In Psychiatry, a delusion is a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact. Psychoses according to dictionary.com is characterized by a set of symptoms such as delusions or hallucinations.
Religions from the ancient to modern times have always made spectacular claims. These claims vary from the supernatural to the unbelievable to the outright impossible and preposterous. The Abrahamic traditions is most known for making such claims. The Torah, which consist of the first five books of the Christian bible, is replete with claims that are in today's world, plainly untruths passed as absolute facts. If the Torah is to be taken at its plain word, then the god of Abraham is a god who created the world in seven days (why not in an instant if he is that powerful?), who gets angry and jealous (like any normal human being), who sent the flood to wipe out everything that he created in the first place and who commanded a man to stuff all the creatures of the world in a boat 45 feet in height, 450 feet in length, 75 feet in width, made of wood and held 50,000 animals, 2 million insects, 7 people, a 600 year old man and enough provisions for its inhabitants for one year! As unbelievable as it sounds, there are actually people who would take it literally as having actually happened.
Any holy book of any religion is not exempted from such pompous, self-laudatory, fantastically out of this world claims yet none claims such arrogant self-confidence and self-righteousness about its truth than the Abrahamic faiths, most especially the Christian bible and the Islamic Koran. For all its claims of a merciful and just god, such god is also harsh, cruel and even murderous. Take for example the exhortations of god to kill all homosexuals in Leviticus 20:13, the murder, rape and pillage of whole groups of people in Numbers 31:7-18, and actually gives instructions on how to enslave people as described in Leviticus 25:44-46. The Koran is even more graphic, it actually gives instructions on how homosexuals are killed, what to do to disobedient wives among others.
Religions turn otherwise rational, sentient human beings into absolute mindless, obedient, subservient and irrational creatures. It erodes man's sense of humanity in its absolutism and unmitigated cruelty against those who do not conform to its idealized version of the good life.
The systematic slaughter of perceived witches, heretics and simply the different in Christian Europe from the 12th century to the middle part of the 19th century attests to the delusional brutality and psychotic nature of organized religion, especially the Abrahamic traditions. Although Judaism and Christianity have since outgrown their violent and certainly genocidal past, the cudgel has been in modern times been taken by Islamic radicals who envision the forced Islamization of the world.
The lack of dynamic reflection and the active suppression of dialogue in the Islamic world has brought Islam back to its violent, militant and militarist past. As articulated by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, no modern organized religion has implemented a clear goal of establishing its political, social and religious inclinations than Islam. The silence of the vast majority of Muslims, who are against intolerance and violence, been overtaken by the fundamentalist Islamists with their repressive and dictatorial brand of Islam. The delusion is no more clearer than their insistence that their brand of interpretation is the only interpretation. Dissent is violently suppressed, critical thinking is blunted with rote memorization of Koranic verses and infused with the insecure and immature interpretations of a few but nonetheless influential cadre of radical clerics.
Modern society is at a peril from fundamentalism in all religions and in all ideas. Claims of absolutism, be the idea religious or secular, begets violence, engenders fear, provokes wars, births mistrust, stirs animosity and enslaves peoples. When absolutism is claimed by religion, the implications are widened, broadened and deepened because then, any act is possible, all excuses are allowable, no compromise is possible and only its fulfillment is permissible.
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