Psychosis, noun, severe mental disorder with loss of contact with reality.
Have you ever known someone who is a die-hard Christian? You know, the ones who insist on praying over every morsel of food they eat, who insist on talking about Jesus as though he were a rock star, the ones who like to look down their thin little noses at you for having a life? Growing up in the deep South of the U.S.A. I have had lifelong opportunities to know such people and as a psychologist, I've recently come to a certain realization. But let me give you a "For Instance:"
Say a perfect stranger came up to you in a public setting. This person acted as though they knew you, despite having just met you for the first time. They strike up a conversation and somewhere in the middle they ask you if you have accepted the Easter Bunny as your God. With a perfectly straight face, they then proceed to tell you how the Earth started out as quiche baked in a giant oven for a week and the moon is just a hunk of cheese that fell off when they took it out to cool. Then after the quiche was cooled, the Easter Bunny came down, grabbed a couple of handfulls of the baked goodness, breathed life into it, and that's where humankind originated. Now, they go on to tell you story after story, and one story about how the Easter Bunny one day was hunted down and shot by the other inhabitants of the quiche, and they didn't just shoot him, they nailed him to a wall and tormented him for days on end before finally putting him out of his misery. And the Easter Bunny died so that no one would ever have to go hungry for quiche ever again. And that's why you should accept the Easter Bunny as your personal Lord and Savior. Not only that, but if you don't, when you die you'll have to move to a planet where there IS NO QUICHE and you have to do without it's savory goodness for all eternity.
It would take you all of how many seconds to walk away from this lunatic? Or maybe you're like me, and you stick around to see just how crazy they are...
Why is it that when we change the names and some of the smaller details it's easy to see how crazy it is? Yet there are millions of people who are otherwise reasonable and intelligent who fall for a different version of the Easter Bunny story and they just eat it up like it was quiche.
In a very literal, clinical context, to be a faithful Christian is to suffer from a Delusional Psychosis. They believe things that cannot be proven, things that any reasonably intelligent person would see through immediately in the right light, and they don't know they're delusional. In a very real sense, there is no way to differentiate between Christianity and other forms of Psychosis, but because we have gotten used to overlooking the "religious" we no longer see them as mentally ill.
So I have a challenge for you. If you have even the slightest vestige of Christian faith in the Bible or Jesus or any of the Christian mythology, this is a challenge you will find rather enlightening. Write down in a paragraph or less the essence of what you believe to be true about Christianity. Then look back at what you wrote, replace every noun with a vegetable (only tangible nouns here -- if you can put it in a wheelbarrow it is a tangible noun), replace every name with the name of a cartoon character, and turn every verb into it's opposite form (e.g. "give" into "take", "believe" into "doubt", "save" into "waste"). Now re-read your paragraph. THen at the bottom of the page write: "All tomatoes are evil." Now go back to the original idea you thought about when you wrote your paragraph and as you do re-read the altered paragraph and notice what happens inside your mind.
Post your experiences with this experiment to this thread, I am very curious to see if you don't find some interesting discrepancies.
I'm not saying you'll find my hypothesis correct by doing this, but it will certainly give you some insight into the way people encode reality with their words. And when you consider that people build their entire lives on those word-encoded realities, you might see the world in slightly newer terms.
But don't take my word for it, what the hell do I know anyway?? ;-D
