Barefoot Bree

Hmmmm - so, combining the last two posts, would you say that the mass hypnosis coming from above is internalized by many individuals to the point of becoming obsessive-compulsive about certain elements of ritual?

Hopeful Monsters

That's a possibility - but maybe both are going on: organised religion deliberately or accidently employs hypnotic techniques and, separate from this, it satisfies compulsions to suffer repeated thoughts and repeated behaviours.

These two are just a part of what makes it so powerful.

Clivedurdle

They most definitely feed on each other - the praying obsessive monk, punishing himself according to the rules of Opus Dei, getting high with the smells and bells of high mass, and the heavy pentecostal meeting, everyone hypnotised into the very strange group experience of singing in the spirit.

I have been posting in other parts about psychology and madness.

Maybe my resistance to how psychology and psychiatry are practised is because they are avoiding the elephant in the living room of our religious behaviour and how it is really inseperable from our psychology, our abilities to change our states of consciousness and our use of drugs.

Barefoot Bree

That's an interesting point, Clive - but I think you might be selling many practitioners of psychiatry short. There may indeed be many who do delve into that morass.

Clivedurdle

Here in Britain, every morning on BBC radio 4 we have a religious slot "thought for the day". We have an established church, where debates about the evil of homosexuality are given time of day.

We do not have anyone - as we do with cigarettes - saying religion is harmful to your mental health, when it probably will not take much to establish that!

Barefoot Bree

Publically? On the radio? I seriously doubt you would, at that - nor would you find such being taken seriously in this part of the world, either - if it managed to get on the air at all.

In private practice, however, I'll bet you'd find a much different story. You'd have to find a nonreligious practitioner to start with, of course..... but even the religious ones would likely have room for admitting that some patients take their religion a little compulsively....

Clivedurdle

But medicine has an ethical code - if behaviours are thought to be problematic in terms of mental health - and we seem to have evidence of this for example with OCD and catholicism, hypnosis with the pentes and rocking behaviours in Islam, - there should be clear statements at least that there is cause for concern! It is a public health matter!

Barefoot Bree

I wouldn't disagree with you, but I seriously doubt any medical professional in either your country or mine would have the sheer fucking brass to come out and say it in public, not in today's religio-political climate. Sad. Perhaps in time......