The question of curing the religiously crazed or psychotic is one that has emerged on many forums I’ve frequented. Some, of course, are horrified at the very notion that one would wish to “cure” the religious, since they don’t identify it as a disease or mental aberration. Thus, there is an impetus to “leave religion alone”.
However, if you treat religion as taboo and "out of bounds" for commentary or prescriptive cure, you essentially give mental dysfunction (which often operates under religious cover) a free pass. You also leave religious memes unexamined. Including those that emerge as when attention is drawn to the heaven-hell myth, viz. via the "Hell House" horrors now being used by evangelicals to prepare children for what they will face if they become "unbelievers". In these odious performances, kids are forced to watch plays depicting infidels being tortured and burned by Demons. Many come away in partial or full psychoses.
These scenes - "real" (based on biblical bunkum) or imaginary ("Hell House")- also raise an eschatological problem: Could devout fundamentalists really enjoy paradise as their friends, relatives and neighbors were heaved into hell?
These sanctimonious, insufferable Christianoids (especially) insist that they have earned their 'just rewards" and they mean to enjoy them. Even at the expense of cousin Tommie, Uncle Fred, Aunt Millie or Grandpa Ed - seen now perpetually frying and getting impaled with Lucifer's pitchforks with the other unbelievers, sinners and spiritual riff raff!
Here's the real question to ask an unctuous believer who insists he or she is 'above it all' and merely looking out for the "advancement" of humanity (by which they really mean being "personally saved"):Do you have a "hard on" for afterlife exclusion, segregation? Dividing humanity's dead into the permanently "saved" and "unsaved"? The former sitting at the "right hand" and watching on as we ("unsaved") unbelievers, along with Buddhists, Hindus, Jews get cremated for eternity? Is this important for your own spiritual satisfaction? Or, can it be dispensed with?
If your God is truly one of Love, why on Earth does he need a “Hell”? (And please don’t hand me the malarkey that God “doesn’t send people to Hell but people choose to send themselves:”. This swill is definitely the last refuge of scoundrels and imbeciles)
My point is that no matter how devout a person insists he or she is, if s/he believes in "Heaven" and "Hell" the words are already hollow and show that - whatever the particular "hard-on" requires- it means more than five billion frying in a nuclear holocaust initiated in the Valley of Megiddo.
It means > 100 billion crisping in fires for eternity as some snotty little "elect" enjoys sitting at the "right hand" of their little lord and master watching the infidels writhe. And then these fart will have the nerve to say: "Oh, but we hate the sin and love the sinner" Yeah, right.
Whether many want to admit it, or realize it or not, many evangelical Christians' entire life is bound into and promotes, defines their ultimate “salvation”. I have no problem with that, until they also posit my exclusion, e.g. damnation, based on my unbelief. (Never mind the exclusion may be from an unreal existence from my Atheist POV, the point is not the existence per se but the person's absolute mental exclusion in the first place!)
In other words, fine if you want to believe you're saved, but don't pillory or condemn me as "unsaved". Don't grab your "heaven" ticket, by handing me my "hell" ticket. (E.g. you're attaining the heavenly clouds, means I must descend to the hellish pits). I also totally question the premise that anyone can "behave with decency" in this world, if they also believe in their heart of hearts that a good portion of humanity will be condemned at the end of time - for either never having heard of Jesus, or not believing in him.
That makes a mockery of any decent acts they might do, and makes them hollow at core, since their governing belief is whatever people they help (or cooperate with in helping others) will ultimately be destroyed in some eternal holocaust. How does that reconcile? It doesn't - unless one is a madman. Speaking of madness, there is enough evidence now to show that the vast bulk of religiosity and its expressions are centered in the temporal lobes as epiphenomena.
Experiments by J.M. Persinger at Laurentian University have exposed these, by stimulating the temporal lobes of numerous subjects with specially designed helmets. In each case, religious visions or "insights" emerged, as well as beliefs. Eventually, Persinger had to call it quits after receiving death threats (according to a 1989 OMNI piece, 'Transcending Science') One would think people wouldn't get so lathered up at this.
Beholding the sheer wonder of the brain as a 3 lb. mass of gray matter. Packed with over ten billion cells - able to deliver everything from the most advanced tensor equations, to building space rockets...to well, providing the most exquisite visions and beliefs on demand. (Read some of Telhard's writings, like The Divine Milieu, to see how his own temporal lobes excited his neocortex and conjured up his marvelous visions of the Alpha and Omega).
But people (believers) almost uniformly 'lose it', perhaps because - as Daniel Dennett once noted - they want to build their world and universe on "skyhooks" not cranes. Cranes, after all, have to hoist from the ground up. They're prosaic, dirty material flotsam and jetsam like cells, electric signals and chemicals. But oh those skyhooks! To toss them upwards and hook on to the ethereal, immaterial realm in the hyper yonder beyond the clouds and matter!
"BWAAAAAA....We don't want that! We wanna be GRANDIOSE beings! Made of sky and spirit not filthy matter! Or derived from it like those dirty atheists!"
They fail to comprehend that for humanity to be in harmony - no single subset can elevate itself as "more special" or “more worthy" or more "grandiose" than any other, irrespective of who or what they believe in. And while it might be nice or appealing to believe ALL humanity is skyhook-engendered, in practice it never works! Because once the skyhook meme is admitted, one segment seeks to claim its grandiosity and specialness for itself, and excludes the others!Much better to look at basic evolution by natural selection, and how we all came to have the same basic DNA in our cells. Sharing the same basic chemical arrangement. Indeed, this sharing can be extended to all living things on the planet- removing the specialness of humans as a species.
What is the prescription therefore to cure exaggerated religiosity? It is simply an adaptation of Persinger’s own methods: in this case using quantum dot electrodes inserted into the temporal lobes to control the “temporal lobe transients” that give rise to religious visions, beliefs, rituals, and the arrogant, exclusionary condemnations of others.
If every religiously-driven extremist could be identified, tagged and implanted the world would be a much better place, since the extremist manifestations of religion would be held in check. Then, people could still practice interior meditation and worship – but their yen to interject it into the outside world (and onto unwilling others) would be suppressed.
For an Atheist this is as close as it gets to “heaven”.
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