Schizophrenia and Religion

This Psychology research paper is about, what is in fact, considered to be a mental disorder in the science community. Although this is a controversial topic to the point that it is almost taboo, that does not take away the science behind the human condition that billions of people have for religion. Religions effect on the brain and its ability to stifle human curiosity by filling in the gaps with a god is a psychology topic in regard to human development. In reference to nature vs nurture in psychology, religion falls under the nurture umbrella; it is something that is taught and learned, it is not something that is already inherently built in, and therefore is not natural. There are many psychological studies documenting how a person is raised; what they are taught to be right and wrong or appropriate and inappropriate and how it becomes ingrained into that person’s belief system.
Recently in ECPI psychology class PSY105-DHM, a true story was discussed about a girl who was shown love from her father through sexual relations. This girl grew up believing that was a normal and appropriate way to show love and affection. That same girl later had a child of her own who she also had sexual relations with. She did not think she was doing anything inappropriate. Through her eyes, society was wrong and her way of showing love was appropriate. It is the mental illness pedophilia when a person is attracted to people who are prepubescent, and it is incest when it is within the same family.
How someone is raised does affect how they mature and how they operate in society. If a child is not put into social situations at a young age they could turn into someone who is shy, scared, or timid in social settings and can be diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, also known as social phobia. A person who experiences trauma as a child or as an adult, can be diagnosed with PTSD if they continue to be affected long after the incident occurred. This also goes for a child who is taught that they are born sinners and that they will spend eternity in hell unless they believe in god, live by god’s rules, worship this god, and pass on the teachings of this god through religion. When a person is raised in such a way but you take the word religion out of the equation there is no longer the taboo dilemma of being worried about offending someone because of their beliefs. (Hearing Voices; Mental Health Foundation, nd), when someone feels something that is not there, hears voices that are not present, and sees something that does not exist, that person has the symptoms of schizophrenia. As soon as we take all of those symptoms and throw religion back into the mix, suddenly it is taboo to diagnose this as anything other than faith.
When someone is raised with certain beliefs and those beliefs are enforced through fear, through ritual, through tradition, and through reward, that produces a psychological condition that makes it very hard for someone to allow any conflicting information to sway those beliefs. When someone is raised in such a way it does not matter how much evidence is prepared and presented; like the girl who thought it was appropriate to show love through sexual relations due to the way she was raised, or a child who is not introduced to social activities grows up to have social anxiety. When someone is raised to believe in something simply on faith and there is no supporting evidence that it exists, they will think that anyone who tells them it probably doesn’t exist, must be wrong. This statement is supported in the documentary (The Unbelievers, 2013).
This is not a condition of a specific type of religion, this goes for any religion or anything that is taught and reinforced through the years that a person is growing to maturity. This is why most religious people believe that their religion is the correct religion. Even though there is vast evidence provided through science and discovery that there are billions of galaxies in the universe, with billions of stars, and even more planets, many religions teach that our little planet in our little solar system, with our one specific human species will be blessed with eternal life (after death) through faith in a god, so long as their very specific religion is the correct one.
Religion attempts to teach that the words found in whichever holy book you choose are not to be questioned; doing so will result in eternal damnation. This is reflective on the nurture aspect of psychology; teaching a person at an early age to fear ideas or doubts of particular teachings. The need for religion is partly because we are aware of our own mortality, and that our time here on earth is limited. Religion is one of the ways that humans are able to find it in themselves to accept the loss of a loved one. It’s easier to let go of someone you love so dearly if you are convinced that they are in a better place and that you will see them again someday. In science on a molecular level they do still exist, and we all are as old as the universe; per (Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos, 2014) “We are all stardust.” When we die we will still exist just as we did before we were born, as atoms, particles, molecules, and biology that will decay, change, or be consumed by and become something else.
The human need for religion is that of not only the teachings that are learned but also due to the need to believe that we have a purpose. For most people if they do not believe something is in store for them after their life here on earth, they will often ask “than what is the point?” Unlike most species that are completely unaware of how temporary their time is and are oblivious to their mortality, we humans know that our clock is ticking. (Dawkins, R. The God Delusion, 2006) brings up several valid points throughout his book that support this.. If it wasn’t for billions of people being raised and indoctrinated into religion from childhood this wouldn’t be such a “walk on egg shells” topic.
There is an article about a man who had an accident at birth (Who was David Reimer, 2010). It was assumed that since the damage to his penis was so severe and it was removed that the family should raise David as a girl. The family treated and raised David as a girl for several years. The doctor and the mother thought it was best for David to think he was a girl because of the injury. They thought they were doing the right thing and looking out for his best interest. He was being brainwashed, this is abuse. After several years of identity issues, relationship problems with his brother and his love interest, David eventually committed suicide. He discovered that everything he was taught about himself was a lie and although at first he seemed to feel relief from finding out the truth, he eventually took his own life. On a different scale this isn’t any different from telling your kids the Easter bunny is real, Santa Clause is real, Thor is real, the tooth fairy is real, Jesus is the son of God who is also real! Nearly everything listed are examples of fairy tales. Thor along with other Greek gods that are now considered mythical, were once believed in as real gods. It is a mental condition when you have a crippling fear of germs (OCD). It is a mental condition when someone lives their life a certain way because they were proselytized into believing they would spend an eternity in hell if they didn’t, before they had the ability to make the choice for themselves.
