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Comment by 2devnull | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes this can be a sign you need to put more energy into the spiritual side of your life. Many people find faith important to their mental well being. As society has abandoned its religious foundation, mental illness has increased. Perhaps psychosis is the mind’s way of saying, there’s more to all this.

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Something that helped me with this is reading and realising that spirituality / faith is not necessarily the crazy people knocking at your door with a moral code to sell and can be grounded in reality and lived experience ;)

Other people, like me, need maximum distance to everything faithy and religious to stay mentally healthy and sane. Believers make me inherently nervous and restless.

Counterpoint: some might consider a lot of the aspects of many faiths as exacerbating to a mental health disorder. Plenty of mental health issues center around faith and specific religions, even.

I think society is at a net positive for leaving "faith" behind, but spirituality can exist in the absence of any specific religion [0].

[0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/01/13/spirituality-kris...

+1 for this.

Yeah, a different friend of mine from another comment I made went from observant-religous to fanatical while losing weight and generating tons of work. Bipolar, obviously, and when he crashed it was very hard on him. He then became an atheist because the experience of being godspoken and then abandoned, and realizing it's just bipolar disorder, brings into question the basis of prophets, etc.

Other people, perhaps, would look at the same example and say that bipolar is what happens when someone is being used as the mouthpiece of a god, but my friend ended up with the opposite conclusion.

Well, you’re simply wrong, arguably justifiably bigoted. I don’t think bigotry on (race or) creed is justified however. I speak from experience on this matter but if you don’t like personal testimony and prefer hard data, you can do the math. Spiritual woo or claims of being a prophet or the messiah himself, as another commenter related, ie hyperreligiosity are a classic symptom of bipolar mania. Worship within well established denominations, according to traditions and social norms that are hundreds of years old is what helps people. There are hundreds of years of historical data, big data if you will, from which you can draw pretty solid conclusions, but only if you put your bigotry aside and look at it objectively.

No, I'm not wrong. The only "solid" conclusions I can draw over the last hundreds of years are the systemic abuses, the bigotry and the hate that emanates from the practice of every major religion.

Religion has irreparably harmed society, and only recently have we finally begun to eschew the completely unnecessary worship of sky beings in favor of experiencing reality for what it is. That doesn't mean we have to abandon spirituality, but it does mean we can be more sophisticated than to suggest people pick back up an ancient tool that has no use for us anymore.

No one should be forced to put themselves through the awfulness that is religion just to experience being a human with spirituality.

You and I will disagree because, in my opinion, you ignore data and draw conclusion that stem from your own bigotry rather than an objective view of available information. Also, you should become friends with more Jews, Muslims, Christian’s, Buddhists and ask them whether their religion is a net positive in their lives. You may learn your perspective is narrow and poorly informed by people’s lived experience.

You immediately started calling me a bigot in your very first reply. I wonder why you had to resort to name calling so quickly, if your position is so strong...

Any positive traits I would encounter from knowing a religious person would be in spite of their religion, not because of it. There are great, wonderful people who are religious, but not because of religion.

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