Is religious zealotry caused by mental illness?
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This thought struck me while watching a recent episode of Compass on the ABC.
It showed a priest from the Mandaean religion in Western Sydney, whose eating and drinking habits were considered spiritual.
Everything he cooked had to be blessed with “holy water”.
This holy water had to come from natural sources, like a spring or river.
The program showed the priest drinking a hot beverage with a glove on.
He wouldn’t hold the drink with his bare hand, unless it had been “blessed or cleansed with holy water”.
This column is not intended to mock religion. It should be acknowledged that religion is an aspect of humanity that has benefits. For example, research shows that belonging to a faith-based community can improve wellbeing and longevity.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but notice that the rituals of the Mandaean priest appeared to be a sign of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
This got me thinking more about links [unrelated to the Mandaean priest] between paedophilia, religion and disturbed minds.
Having followed the paedophile scandals in the Catholic and Anglican churches in the Hunter, I wondered about the mental state of the perpetrators.
Paedophilia is included as a disorder in the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This is a highly controversial matter. Some have argued for it to be removed from the manual.
This leads into the debate about whether paedophiles are sick or criminals. A few years back, the Catholic Archbishop of Durban, Wilfrid Fox Napier, claimed paedophilia was a “[psychological] illness, not a criminal condition”.
The American Psychological Association has stated that paedophilia is a mental disorder, that sex between adults and children is always wrong and that acting on paedophilic impulses is and should be a criminal act.
This stuff doesn’t make for easy reading. How can we see paedophilia as anything other than evil?
Having read the Herald’s stories on the devastating effects of this heinous crime on children, one is left with the thought that offenders should be locked up and the key thrown away.
This matter also got me thinking about the question of whether terrorists are mentally ill.
Who in their right mind would blow themselves up?
Is it delusional for suicide bombers to believe they’ll be rewarded with virgins in heaven?
Conventional wisdom has it that suicide bombers are not mentally ill or suicidal, but stable individuals who think they are sacrificing themselves for a worthy cause.
But researchers have challenged this and found suicide bombers have been found to suffer from suicidal tendencies, depression, bipolar disorder and substance abuse.
It’s understandable for most of us to think of paedophiles and terrorists as nothing more than criminals who should be removed from society for life.
Questions on this subject have been considered taboo, but they are surely worth asking in an age of terror and bombshell revelations of paedophilia in the church.
Further research should be done on this subject to find ways to reduce, if not eliminate, these horrendous crimes.
