Posted: Mar 27, 2010 2:54 pm
Julia wrote:
Yeah, religious delusions are rather common among psychotics. It makes me wonder if there isn't some primitive part of the brain having to do with woo and religion that is more activated during psychotic episodes.
What it is, is a desire for a grand legitimization for a spectacular act. Think of the guy who flew his plain into the IRS building a few months ago, he views his act as a part of grand mission, hoping to fuel something dramatic by his martyrdom.
Ted Kaczynski claimed "he wanted society to return to a time when technology was not a threat to its future, asserting that "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race". This is how he legitimized his targeting of universities and airline industry.
Or take the French Revolution, with its Reign of Terror, and the guillotines, that legitimized it's thirst for violence as for the sake of rationalism and the enlightenment.
The only reason we see religion used so frequently by psychotics, is because we forget that religion was once the language of all human ambition. Modernity has offered us alternative languages, and we see it used in the same sort of way, to justify a man's desire for cruelty and violence.
A bear will kill its cub. Chimpanzees have been observed cannibalizing infants, and carrying out extermination wars. They are just feeding their desires. Our instinctual desires are not only for the pretty stuff, but also for the cruel and violent, but being creatures of self-awareness we desire for a legitimization for appeasing these innate desires.
I was watching a film the other day, that closed with a violent scene of vengeance, beautifully done. Like an erotic dance of brutality. Throats were cut, men were continually stabbed, limbs were torn, bodies mutilated, and the girl I was watching it with slipped, and said, "Ooaah, I want to do that.", like a child watching other children on a merry-go-around, desiring to ride as well.