Religious Fundamentalism Could Soon Be Treated As Mental Illness

Religious Fundamentalism Could Soon Be Treated As Mental Illness: April 26, 2014 - Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist at Oxford University, said that recent developments suggest that we will soon be able to treat religious fundamentalism and other forms of ideological beliefs potentially harmful to society as a form of mental illness.

She made the assertion during a talk at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday. She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder. She said new developments in neuroscience could make it possible to consider extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals.

She told The Times of London: "One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated. Someone who has for example become radicalized to a cult ideology -- we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance."

IT'S ABOUT TIME: MIND CONTROL AND SHOOTINGS

IT'S ABOUT TIME: MIND CONTROL AND SHOOTINGS: It’s about time�someone raised the issue of mind control and its possible relationship to the strange and senseless shootings that seem to be part of the American landscape… Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, Columbine… even Sirhan Sirhan and the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and many more such incidents, raise the issue of just who,�really, is to blame, and increasingly, it looks like not just the crazed lone nut assassin, but the very possibility that they, too, are being manipulated literally by voices beamed into their heads. One may regard it as fundamentally a form of torture of the most insidious kind, where the perpetrator himself or herself becomes a victim of the crime they themselves commit.