Christianity and Schizophrenia Redux: An Empirical Study

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i’m not sure what this paper says

I couldn’t make a whole lot of sense to it either…

But I love you’re contributions firemonkey…keep them coming.

But then, I suppose it might be saying is there a correlation between religious beliefs and practice and delusions of religiousity? For me, having been raised an Episcopalian (they don’t exactly force it down you’re throat and I never once heard mention of there even being a hell for the “others” to be forsaken to) I can say I am not a religious person, I respect and believe there’s value in all religions, but myself am an agnostic.

However. I have experienced relgious “delusions” or whatever they really are. These based on the visions and unplaced memories that came as flash backs during various points in my life, especially in my mid 20’s. I have visions and “memories” in my mind of having traveled by sea to the middle east in my early teens with a friend and returned with a religious relic, possibly the orignal ten commandments which I couldn’t find a way to deliver to a "farm on a hill in Monterey Massachusettes. I have a vision/memory in my mind of being on a ship in a storm both dope and sea sick and the spirit of a red haired girl in her late teens appeared to me and explained that she’d been on this very voyage in her lifetime, explained that she’d been just as traumatized as I’d been, and then as she dissapeared the stormy sea became as if still and a voice spoke from above, the words of which I do not remember, I’ve described it as if Morgan Freeman were narrating a movie about the prophets of the Abrahmic religions, visions of whose lives I saw played out before me on the still but stormy sea.

But am I a Christian? No. I accept Christianity except when hate is involved, all religions included here, I believe there’s truth to all religions in some aspect. Do I absolutely believe this actually happened to me? No. Do I absolutely discount it as the product of a diseased mind? No. I just try to accept it as something I cannot understand or piece together and move on.,

I think the takeaway is this:

Schizophrenia patients with religious delusions did not exhibit enhanced Christian beliefs and rituals. These results do not confirm the hypothesis of general hyper-religiosity in schizophrenia.

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