Kathleen Taylor, Neuroscientist, Says Religious Fundamentalism Could Be Treated As A Mental Illness
The Huffington Post | By Meredith Bennett-Smith
Posted: 05/31/2013 12:21 pm EDT | Updated: 05/31/2013 12:59 pm EDT
...In response to a question about the future of neuroscience, Taylor said that "One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated," The Times of London notes....
Kathleen Taylor, Neuroscientist, Says Religious Fundamentalism Could Be Treated As A Mental Illness - click
Psychiatry's Views on Conservatives
"In August 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million taxpayer-funded study. It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed. Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from ‘mental rigidity,’ ‘dogmatism,’ and ‘uncertainty avoidance,’ together with associated indicators for mental illness."
Source: B.K. Eakman, Chronicles, October 2004, pp. 28-29.
"Political conservatism as motivated social cognition" By Jost, John T.; Glaser, Jack; Kruglanski, Arie W.; Sulloway, Frank J. APA Psychological Bulletin, May 2003, Vol 129(3), p 339-375
Psychiatry's Views on Education
"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future"
Dr. Chester M. Pierce, Psychiatrist, address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973
"We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers, and others with a vested interest in controlling us. ‘Thou shalt become as gods, knowing good and evil,’ good and evil with which to keep children under control, with which to impose local and familial and national loyalties and with which to blind children to their glorious intellectual heritage… The results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living, to reason clearly or to make a world fit to live in."
Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, President, World Federation of Mental Health
Teaching school children to read was a "perversion" and high literacy rate bred "the sustaining force behind individualism."
John Dewey, Educational Psychologist
The school curriculum should "…be designed to bend the student to the realities of society, especially by way of vocational education… the curriculum should be designed to promote mental health as an instrument for social progress and a means of altering culture…"
Report: Action for Mental Health, 1961
"Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are 'obstructive' and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective ... It is for the future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."
Bertrand Russell quoting Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of philosophy & psychology who influenced Hegel and others – Prussian University in Berlin, 1810
"…through schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of government – one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interests of all people."
Harold Rugg, student of psychology and a disciple of John Dewey
"Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know – it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave."
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) sponsored report: The Role of Schools in Mental Health
"This is the idea where we drop subject matter and we drop Carnegie Unites (grading from A-F) and we just let students find their way, keeping them in school until they manifest the politically correct attitudes. You see, one of the effects of self-esteem (Values Clarification) programs is that you are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don’t feel like it. You don’t have to tell the truth because if the truth you have to tell is about your own failure then your self-esteem will go down and that is unthinkable."
Dr. William Coulson, explaining Outcome Based Education (OBE) Info
"Education is thus a most power ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?"
Charles F. Potter, Humanist
"Men are built, not born…. Give me the baby, and I’ll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood…. I’ll make it a thief, a gunman or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless…"
John B. Watson, psychologist, founder of "Behaviorism"
"Of course, Behaviorism 'works.' So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public".
W. H. Auden
"Despite rapid progress in the right direction, the program of the average elementary school has been primarily devoted to teaching the fundamental subjects, the three R’s, and closely related disciplines… Artificial exercises, like drills on phonetics, multiplication tables, and formal writing movements, are used to a wasteful degree. Subjects such as arithmetic, language, and history include content that is intrinsically of little value. Nearly every subject is enlarged unwisely to satisfy the academic ideal of thoroughness… Elimination of the unessential by scientific study, then, is one step in improving the curriculum."
Edward Lee Thorndike, pioneer of "animal psychology"
"We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine."
Dr. John Rawlings Rees, "Strategic Planning for Mental Health", June 18, 1940
"Psychology, and child-study stand first in order among the required subjects of technical nature… The course of child-study is supplementary to the prescribed courses in systematic and applied psychology."
1899 Teachers College Course
"...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong". "A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student's fixed beliefs. …a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child's thoughts, attitudes, and feelings."
Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and educational theorist, in "Major Categories in the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives", p. 185, 1956
"The educational system should be a sieve, through which all the children of a country are passed. It is highly desirable that no child escape inspection."
