conflict between scientific findings (including the age of the Earth and the age of the universe) and creationism, especially Young-Earth creationists. Some use the term as a purely ad hominem form of attack when in philosophical, scientific, or religious conflict with fundamentalists.
Such a term more widely refers to any individual who attempts to justify social atrocities with religious motivations, and is similar in connotation to the slurs "Koranimal" or "Osama-bama" (Islam), and "Kyke" or "Heeb" (Judaism). Anachronistic examples include Adolf Hitler, various Roman emperors after 400 CE, and Saddam Hussein.
[edit] Criticism
Many traditional Christians and other theists take offense at the use of the phrase, claiming it is a loaded term that implies all religious believers are psychotic.
Also the term has been criticized as being eurocentric as it tries to define religious beliefs in terms of european notions of objective psychological science.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- BBC - Science & Nature - Horizon. "God on the Brain (programme summary) and (transcript), 2001.
- Clark, Isabel. "Psychosis and Spirituality. Finding a Language.," 2001.
- Dawkins, Richard. "Viruses of the Mind," 1991.
- Farrenkopf, Christine. "This is Your Brain on God," 2001.
- Getz, GE with DE Fleck and SM Strakowski. "Frequency and severity of religious delusions in Christian patients with psychosis" (abstract), 2001.
- Heffern, Rich. "Exploring the biology of religious experience," 2001.
- Keller, Julia C. Swedish scientists can’t replicate religious experience in lab, 1 Feb 2005. Science & Theology News.
- Pataphysics Research Journal. "Psychosis or Faith? Clinicians’ Treatment of Religious Beliefs in the Context of DSM-IV Part I e," 2003.
