ON MENTAL ILLNESS: There is No Conflict Between Religion and Science. Category: Columns from The Berkeley Daily Planet – Berkeley Daily Planet

When members of your church or other religious affiliation dispute the existence of mental illness and advise you not to take psychiatric medication prescribed by a doctor, they're advising you to make a huge mistake. The person advising that will not suffer the consequences themselves, you will. You can be a good Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or any of the above and can still listen to the reality-based warnings and advice from a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who specializes in certain brain disorders treatable with psychiatric drugs.

On the other hand, a psychiatrist should never be advising you not to have a religious practice, albeit in my experience I have never seen that happen. Religion and science do not conflict. They are two different things that address completely different areas of human lives.

Some of the greatest scientists and scholars have been highly religious. Gregor Johann Mendel was a meteorologist, mathematician, biologist, Augustinian friar, and abbot. After his death he gained recognition for discoveries that led to the modern science of genetics. He studied how characteristics in plants were transmitted. In high school, I got the impression that my biology teacher was big into church. I was told by a fellow student that he volunteered at the church doing cleanup.

You do not have to be atheist to understand and believe science. Our President is highly religious and at the same time touts "listen to the scientists," in his powerful speeches about beating coronavirus.

I am not religious, but it doesn't mean I lack belief in a higher power. Something takes care of me and got me through dozens of situations that by all rights I should not have survived. The higher power must have work in store for me or would not be taking care of me in this way. When people are in rough times, in which we don't know how we are to get through a situation, even the non-religious like me will be tempted to ask for help from something greater.

Those who pervert science into something it is not might reject the spiritual, and this leads to cruelty. I am not saying you need to believe in god to be a good person--you do not. My point is that atheistic people who disbelieve in human personhood and believe people are machines that arose by chance, might also reject the validity of human suffering. This could lead to cruel experimentation on people.

I've heard a psychiatrist say, "consciousness could be an illusion." How crackpot of an idea is that? To assert consciousness is an illusion is in total contradiction to the most basic truth known by a conscious entity: "I think therefore I exist." If consciousness were an illusion, we would be unaware that we are here. Who is reading these words? How is it that you are aware of them? Consciousness is not an illusion; it is a subjective absolute truth.

Atheism is not the same thing as agnosticism. No one can prove or disprove a theory that explains how the universe came to be. We can prove and disprove many things about the universe and about the people in it. And it has been shown that science is applicable to mental illness. If you are a good Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Sikh, other, it doesn't make you more or less likely to become mentally ill, and none of these religions will cure it.

I once believed meditative attainment could cure my mental illness; it can't. I've gained meditative attainment in my past, and then when I believed it had cured my condition, I relapsed from not taking medication. Afterward I was aware that the attainment I'd created was erased. And it can take years to regain this--if it is even possible. The damage to function that occurs in a relapse of psychosis will make any type of mental development harder to regain. I am not speaking of Buddhism specifically but of mindfulness, which can be practiced generically in the absence of any religious beliefs.

Many doctors and many psychiatrists seem to reject the notion that human suffering exists. This is a sign of being disconnected. If science is to help the human species, it must be used to remediate aspects of the human condition. It must not be used solely for profits of innovators. Human beings employ massive amounts of time and energy devising methods of getting more. This is also apparently not in conflict with many religious practices.

Doctors in the U.S. and in NAZI Germany have experimented on human beings. This was perceived as conscionable because people believed they were forwarding science. This is an atrocity like any other. A religious person could do this to people as could a non-religious person. Religion is a separate issue from people's acts of kindness and unkindness. That's an opinion. Many religions teach compassion. Yet the lesson does not always take. Some religions teach members that anyone outside of their religion goes to hell. Some religious people are lacking enough in basic perception that they would not be suitable to practice science. Yet many atheistic people are unsuitable as well, because ruling out the possibility that something conscious could have created the universe shows lack of thought. No one knows how the universe came about. Science can describe the universe but that is all it can do. Religion is not sufficient to explain things either, since our religions create a concept of god from human imagination, not from known fact.

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ON MENTAL ILLNESS: There is No Conflict Between Religion and Science. Category: Columns from The Berkeley Daily Planet - Berkeley Daily Planet