Paul Popenoe, Behavioral Eugenist and co-author: "Sterilization for Human Betterment"
Psychiatry's Views on Religion
"Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis."
Sigmund Freud, defining spiritual belief
"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."
Sigmund Freud
"The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such..."
Sigmund Freud
"Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up."
Sigmund Freud
"In short, the nature of the hallucinations of Jesus, as they are described in the orthodox Gospels, permits us to conclude that the founder of the Christian religion was afflicted with religious paranoia."
Psychiatrist Dr. Charles Binet-Sangle: La Folie de Jesus (The Madness of Jesus), 1910
"…Jesus Christ might simply have returned to his carpentry following the use of modern psychiatric treatments."
William Sargant, British psychiatrist, 1974
"No one knows just how the idea of a soul or the supernatural started… It probably had its origin in the general laziness of mankind."
John B. Watson, behavioral psychologist
"This dogma (the soul) has been present in human psychology from earliest antiquity. No one has ever touched the soul, or has seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into a relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience."
John B. Watson, behavioral psychologist
"I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion"
Sigmund Freud
"The soul or consciousness, which played the leading part in the past, now is of very little importance; in any case both are deprived of their main functions and glory to such an extent that only the names remain. Behaviorism sang their funeral dirge while materialism – the smiling heir – arranges a suitable funeral for them."
Statement delivered at the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy at Harvard University
"…humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith." "Traditional moral codes… fail to meet the pressing needs of today and tomorrow…" "Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful… The total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context. There is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body."
The Humanist Manifesto 2, 1973
"All neurotics seek the religious"
Psychologist Carl Jung
"It should be recognized that an acceptance of the mental health viewpoint… carries an obligation to examine critically some of the teaching of the churches in the light of present-day insight into what seems to be essential to wholesome personality development and into what is now known to be detrimental to the growing personality of the child."
Psychiatrist at World Federation of Mental Health (WFMH) Conference
"Pastoral psychology understands itself as a help for the communities in view of ‘group dynamic’ proceedings –e.g., the processes of rivalization, or the search for scapegoats, harmonization or shifting guilt, which… can determine life in a community so strongly that the succession of Jesus Christ is no longer paid heed"
The German Association for Pastoral Psychology Magazine – Ways To Man
"What is the relationship between wholeness and holiness?… What does personal responsibility mean in the light of the findings or psychoanalysis? Do the words right and wrong, have any further usefulness in the light of our new knowledge of compulsive behavior patterns? I believe it’s one of the tragedies of Christianity that it has got itself all mixed up with morality…"
Canon Sydney Evans, National Association for Mental Health, 1967
"The word soul has lost its meaning and even its plausibility…. Faith, hope and love can no longer be seen simply as virtues or graces; they are processes in flesh and blood… (the clergyman) will find that whether he wants it or not, he is also a front-line mental health worker or he will be so regarded by the specialists in mental health. It is on the pastoral role and the tasks of shepherding that the psychological disciples have the greatest impact in theological work."
Paul Pruyser, psychologist, author: "The Seamy Side of Current Religious Beliefs"
"In recent years pastoral counselors have separated from their parishes and emerged as a psychotherapy profession…. This professionalization process includes a shift away from parish-based counseling to counseling centers or medical settings, declining interest in religious practices and convictions, increased interest in psychological practices and theories, the charging of fees, and increased institutional and professional barriers to those individuals perceived as poor counseling clients or unable to pay…. There is also… growing deviation from a religious orientation to a pseudopsychiatric orientation."
American Journal of Psychiatry, March 1986
"We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine."
Dr. John Rawlings Rees, "Strategic Planning for Mental Health", June 18, 1940
"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas..."
G. Brock Chisholm, psychiatrist and co-founder of the World Federation of Mental Health
"The danger is that these psychologies may, to one degree or another, replace Christianity without most people even noticing that any substitution has taken place."
Christianity Today, 1994
REVEALING QUOTES ON THE GOALS OF PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOLOGY < click
