hobbit-humanist

Voices In Our Heads?

I was in my local library earlier, for a small town it has quite a range of books, each category seemingly with plenty of choice. The Faiths section is quite broad though Christian based and thankfully has a few atheist books by the likes on Dawkins and Simon Blackburn etc sandwiched in between like little gems of sensible radiance.

I like to remain objective so occasionally I’ll read Christian books. Being an atheist (Anti-theist or maybe militant in my case) I think it’s good to know quite a bit of what you’re objecting about.

Today I thumbed through a book called ‘Who Made God’ by Edgar Andrews in which he tries to argue the case for god using reason and science it would seem. It didn’t take long for sentences such as ‘God appears consistently throughout the old and new testament’ followed by what one of the apostles said to some stoics in Athens to get alarm bells ringing in my head. It made me reflect back to a creationism booklet the local Evangelicals gave me some weeks back and after some what can be described as pseudo scientific waffle all of the authors generally come down to something like ‘And then god spoke to me’ or ‘I saw in the Bible it said blah-blah etc etc and that it reached out to me’.

To me that sort of writing is constructed like a house of cards and soon as the bible and god are mentioned it all falls down in my head because sooner or later they have to bring in Jesus, god or the bible, almost surreptitiously as if disguised then revealed near the end, as if it is some kind of revelation. Fancy words and posturing often seemed the norm in pro Christian literature before the holy trinity suddenly reveal themselves to the author in some fantastical way and then it turns absurd very quickly.

So, Jesus, saints, the virgin Mary and god talking to people? Is this actually possible?

I’ve worked in mental health and sure some of my clients did believe god had spoke to them, here though we have people that had been diagnosed with the likes of schizophrenia, delusions, depression and paranoia etc. Rationally we can excuse these people because of their mental condition and also we must realise that sane people can develop the above or indeed have periods of depression etc.

I worked with a paranoid schizophrenic once, a lovely man who struggled greatly with life and had been dealt some very bad luck. He would argue with utter conviction over many things that I knew were untrue. Often it would start with something very real, perhaps workmen outside where he lived who then morphed into spies that observed him constantly before moving to persecuting him in some bizarre way. He’d even hear their voices coming through the walls and speaking to him. Sometimes I would try and ease his torment with rational answers or attempt to change the subject, or even remind him of his condition but once he became fixed on something it was often hard to de-rail. Which reminds me how some hardcore Christians get fixed ideas in their heads, even in light of irrefutable evidence. Getting back to the clients torment, what kind of caring god would permit such a thing?

Continuing with religion and the mind.

The author H.L. Mencken once wrote;

“A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.”

If we move to Freud then he has this to say (among many other things);

“Religion is the universal obsessional neurosis of mankind; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose of of the Oedipus complex, out of relation to the father…. [it is] a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”

Freud’s biographer Philip Rieff wrote;

“Religion may have been the original cure but Freud reminds us that is was the original disease.”

There’s a book called ‘The God Impulse’ by Kevin Nelson who is a neurologist with over 3 decades of experience that I believe tries to explain why people have out of body experiences, feel deep emotions and hear things etc. I’ve not read it yet but plan to but the book seems to suggest on reading a brief summary that faith could be hard wired from our most primitive times.

Do I think faith, the mind and mental health are linked? I don’t really know, or have the expertise and knowledge to make such a sweeping statement. I can only say I know unfortunate people with mental health issues do hear voices and sane people don’t, apart from the brain generated ones we all have in which we use all the time, simply called ‘thoughts’.

I’m sure if god or one of the thousands of others gods existed they’d be able to speak to anyone surely on the basis they were gods. So my rational is simple, gods don’t speak to me and millions of others yet some people among us claim otherwise and they have dialogue with unseen and ethereal beings. Do they have special powers we don’t? Answer – No! Isn’t ironic it’s always the few that only hear gods and they seek to control the many? Forget mystical and faith explanations, utter nonsense.

This brings me to the last bit of this blog in which after browsing the books I noted some on early Christianity and how it spread. I wanted the two books I leafed through to be unbiased and more historical but alas they were Christian orientated so biased and laced with presumption and biblical quotes. The fact nowadays is that we know most of the bible has been heavily edited over the ages to incorporate some things yet remains historically inaccurate at almost every turn. Biblical scholars still debate over the historical veracity of its contents but you have to empathise with them because making folklore into history was never going to be easy, no matter how many books early christians burnt to single out their own fabricated history as the truth. Oh and did I mention different bibles and rewrites, probably but I’ll mention it again!

So back to early Christian history and Paul of Tarsus or St Paul as he is better known. Paul had visions (delusional episodes?) and suffered blindness and other ailments before he took early Christianity on the road and began his early miserable rhetoric feeding on the lamentations of the age and converting innocent pliable minds to his way of thinking. Remember Paul never met Jesus, there’s the time frame between them (again an argued point) and the fact Jesus never existed. Paul seems out of touch completely though with the portrayed Jesus of today. Paul never mentioned he had a ministry, Bethlehem, entrance into Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate, Mary, Joseph, Herod, miracles, John the baptist in fact he doesn’t quote anything Jesus had said. Paul’s version of Jesus arose, died and ascended in a mythical realm;

“If Jesus had been born on earth, he would not even have been a priest.” (Hebrews 8:4)

Paul doesn’t seem aware of Jesus actually being a human being and let’s be honest here he is the link between the period and the alleged figure of Jesus. You have to remember though, allegorical literature was extremely popular back then and people such as the apostles weren’t writing factual history but a symbolical one, they were writing what they thought was the good word with many elements stole from different sources and faiths. There’s also many apocryphal gospels that didn’t make it into the bible  that were either considered too folklore orientated and thrown out or discovered later.

So was Paul an ex Jew with a guilty conscience, fervid imagination and mental health issues who just got lucky? Probably but we’ll never know.