Mental illness and evil

Honestly I see us as the handicpaed and unevolved ones. Look at apes in the wild. sometimes i think they evolved from us!

 

Wow. This thread went an interesting direction.


Actually, the issue I was thinking about wasn't really mentally and physically handicapped people, but mentally ill people who are bi-polar, manic-depressive or mentally ill people who commit crimes like pedophiles. People who, sometimes, commit violent acts or abusive acts. Are they forgiveable by God, but not humans? Are they only forgiven if they ask for forgiveness? What if a manic-depressive or alcoholic person who is close to you steals from you and lies, but refuses to confront their illness? Does that make them "unforgiven"? These are the questions that I'm struggling to answer right now.

 

I think whoever and whatever God forgives is between Him and the person in question, but yes I think someone has to admit they need to be forgiven before forgiveness is even an option.

Everyone Jesus ever healed in the gospels asked to be healed, admiting they needed healing. Every demon he drove out admitted they were a demon.

As far as we, as humans, are supposed to deal with people who wont face themselves I think this falls under the heading of not casting your pearls before swine.

Whatever we have to give--patience, money, shelter, compassion... basically love--are our pearls and they're wasted on someone who's living a lie and won't admit it.

You can't save an alcoholic Molly, you can only postpone they're getting to a point where they have to admit they need to be saved.

 

Sound advice NayKidApe. Thanks. I find that this one (of three) manic-depressive person in my life tries to change, but continues to hurt people around her..seriously in some cases. Yet she is "trying to go to church" and wants her faith to be strong.

Sometimes God just seems so far away when you're trying to console someone who sometimes forgets even where they've been for the past four hours because of their mental illness.

 

that's a tough one Molly.


One distinction that I've had to make for myself is that if I'm trying to help someone, and I get any indication along the way that this person actually enjoys the chaos they're causing in someone elses life, ie;

If --judging by their facial expressions, body language, subsequent actions, or just your own intution---their apologies just seem like an attempt to escape the consequences of what they did.

If their confessions have any element of gloating.

If they're whole idea of right and wrong seems to be based on whether or not they get caught.

---I have to leave that person alone.


If someone gets off on the pain they're causing in the people around them then (from my perspective) that persons problems aren't just financial or emotional or even pychological.

That persons primary problem is that they're spiritually ill, and I'm not god, I can't do anything about that.

Even without judging them I have to admit that this person's problem is way out of my league. Any attempt to help them on their terms will just translate into more ammunition for them to use against somebody else.

 

Ah, everything you said is true. The thing I have yet to master is distinguishing between people who are making honest efforts to change and people who seem to get off on the drama in their life, even though they claim they hate it.

 

The only observable bad point about being a retard is that they require extra care, and that we live in a society where the term 'retard' is used as an insult. They could be very happy, very peaceful, very loving people.

 

2 things that helped me;

1. If you walk away feeling drained then you weren't giving, you were being taken.

2. the difference between a nice guy and a sucker is that a nice guy stops being a nice guy when he starts feeling like a sucker.

 

How can you say that anyone is going to hell... we are all human. You have to eventually look at llike "this is my mind right now, would i believe it?" unfortunetly those that can answer the question arent the ones being asked the question... lets face it, beyond our family and a few friends, who would care that we are alive. who would care about our work and the influence we have upon one another. do guardian angles exist? Ive held the hand of more than one dieing man and he was a stranger and i can honestly say... "I would cry if it wasn't my family next to me" only because ive been that stranger... you'll never understand that unless you experience it... and i honestly pray its never you on your death bed when you do...

 

There is the distinct possibility that people who need religion have psycho-emotional (ie mental) instability. After all, if you can TRUST God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, there should be nothing to worry about. Ever. But christians are worried about whether or not God will save them or anyone, and that to me indicates that either their God is UN-trustworty & UN-reliable, or that the xtian religion has screwed up mis-conceptions that screws up minds. And to knowingly screw up someone's life is the ultimate evil.

