Psychiatry views faith in God as a brain trick!

"God has also set eternity in their heart" Ecclesiastes 3:11

Psychiatry believes that religion, faith in God, spirit and soul are trick played by the brain. Now that Casper has learned he doesn't exist, will he have to go into psychotherapy?
	Psychiatry is Anti-Christian Psychiatry is Biblical Psychiatry is Atheistic Psychiatry is Humanistic Psychiatry is Darwinian

Introduction:

1. Psychiatry believes that when someone has faith in God, that his brain is merely playing tricks on him.
2. Psychiatry rejects the existence of God, soul and spirit. In fact Psychiatry rejects the entire spiritual realm as vestigial genes we would be better off not having any more.
3. The Bible explicitly teaches that man has a spirit and a soul that is not only entirely distinct from the body, it consciously survives death. Eccl 12:7 says that at death: "then the dust (body) will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it." Ecclesiastes 12:7. This concept of the dual nature of man is rejected by most everyone in the psychiatric community.
4. The Bible explicitly teaches that when a person dies, they do not cease to exist, but continue in conscious existence with all their memories intact awaiting judgement from God for everything they have done on the earth. The bible provides no exception for the behaviour of mentally ill people. Sin will be judged.
5. The Biblical doctrine of the dichotomous nature of man, being composed of an immaterial spirit and a physical body is called the "Moral/spiritual model" in Biblical Psychiatry.
6. Evolutionary Psychiatry bemoans the fact that faith in God is so universal and wide spread. They argue that there must be a "God Gene" in the DNA that is responsible for this widespread believe in God. In fact, we believe that it is indeed an instinct that God placed inside the human heart to believe in Him. We were created by God with a natural instinct to believe in him: "God has also set eternity in their heart" Ecclesiastes 3:11

A. Psychiatry rejects the soul and spirit:

1. "At that point it may become obvious to everyone that all we are looking at is a piece of machinery, an analog chemical computer, that processes information from the environment. "All," since you can look and look and you will not find any ghostly self inside, or any mind, or any soul. Thereupon, in the year 2006 or 2026, some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce: "The self is dead"--except that being prone to the poetic, like Nietzsche I, he will probably say: "The soul is dead." He will say that he is merely bringing the news, the news of the greatest event of the millennium: "The soul, that last refuge of values, is dead, because educated people no longer believe it exists." (Tom Wolfe, "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Athenaeum Reading Room, 1996)
2. "Paul Churchland, also a professor of philosophy at the University of California in San Diego, pulls no punches about his commitment to a reductive-materialist view of the human mind. In his latest book, The Eitqine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul, he asserts that all human mental life is reducible to the brain viewed as a "biological computer. ... Churchland's finale is truly mind/brain boggling. "The aim of these concluding suggestions," he declares, "is not to deny us our humanity, but to see it better served than ever before. That is why understanding the brain is so supremely important. It is the engine of reason. It is the seat of the soul." With this sentence, on page 319, the book ends. Three-hundred ten pages earlier, Churchland asserts: "The doctrine of an immaterial soul looks, to put it frankly, like just another myth, false not just at the edges, but to the core." So is soul a myth or is "it" in the brain?" (The Meaning of the Mind, Thomas Szasz, 1996 AD, p 78, 80)
3. "If what you mean by "soul" is something immaterial and immortal, something that exists independently of the brain, then souls do not exist. This is old hat for most psychologists and philosophers, the stuff of introductory lectures." (Psychologist Paul Bloom, In response to the World Question Center 2006 question, "What is your dangerous idea?" author of Descartes' Baby)
4. "materialist neuroscientists and philosophers hold that mind, consciousness, and self are by-products of the brain's electrical and chemical processes, and that RSMEs [religious/spiritual/mystical experiences] are "nothing but" brain states or delusions created by neural activity. Accordingly these scientists and philosophers believe that there is no spiritual source for RSMEs, that is, they think that the human brain creates these experiences and, in so doing, creates God." (The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard Ph.D., Neuroscientist, 2007, p289)
5. More detailed discussion about how psychiatry rejects the soul and views man as a pile of chemicals.
   

