David Bellamy left the following curious link:
A leading neurologist at the University of Oxford said this week that recent developments meant that science may one day be able to identify religious fundamentalism as a “mental illness” and a cure it.
During a talk at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday, Kathleen Taylor was asked what positive developments she anticipated in neuroscience in the next 60 years.
“One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated,” she explained, according to The Times of London. “Somebody who has for example become radicalised 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. I am not just talking about the obvious candidates like radical Islam or some of the more extreme cults,” she explained. “I am talking about things like the belief that it is OK to beat your children. These beliefs are very harmful but are not normally categorized as mental illness.”
Yes, let’s all get lobotomized and have “correct” thoughts implanted into our brains. It surely is an attractive idea: anybody who disagrees with me must be sick and needs to be cured. Of course, it is only attractive for as long as my disagreement with Kathleen Taylors of this world doesn’t mark me as diseased.
This was actually the idea behind the persecution of Soviet dissidents in the 1970s. Anybody who didn’t believe that the Soviet system was the best in the world was considered insane. Dissidents were put into psychiatric facilities and subjected to enormous doses of psychotropic drugs. As a result of such “treatments”, many would, indeed, become disturbed. This allowed the authorities to take the triumphant “We told you so, they are crazy!” position. So this approach to dissent is anything but new.