Gary wrote: Why should I expect God to help me any more than he helps those who experience the most horrible fates? People meet horrible fates all the time. God clearly doesn't care. I don't subscribe to the view that all those who suffer deserve to suffer. Certainly we mortals are, fallible and make unjust mistakes. So what's God's excuse for the suffering he inflicts or else allows?
IC wrote: Such sage advice: "You're suffering with personal distress and mental illness...so just get over it."
I have been interested in the issue that Gary, perhaps inadvertently, presents to a philosophical community: How to respond to and interchange with someone who self-confesses as mentally ill. I admit to having an interest in therapeutics generally, because my view is that mental illness and mental derangement should be understood as being more or less the norm, except that there are more extreme manifestations of it such as psychosis. I.e. it is man's mind that is pretty deranged, generally speaking.Veggie wrote: I'm not his bloody mother. And you are a disingenuous ****. You carefully left out where I was referring to your horrid little imaginery friend. You are like a vulture. It's quite revolting to see you hovering over him, sniffing at his obvious indecisiveness. Thinking only of yourself and potential heavenly brownie points. Your breath must be horrible. Yuk!
I am interested in the religious and also the spiritual and the spirtual-psychological relationship to mental illness and mental disorder. So for example there are Christian psychologists and therapists who do strongly advocate for a sick person getting involved in a spiritual relationship with God and choosing to make that a part of a healing processes. There is also, as many know, the approach taken by CG Jung who, through certainly not a Christian (indeed a Christian heretic), was deeply involved in religious ideas and whose psychologics were always concerned for Occidental categories.
His patients were Christians and also Jews (perhaps post-Christians and post-Jews) who discovered that it was necessary to engage with their own selves at a psychological level, or perhaps it is correct to say that if they were to incorporate religious concerns into their healing processes they discovered it was necessary to encounter *God* on an inner plane: something encountered when the Self was encountered or *beckoned to*. When I say *becokned to* I mean that one makes an effort to interact with one's own self in different, non-conventional ways. Like paying attention to one's dreams or examining one's unconscious content, etc.
When I examine what poor Gary writes I discern a man who seems to be locked into specifically Christian categories. And he is very very angry with this Christian God (he also calls him Yahweh) who he sees as the one who *did terrible things to him* or did not stop terrible things from happening to him. So he is locked into a rebellious battle with that *god* and, by extension, with Immanuel Can the forum's resident Christian religious fanatic.
But it must be said that it is not Christianity that ultimately defines what *god* is or isn't, and all spiritual and religious modalities seem to have a therapeutic concern. Even primitive shamanism's core concern is for the well-being of the individual. Buddhism is very concerned with the *deranged mind* and proposes therapeutics to heal the mind or alleviate the mind.
It is true that a Christian fanatic like IC must act like a *vulture* circling the moribund victim. That is how they see the individual soul who has not *come to Christ*. This does fit in not only with Christian psychology but other spiritual modalities as well. The Christian waits in a sense for the conventional self, plagued by neurosis, to run out of fuel and to collapse. That is, a deep personal crisis. Then, there can take place an intervention where the convert has no other option but to choose a very different axis for the self to operate from.
But the same is true in various traditions especially Buddhism and the Vedic religons. Something very similar occurs even in the American Indian peyote ceremony religious community. The conventional self (the developed ego) is discovered to be the disease. And the life badly lived is manifestation of the disease. And it is that self that has to be transcended. Take even the 12-Step Program for drug addicts and alcoholics. They often speak about arriving at a point where their addictions are *unmanageable* and they have to *let go and let God*. I've spoken to many people who have had addiction issues and have resorted to the 12-Step Program and they also describe a long and dramatic healing process that involves *their higher power*.
I would take Gary as my Pet Project if the forum would cough up the 10 grand I generally get when I take on a really really stubborn case. But just imagine him after he undergoes the treatment! Can you selfish assholes part with a few hundred dollars each?!? I gUaRanTee results. As a matter of evident fact please note that since I started remotely blessing Gary's Meds there has been a marked improvement. He's limiting abuse of the wang-dang and that, at least, is a plus! So there's that ...
C'mon people! What you pay for those uptown coffee drinks could be channeled to curing a really tough case!