The Christian Religion would have you believe that we received our morals through the stories in the bible and more specifically the 10 commandments. (msn.com, 2015) The Muslim Religion teaches believers that if someone insults or pokes fun at the profit Mohamed they are the infidel and the appropriate retaliation for this offense is death. It is a mental disorder when someone decides to shoot several rounds of ammo into the audience at a Batman premiere, but if they are yelling “God is Great” while doing it than it’s considered a religious issue and an act of terror. (Truth Be Known, nd.) It is a mental disorder when someone thinks they hear voices that tell them to buy a gun, drive onto a military installation, and proceed to shoot and kill as many people as they can until they themselves are killed. If that same person was yelling “God is Great” while shooting dozens of people than there is suddenly only religious conflict being considered.
“At the end of the 19th century Jean Charcot and his star pupil Sigmund Freud, linked religion with hysteria and neurosis” (Koenig, H. 2008). If someone believes that Mickey Mouse will grant them eternal life in Disney Land as a reward for living a certain way they would be diagnosed as clinically insane. Change Mickey Mouse to Jesus, or Allah, and change Disney Land to Heaven and it becomes widely accepted as a completely normal belief.
I picked this topic not because I want to offend people who are religious and I understand that not offending someone is a difficult task when doing research on the link between religion and schizophrenia. Being raised in a very religious household and only through my own love for learning, excitement fed through discoveries made due to a deep curiosity, I have grown out of the religious beliefs that I once held very deeply. It is certainly brainwashing when someone knows that 2+2 = 4 but because they were raised that 2+2 = 5 that even if they add it up and do not get 5 they still say it’s 5, is clearly a state of denial and mental illness. To me that’s what religion is. Through the research I have done, the papers I have read, the sites I have visited, the books written by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Nye, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, Sam Harris and many others, all provide extensive evidence that directly conflicts with the teachings in just about every “holy book” that has ever existed. Even with mountains of evidence presented, millions of religious people will deny all this evidence and only accept what doesn’t conflict with their faith.
I take a chance by choosing this illness as my research paper because I think it’s important to raise awareness of how many millions have been killed over centuries in the name of religion but it’s only a small handful in comparison that commit murder without religious attachment that have been deemed mentally ill. Is it not crazy when a person will wrap bomb vests onto children, trick them into approaching American troops, and then blow them up if they get close enough before getting shot? This puts the troops in a position where they have to stop the child with a bullet before the child and others are killed from the explosion.
This research paper is not an attempt to say that although many aspects of Religion are inherently bad, and many of the claims people make to religion are the same as the symptoms of schizophrenia, but the bad greatly overshadows the good. There are plenty of groups, volunteers, committees, and generous people in the world that are Secular, and do not carry all the negative baggage of religion to find the morals to be good people. When someone constantly finds themselves adjusting the “meaning” and “interpretation” of their “good book” in order to fit within today’s ever-changing world, who is brainwashed? Is it not brainwashing when you look at cultures and religions all over the world and you see that certain religions are heavier in particular regions of the world? Clearly this is representative of how religion is taught, and over the years and around the globe the story changes. If I tell you a story and that story gets told from one person to the next until it makes it around the globe, due to human error, and human nature to exaggerate or modify stories, it would probably not even resemble the story I told by the time it makes it all the way back to me. If you are an American Christian you were very likely raised a certain way for as far back as you can remember. If you were born in India in the same way you would be of a completely different religion. Does this not remove the ability or at least make the ability to make an intelligent, educated choice of what you believe in more difficult? (http://www.bible-knowledge.com/adam-and-eve/, nd.) Do I have a mental disorder if I think the world is flat, that I am the son of God, that I can walk on water, turn water into wine, understand a talking snake, believe my companion was made from my rib, or that the only way to eternal life is to worship the Flying spaghetti monster? Would everything I just stated have been completely believable and considered the speaking of a mentally stable individual if I had put God in place of “Flying spaghetti monster”, or maybe if this paper was being published 2015 years ago, or maybe if I wasn’t saying I could do those things but I simply believed someone else witnessed all of those things?
If someone today says they are a profit of god, they are labeled by most as crazy, if someone today said they did not have sex and that their child is one of immaculate conception, no one would believe them. Several of the resources I have found would label religious people as delusional, and even mentally unstable. If a topic is so highly controversial that there hasn’t been an official diagnosis made to present it as a disorder, does that mean there isn’t a mental issue that could be related to believing something blindly even when everything someone learns tells them it’s wrong? Is it not an issue of mental illness or psychology of the brain when someone would commit murder if someone insults something that they themselves have never seen, never touched, and have only read about, for example the late Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons?

References
Benhamou, L. (2015) Mohammed holds Je suis Charlie’ sign in new Charlie Hebdo. Retrieved from http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/mohammed-holds-je-suis-charlie-sign-in-new-charlie-hebdo/ar-AA85wHs?ocid=ansnewsafp11
Bradley, M. (1982). The Bible of Knowledge. Retrieved from http://www.bible-knowledge.com/adam-and-eve/
Dawkins, R. (2006). The God Delusion. New Zealand: Bantam Press.
Golar, C (2010) Who Was David Reimer? Retrieved from http://www.shb-info.org/reimer3.html
Hearing Voices, (nd) Mental Health Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/help-information/mental-health-a-z/H/hearing-voices/
Kapogiannis, D. (2009) How our Brains Evolved to Accommodate Religious Belief. Retrieved from http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/Default.aspx?id=39426,