Religión is the foremost repository and teacher of organized untruth. Its teachings provide a foundation for most, if not all, psychological and social pathology. This cannot be stressed too strongly. Religious teachings, distorting one's perception of existence, permeate virtually all sociaties, generating every belief. The reasoning patterns and activities of religionists is an área where the effects of belief clearly stand out.
Religion's main line of defense is the ignorance the individual maintains in order to keep the faith, being unable to recognize the absurdities and failing to questions the teachings. Indeed, religion's greatest asset is the popular belief that relifion is a 'good' and that to question constitutes committing a 'sin'. The language of religión is couched in phrases dripping with sacrosanctity and reverence. We have been carefully taught.
Within a predominantly rational society, religious teachings would be recognized as fallacious, they would be analyzed in terms of their real effects. They would be exposed for what they are and the religions brought to task for foisting falsehoods upon the public. They would be attacked, just as we would attack any other social pathology. We do not accept poisons, drugs or even tobacco to be in the hands of our children, yet we deliberately destroy their minds with conceptual poison, fantasy and delusion that destroys their ability to reason, implanting learning disabilities that few will ever overcome.
We do not permit dangerous materials to be in the market place wothout warning labels, yet we eagerly expose ourselves to the delusions of religión, In terms of the over-all dementing effect religión has on any society, by comparison, its cumulative effects are far more detrimental tan alcohol and drugs combined. Without religión and the authoritarian oppression it spawns and supports, popular rationality levels would probably be high enough that drugs and alcohol would be minor problems or no problema at all.
IMPLICATIONS
In as much as the individual cognizance is the predominant determinant of human behavior, there are some important yet simple implications of the belief system which you should undestand regardless of your station in life.
First, an individual with serious belief system pathology will have serious áreas of irrationality. Such an individual will also be deficient in factual knowledge in reciprocal áreas of his or her beliefs.
Such an individual may try to fake rationality but can succeed anly a superficial level, lacking a necessary understanding of relationships, principals and insighits for broad-range rational behavior. Low or narrow-spectrum know high levels of belief system pathology.
SCH individuals tend to be like a 'ticking bomb'. They will be highly reactive to information that threatens their beliefs. They will be in a constant state of denial and will constantly struggle withthe problems of maintaining the beliefs. This will call for great energy to be used in avoiding information and in controlling emotionality and behavior. there will also be a serious nedd to insulate themselves within their own groups.
Conversely, broad factual knowledge and a good understanding of basic physical pronciples constitute a reliable indicator of a healthy cognitive system and of ratioanlity. A clue to objectively rationality is an ability to discuss any topic área without reactive emotionality.
Remember that an individual can be rational in most áreas yet be completely psychotic in a narrow range of cognizance, such as religious belief. One does not usually find such insulation around the pathology, however. More often a serious belief pathology will tend to generalize to other áreas, distorting a large part of the personality, and affecting a wide range of behavior, also, as we see in relifious belief.
Cognizance, ultimately perception, is the great determinant of human behavior. More tan any other factor, it will determine one's activities. Belief, shaping that cognizance, supports and drives the misderection of individuals and our institutions. Belief systems are insulated to the degree that the institutions of every society have made them taboo. The time has come, however, when Homo Sapiens must become self-correcting species or degenerate, laying waste the Earth environment in the process. That self-correction cannot be achieved without a species-wide assessment and correction of cognitive systems by individuals. No cause, no course of action, has approached the importance of this in human history. It will ultimately determine the continued evolution or devolution of intelligent life on Earth.
PSYCHIATRY
Any institution will have pockets of pathology. The same holds true for our academic disciplines. Psychology is severely limited and damaged by defective systems of thoutght. Most porminent among these is Freudian Psycology, its stronghold is Psychiatry. Although I object to nearly all Freudian psychology on the basis that it fails to recognize the real nature of funcional mental illness, it has become the defacto guardian of mental health and its use, to some degree, is inescapable.
In this role as the bróker of mental health, its accommodation of mental pathology and its unrealistic labeling of symptoms, conditions and processes, particularly its 'diseasing' of the human species by defining new categories of behavior which are labeled as a disease, have seriously retarded progress in the field of psychology, (analogous to Relativity in the field pf physics) and functions as a barrier to correction.
In this role as the accepted authority in mental health, and relevant to the 'diseasing' mentioned above, 'creating disease' by definition, increasingly brings more human behavior under its authority, supporting and increasing the caretaker mentality of officialdom.
