by Mum 9 Replies latest jw friends
A man named A, J. Miller, who lives in Queensland, Australia, claims to be Jesus. I saw it on a YouTube video of "60 Minutes Australia, He was formerly a "Jehovah's Witness minister" according to the video. He has bought a large tract of land, with the help of his followers. He plans to start an "organization" in his words.
I apologize if this has been posted previously,
The question is:
Does the WTS cause mental illness or just appeal to the mentally ill?
It's probably the latter, as most religions seem to have these types in one form or another, but the religions certainly don't help these people - they feed their delusional beliefs, constantly filling their heads with batshit nonsense.
Those who work with the mentally ill are generally in agreement that persons suffering from that affliction often share three common characteristics.
For one thing, they tend to be obsessed with something.
For another, they often suffer from delusions of grandeur. The psychiatric wards house many a person who believes that they are Jesus, God, the Seventh Angel of Revelation, the granddaughter/grandson of the Russian princess Anastasia, or similar.
Also, most mentally ill people are also deeply religious.
That isn't to say all religious people are mentally ill. However, deep religiosity is a common characteristic of those who are mentally ill.
(I certainly have often enough observed all three characteristics at work. While working at a remote site in the tropics, I saw two work colleagues go insane in the space of two years - a condition often referred to in this part of the world as "Going Troppo", i.e. brought about by extreme work stress, plus the environmental stresses produced by the climate. One in particular exhibited all three of those traits).
Hey I proclaimed I'm Jesus, he's stealing my gig !
What a screwball delusional imposter.
Also, most mentally ill people are also deeply religious.
Since there has never been found a culture without some sort of religious belief system, it would be highly unlikely to find a mentally ill person without some sort of religious belief. So, this statement seems particularly biased.
On the other hand, a 22 year study suggest that aggressive atheism, characterized by debate and the need to belittle others, shows a strong correlation with SEVERE mental illness:
“Overt atheism, in other words, atheism that is professed as a way of life by some individuals — a manifesto of sorts — was found to be a common component inherent to many people suffering from other forms of severe mental illness,” said Dr. Hans Zimmermann MD PhD
“We started to notice that many of our experimental volunteers — those who were defiantly atheistic in their beliefs — were also suffering from various forms of dissociate disorders and social adaptation manias. This came as quite a shock to us as we studied patient after patient because for years we have been led to believe that religious zeal was often a patently obvious sign of mental illness, but in fact this is not the case. Quite the contrary.
“The individuals we have studied, especially those under the age of forty who actively participate in open debate about their own avowed atheism, or people who are very strident about their atheism are heavily prone to mental illness — and most of the illnesses are quite severe. This was not a handful of subjects who were studied, mind you. There were 17,809 people in the study. It was a very large model as far as psychological experiments go.”
We are not here talking about "some sort of religious belief system", along the lines of attending church at Christmas and Easter, plus the odd Sunday in between those events - but certainly not getting too bent out of shape over the matter of religion.
Rather, a common trait amongst the mentally ill is an extreme level of religious devotion - to the point of fanaticism and frequently even crossing that line. To some, that may sound biased, but persons who work day in - day out with the mentally ill cannot but observe certain common traits amongst their patients. This happens to be one of them.
(For the record, I have had extensive involvement with mentally ill people - experience I would rather not elaborate on).
So, where did this intriguing Dr Zimmermann officially publish this paper and does he even exist?
Or is it a figment of The Damien Zone madness?
I haven't even found if Hans Zimmermann even attended the University where the supposed study originated.
jtg
P.S. Wouldn't mind a copy of the actual study and not just a cherry picked few sentences by Damien.
David karesh, when he was a teen ager ,use to spend many hours in his 2nd floor hay barn, studying his bible until one afternoon his mother came exasperated looking for him and yelled, “Jesus Christ will you come down from there!”. And from that moment onward, he thought he was Jesus...
That research paper purporting to be from the University of Hamburg definitely sounds suspicious. All the more so when a newspaper in such a prominently "theocratic" country as Pakistan even writes it off as a fraud.
Wikipedia has Divine Truth as the subject for this guy. I don’t know if he’s mentally ill or if he really thinks he’s Jesus LOL. I wish I was an elder in his congregation with him those meetings must’ve been unbelievably interesting.
