Leo Volont
Registered Senior Member
God As A Psychological Event
There have been enough studies to show that Psychological Experiences are not arbitrary and random, that they show pattern, design, meaning, are predictable and can be mapped – that if a patient experience this, this and this, then it is likely he will soon experience that. In healthy patients Maturity Curves and Passages can be tracked along known curves, and in pathological cases deterioration can follow predictable lines as so also the course of healing. All this is to say that the Mind and its experiences are in a manner Real Events, following all the ordinary rules by which Objective Phenomena must abide. If it is Objective, then it is Real, and if it is real, then, well, it can’t be so easily dismissed, can it?
So what if Psychology has encountered God Delusions – patients that had experienced God? And then, what if many other patients had experienced much the same order of Delusion – that God is seen by different people, but in substantially the same way? And not in accordance with the doctrines of the Religion of their upbringing, but a Surprise God that is consistent across population groups? Years ago before the Internet I had read a Paper by a psychologist who maintained that the God Delusion was powerfully therapeutic – that certain psychotic patients would experience a God Delusion during the course of their affliction but that the God Vision would come as a healing crisis… that the God Epiphany would bring a Re-Integration of the personality. That God Heals.
Well, this raises the question as to whether an Atheist who ever dreams of God can really ever truly consider himself to be an Atheist? If God’s True Realm is in the Mind and nowhere else – the Collective Mind – then once that God is encountered, how can that God subsequently be denied?
And then we must wonder about an Atheist who reads a Psychology Paper that shows a consensus regarding God Delusions or Visions. Can one continue to deny God even after He has become a factor in one of our Scientific Disciplines?
There have been enough studies to show that Psychological Experiences are not arbitrary and random, that they show pattern, design, meaning, are predictable and can be mapped – that if a patient experience this, this and this, then it is likely he will soon experience that. In healthy patients Maturity Curves and Passages can be tracked along known curves, and in pathological cases deterioration can follow predictable lines as so also the course of healing. All this is to say that the Mind and its experiences are in a manner Real Events, following all the ordinary rules by which Objective Phenomena must abide. If it is Objective, then it is Real, and if it is real, then, well, it can’t be so easily dismissed, can it?
So what if Psychology has encountered God Delusions – patients that had experienced God? And then, what if many other patients had experienced much the same order of Delusion – that God is seen by different people, but in substantially the same way? And not in accordance with the doctrines of the Religion of their upbringing, but a Surprise God that is consistent across population groups? Years ago before the Internet I had read a Paper by a psychologist who maintained that the God Delusion was powerfully therapeutic – that certain psychotic patients would experience a God Delusion during the course of their affliction but that the God Vision would come as a healing crisis… that the God Epiphany would bring a Re-Integration of the personality. That God Heals.
Well, this raises the question as to whether an Atheist who ever dreams of God can really ever truly consider himself to be an Atheist? If God’s True Realm is in the Mind and nowhere else – the Collective Mind – then once that God is encountered, how can that God subsequently be denied?
And then we must wonder about an Atheist who reads a Psychology Paper that shows a consensus regarding God Delusions or Visions. Can one continue to deny God even after He has become a factor in one of our Scientific Disciplines?