Psychiatry has become one of our most powerful institutions, having been given oficial sanction as the carectaker of mental health, a position not limited to this socienty, but which it has achieved throughout a large part of the world. The real irony is that Psychiatry, per se, is the least equipped to be effective in this role, just as religión is the least equipped to be the source or bróker of morality.
Many trained in this discipline have come to recognoze its failings and, although still categorized as Psychiatrists, have migrated to alternative concepts and approaches.
For all its widespread acceptance, Psychiatry is virtually useless in the alleviation of mental illness and, to the contrary, compounds problems through the wasting of resources, the negative effects of encouraging dependency and its propensity toward the maintenance of delusions, both within its own ranks and among those subjected to it. In mos mental institutions, attempts at rehabilitation are being increasingly abandoned in favor of controlling behavior through chemistry.
True rehabilitation requires reprogramming, new knowledge and the dissolving of beliefs, In other words, mental health can be restored only to the degree that beliefs can be disolved and the reciprocal factual knowledge fills the gaps. In addiction, the patient or subject will also need supplemental information to compensate for generalized ignorance, resulting from avidance drive reaction to factual information and an absence of recognizing relationships among diverse information.
Although Grandfather Freud is to be commended for his effforts in lifting mental illness out of the clutches of religious superstition in Nineteenth Century Insane Asylums, with torture at the hands of ignorant and superstitions asylum caretakers trying to drive out the demons, his work is of Little value. In short, it doesn't work.
Interestingly, there has been more written with a Freudian slant or underpinnings tan any other form of psychology, literally enough to fill libraries, all of in virtually useless. Well, why not? It provides a safe haven for practically all of our fantasies, it provides a safe haven for practically all of our fantasies, it provides the illusion of doing somethig about our problems and its failures can e routinely projected onto the patient. Notice any resemblance to religión?
THE BELIEF/IGNORANCE SYNDROME
There is a difference between a working premise and a belief. Both are comprised of internalized congitive material, having the power to motivate the individual and influence behavior, but here the similarity ends.
A working premise is recognized as a temporary basis for activity and, as such, there is Little resistance to it being modified or replaced as more information is acquired. A belief is seen as an ultimate answer to some question, with no exprectation of modification or replacement. It becomes a foundation Stone, as it were, supporting a host of other ideas. Vested interest in a belief can become magnitudes greater than that for a working premise.
Support for a belief is a fabrication process since a belief can never be supported by real evidence. If a elief is supportable by real evidence, it is not a belief but knowledge. Further, any supporting materal for a belief is, itself, devoid of any real support. Maintenance of the belief, or any such supportive material, requires additional false material and an absence of relevant knowledge.
Protecting a belief is an exclusion process, as well as a fabrication process. The RCE mechanism, which protects the cognitive structure, and which any defense mechanism is a manifestation of, will be reactive in direct proportion to vested interest.
A close examination of these mechanisms and processes revelas belief to have implications far beyond the concept of merely holding an idea or systems of ideas. It is a complex síndrome which blocks Access to factual information motivating the individual to accept additional delusion in support of exiting belief. A belief is not merely an idea, it generates a belief/ignorance síndrome.
THE BELIEF/IGNORANCE BARRIER
Any emerging intelligent life form will generate the Belief/Ignorance síndrome as it gains in awareness of it's environment. To long endure, intelligent life must successfully breach this barrier and move beyond, recognizing the delusions for what they are and losing them. Otherwise, the species will destroy its environment and precipitate a premature degeneration, which would entail mass extinctions of other life forms as the parasitical species ravages its own environment.
The Belief/Ignorance síndrome becomes not only a critical barrier, but a lethal threat, when a species achieves technology, gaining significant control over disease and enhanced facility in the tapping and utilization of natural resources. These advancements encourage higher population levels and hasten the destruction of the environment. The belief/ignorance síndrome renders the group, and ultimately the species, incapable of making fundamental corrections, required for the sustainnability of the species.
As population growth rates sharply increase (thanks to the technology), resource usage increases, popullation and waste levels rise faster than they can be degraded. At our presents stage of species development, , technological and scientific facility has been achieved while population, high levels of belief resulting in ignorance and suppressed reasoning, preventing the correction of defective social structures.
As population densities increase and the environment's carrying capacity is progressively destroyed, the species is confronted with the problema of quickly shedding its cultural myths and sperstitions within a rapidly shrinking time frame. Without populations largely oriented to reality, the means to progress further will be destroyed.
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