B. Psychiatrists believe religion is a chemical reaction and a product of evolution:

1. Psychiatrists and evolutionists teach that man's inborn instinct to have faith in God is a product of evolution.
2. "If the brain evolved by natural selection ... religious beliefs must have arisen by the same mechanism." (Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, 1978, ch 1)
3. "Wouldn't the fact that all human cultures, no matter how isolated, have believed in the existence of a spiritual realm suggest that such a perception must constitute an inherent characteristic of our species, that is, a genetically inherited trait?" (Matthew Alper, The "God" Part of the Brain, 2001, p 67)"As scientists continue to unravel and decipher the contents of the human genome, perhaps there will come a time when we will have knowledge of precisely which genes are responsible or those parts of the brain that give rise to religiosity and spiritual consciousness. In order to accommodate this new field, the sciences may have to look toward a whole new discipline-a new geno-theology-for its answers." (Alper, "God" Part of the Brain, p 134, footnote)
4. "It may seem sacrilegious and presumptuous to reduce God to a few ornery synapses, but modern neuroscience isn't shy about defining our most sacred notions-love, joy, altruism, pity-as nothing more than static from our impressively large cerebrums. Persinger goes one step further. His work practically constitutes a Grand Unified Theory of the Otherworldly: He believes cerebral fritzing is responsible for almost anything one might describe as paranormal-aliens, heavenly apparitions, past-life sensations, near-death experiences, awareness of the soul, you name it." (Jack Hitt, "This Is Your Brain on God," Wired, November 1999)
5. "In The God Gene I propose that spirituality has a biological mechanism akin to birdsong, albeit a far more complex and nuanced one." (Behavioral geneticist Dean Hamer, God Gene, p. 8)
6. "By inventing a piece of wired-up headgear that induces "religious" experiences in the people who put it on, Sudbury neurotheologist Michael Persinger has shaken the foundations of faith and science." (Robert Hercz, "The God Helmet," Saturday Night, October 2002, p. 41)
7. "Anyone who still doubts the brain's ability to generate religious experiences need only visit neuroscientist Michael Persinger at Laurentian University in the bleak nickel-mining town of Sudbury, Ontario. He claims almost anyone can meet God, just wearing his special helmet." (Bob Holmes, "In Search of God," New Scientist, April 21, 2001)

C. Psychiatrists whine about the instinct to believe in God:

1. What everyone knows is that we are born with a natural instinct to have faith and believe in God. We have to work at not believing in God.
2. "God has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end." Ecclesiastes 3:11
3. Neuroscientist, Mario Beauregard, correctly explains that our ability to believe is tied in our ability to think in the abstract: "What human beings actually inherit is the capacity for abstract ideas like God, the future, ethics, free will, death, mathematics, and so forth. As we would expect, religious ideas normally correlate with regions of the brain that are well developed in humans. But the search for an inherited mechanism or process that governs specifically religious ideas (and not other ideas?) is misguided." (The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard Ph.D., Neuroscientist, 2007, p45)
4. Below are a series of statements of how evolutionary psychiatrists explain why faith in God is so widespread on earth.
5. "It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe." (Richard Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker, p. 316)
6. "The reasons for religion's tenacity have become much easier to identify over the past five years, thanks to advances in several modern fields of study, including a new branch of science known as neurotheology. It seems that our brain structure predisposes us to spiritual belief." (Patchen Barss, Me of Little Faith," Saturday Night, October 2005)
7. "When tribes living in remote areas come up with a concept of God as readily as nations living shoulder to shoulder, it's a fairly strong indication that the idea is preloaded in the genome rather than picked up on the fly. If that's the case, it's an equally strong indication that there are very good reasons it's there." (Time, Is God in Our Genes?, Oct. 25, 2004)
8. The idea of the God Spot "refers to the fact that humans inherit a predisposition to be spiritual-to reach out and look for a higher being." (Laura Sheahen, The Brain Chemistry of the Buddha, an interview with Dean Hamer about the God gene, Beliefnet, 2007)
9. "That, too, is biologically mandated. Finally, in a theory almost unbelievably grandiose, Thornhill and Palmer suggest that the opposition to their theories is itself based on evolution. Our brains, they say, are so much the product of evolution that they have been preprogrammed with a set of beliefs, one of which is a reluctance to believe explanations involving evolution: "Evolved psychological intuitions about behavioral causation can mislead individuals into believing that they know as much as experts do about proximate human motivation." Don't like the theory? Trust the "experts," who have painfully overcome their aversion to evolution. (This is one of the ways in which the new evolutionary psychologists resemble the old Marxists: there is no place to stand outside their system of meaning, except for the privileged place where they themselves stand.)" (Jerry A. Coyne, Evolutionary biologist, "The Fairy Tales of Evolutionary Psychology," New Republic, March 4, 2000)
10. "But recently, materialistic explanations of religion and spirituality have gotten out of hand. Influenced by this materialistic prejudice, popular media jump at stories about the violence gene, the fat gene, the monogamy gene, the infidelity gene, and now, even a God gene! The argument goes like this: evolutionary psychologists attempt to explain human spirituality and belief in God by insisting that cave dwellers in the remote past who believed in a supernatural reality were more likely to pass on their genes than cave dwellers who didn't. Progress in genetics and neuroscience has encouraged some to look, quite seriously, for such a God gene, or else a God spot, module, factor, or switch in the human brain. By the time the amazing "God helmet" (a snowmobile helmet modified with solenoids that purportedly could stimulate subjects to experience God) in Sudbury, Canada, became a magnet for science journalists in the 1990s (the Decade of the Brain), materialism was just about passing beyond parody. Nonetheless, materialists continue to search for a God switch. Such comic diversions aside, there is no escaping the nonmaterialism of the human mind." (The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard Ph.D., Neuroscientist, 2007, p xiv)