 

Never? Heh, hate to tell you, but we all gotta die someday

 

Deut. 28:27-29,34 ........ mental illness is a "divine chastisement" ....... just don't tell yer priest yer hearing voices.... you might become a saint (or be torutured for demonic possiesion, depending on how catholic your beliefs are).

Christianity...keeping sensible help for the mentally unstable in the Dark Ages for close on a millenia...go christians!

 

the mentally ill are here to teach us many things.


Especially about love and tolerance and patience.

God gets our attention in lots of different ways!

 

ahh ... see.. maybe this isn't the best place to say it but i'm 'mentally ill'.. I won't go into details.. but I think until it developed I couldn't see just how ignorant of my own "evil" I was.

Many of the people I know who've been mentally ill have been the nicest, most considerate people I've ever met. Sure, some of them are hard to cope with from an external standpoint but.. internally I'm sure they find it much harder to cope with this world, in so many cases it's precisely that which drives them to their illness... I think that generally many people are "evil" in different ways but just fail to realise it.

 

i truely believe that unlike most physical diseaces... mental illnesses are different in that there is not true point where we decide they are "n state", "six months to live", "we cant cure you"... that said i dont think well truely understand most of these illnesses untill we combine psych and nuero, my lifes... im sure it will happen ten years after my death. anyhoo, these disease can be "treated" by the sain who have never themeselves endured that pain, or needless to say care to. that aside, the psychiatric programs in this country have come a long way in the last fifty years and will continue to advance. psychiatrics is literally telescoping in its technical referrence at the moomment and untill we catch upto where the telescope takes up, we wont understand it...

 

Are you comparing people with bipolar disorder to pedophiles? I take great offense at this because I suffer from bipolar disorder. It is no longer classified as a mental disorder, it is a medical disorder. A chemical imbalance and is fairly easily treatable. Pedophilia, however, is NOT easily treatable and even after chemical castration, the majority of pedophiles would continue to molest children. And though it is considered a mental disorder in most circles, unlike bipolar, pedophilia is a CRIME. Either way the grouping/comparison is rather insulting.

As a Christian ( and I assume you are ) you should already know that humankind is finite and God is INFINITE and by the laws of physics and most philosophy it is impossible for the finite to comprehend the infinite. So this entire thread is little more than mental masturbation. Effort without result. And not a very good exercise.

 

The finite can comprehend finite portions of the infinite. And what makes you think humankind is finite? There are subsets of the infinite within the main set, check out set theory of infinite sets.

 

There is something in Christian theology known as the Pauline principle. As far as I recall, it is the notion that one does rightly when she acts on good intentions, or under the presumption that what she does is "good." If you take this into account (and almost all Xtian theology does), mentally ill people can never do the bad, because they have no real understanding of what they are doing.

One must have knowledge of good and evil to do them; we generally don't think of bears and lions as evil creatures, even though the majority of their lives are spent doing unspeakable violence unto the wee cute lil animals around them.

 

That's a huge copout that's been used by protestant hillbillies since the 1800's. Most theologians don't think that God can do that which is logically incoherent. It doesn't mean anything to say that God can make 1+1=7. Even CS Lewis admitted that it really doesn't matter to him that God can do the logically incoherent, because if It could, it wouldn't mean anything to him, because most people take general axioms of logic and reasoning to be requisite conditions of meaning. Your understanding of God as infinite precludes discussion, mine does not.

So to say that we simply can't comprehend God, and therefore shouldn't talk about It is silly, to me. Given certain assumptions about God (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent), we can extrapolate and discuss an almost INFINITE (to steal your word) number of things.

Furthermore, what does it really mean to say that God is INFINITE? If God is infinite, then It is without beginning and end, and all change is only apparent change, and you may as well just kill yourself, because apparances aren't worth much:

 

OK, maybe you missed my point. No, OBVIOUSLY both missed my point. I'm not a Christian. That argument is purely Roman Catholic in origin, specifically Jesuit. I think it's called irony.