D. Biopsychiatrists view man as a meat robot computer driven by soups and sparks:

1. "The human mind is a computer made out of meat." (Marvin Minsky, Artificial intelligence promoter)

2. "I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence. All the neurons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion." (Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO)

3. "It may seem sacrilegious and presumptuous to reduce God to a few ornery synapses, but modern neuroscience isn't shy about defining our most sacred notions-love, joy, altruism, pity-as nothing more than static from our impressively large cerebrums. Persinger goes one step further. His work practically constitutes a Grand Unified Theory of the Otherworldly: He believes cerebral fritzing is responsible for almost anything one might describe as paranormal-aliens, heavenly apparitions, past-life sensations, near-death experiences, awareness of the soul, you name it." (Jack Hitt, "This Is Your Brain on God," Wired, November 1999)

4. "The reasons for religion's tenacity have become much easier to identify over the past five years, thanks to advances in several modern fields of study, including a new branch of science known as neurotheology. It seems that our brain structure predisposes us to spiritual belief." (Patchen Barss, Me of Little Faith," Saturday Night, October 2005)

5. "I think we follow the basic law of nature, which is that we're a bunch of chemical reactions running around in a bag." (Dean Hamer, chief of gene structure at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, "Is God in Our Genes?" Time, October 25, 2004)

6. The idea of the God Spot "refers to the fact that humans inherit a predisposition to be spiritual-to reach out and look for a higher being." (Laura Sheahen, The Brain Chemistry of the Buddha, an interview with Dean Hamer about the God gene, Beliefnet, 2007)

7. "Even though it's common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life-our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his own intimate private self-is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else. (V. S. Ramachandran, Neuroscientist, Reith Lectures, Lecture 1, 2003)

8. "Evolutionary psychology suffers from the scientific equivalent of megalo-mania. Most of its adherents are convinced that virtually every human action or feeling, including depression, deviant sex, religion, and consciousness, was put directly into our brains by natural selection. In this view, evolution becomes the key-the only key-that can unlock our humanity." Jerry A. Coyne, Evolutionary biologist, "The Fairy Tales of Evolutionary Psychology," New Republic, March 4, 2000)

9. Our comment: Artificial intelligence machines and computers in general, appear to have intelligence because man programmed it to look that way. The Artificial intelligence computers that TV commentators predict will be in every house by 2030 AD, and what Hollywood movies visualize today, have failed to note that artificial intelligence cannot be achieved with even an infinite number of calculations per second. The computers of the future will have enormous processing power, but still be unable to feel the pride of beating a human at chess or pity for humans when they never win again.

E. Psychiatrists build junk science "God Helmet":

The God Helmet Invented in 2002 AD by psychologist Michael Persinger to induce a spiritual experience into the brain with magnetism. Psychiatrists, already adherents to evolution, believe the prevalence of religion in all cultures is because of a malfunctioning part of the brain! Even atheist Richard Dawkins embarrassed himself by flying 7000 miles to try it on and experience God for himself!

Conclusion: 

1. It is offensive and insulting to have a psychiatrist tell Christians that our faith in God is a trick of the brain.
2. Psychiatrists, being evolutionary atheists, view themselves as superior to Christians whose faith is the trick of vestigial genes.
3. When you go to a psychiatrist, remember that they view your faith as something they would like to cure with a drug.

By Steve Rudd: Contact the author for comments, input or corrections.

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