Why Only Small Percentage of Psychiatrists Religious?

[Ibid]

So I concede that there could be a variety of motivations and underlying belief-systems that could make someone an excellent clinician.

A wise consession. Certain debates attract intellectual pigmies who fancy themselves the final arbitors of what constitutes a rational value system. There is no existential moral high ground. No such place exists.

A nice conversation here between Dawkins and the current Archbishop of Canterbury shows how it should be done. Takes about 20 mins to warm up.

As an aside I bumped into Chris Patten, who introduces the debate, at the covered market in Oxford. We nearly bumped heads as we admired the same pork pie.

No words were spoken but their was a silent acknowledgement of the presence of a fellow connoisseur of fatty pastry from the Oxford University Chancellor.

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfQk4NfW7g0[/YOUTUBE]

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Members don't see this ad.

 

[billypilgrim37]

Fair enough. You've suspended your rationality.

To be entirely fair, arguing on the internet about religion is at least as rational as a virgin birth.

 

[OldPsychDoc]

...
As an aside I bumped into Chris Patten, who introduces the debate, at the covered market in Oxford. We nearly bumped heads as we admired the same pork pie.

Might explain the pig action--maybe Jesus just wanted to serve pork pies the next time he had to feed five thousand...

 

[OldPsychDoc]

Fair enough. You've suspended your rationality. You're an important member of this forum and I've learned a lot from you and expect to do so as long as I read here. So I won't attempt to continue along these lines.

The willingness to engage the unclean by societal measure is a perfectly admirable trait. As are a quite a few of the traits of this purportedly virgin-born individual. So I concede that there could be a variety of motivations and underlying belief-systems that could make someone an excellent clinician.

Just as long as they don't suspend their reason when prescribing and continuing to learn their craft, I suppose, there's no issue.

Is there a psychological condition to describe suspended cognitive faculties? Social hypnosis?

Thanks for correcting my chronological metalurgy. And for you keeping this learning environment going in any case.

Thank you. If I've suspended rationality, I believe I'm in some very good company in doing so.

 

[Ibid]

Might explain the pig action--maybe Jesus just wanted to serve pork pies the next time he had to feed five thousand...

You know...forget the Da Vinci code....this goes deep, deep deep....

I hadn't noticed before but there are clearly pork pies on the table in the foreground. Take a look!! Jesus is even looking right at one of them and with his hand gesturing to it. It is as if he is saying "Behold the Pork Pie!!!"

And viewed under the Acme super wizzo with the special light bulbs there is clearly a massive and I mean MASSIVE pork pie on the left with a lot of meat showing.....no way that is a coincidence!!!

above here

 

[PETRAN]

 

[Abider]

A wise consession. Certain debates attract intellectual pigmies who fancy themselves the final arbitors of what constitutes a rational value system. There is no existential moral high ground. No such place exists.

A nice conversation here between Dawkins and the current Archbishop of Canterbury shows how it should be done. Takes about 20 mins to warm up.

As an aside I bumped into Chris Patten, who introduces the debate, at the covered market in Oxford. We nearly bumped heads as we admired the same pork pie.

No words were spoken but their was a silent acknowledgement of the presence of a fellow connoisseur of fatty pastry from the Oxford University Chancellor.

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfQk4NfW7g0[/YOUTUBE]

Well I see what you're saying and see no reason to continue the discussion here. But this is where you and Dawkins depart form Hitchens, Sam Harris and myself. There is most certainly a moral high ground. And it is ours. If for no other reason than we don't presume to know the ultimate deciding factors on the value of a life such that we describe a punitive system for obtaining an eternal hereafter or who exactly is the arbiter of these conclusions.

Although Harris makes some really intriguing arguments about the nature of free will itself, we are for a definitive declaration of human rights. To inhabit public discourse--very poignantly medicine--without the tyranny of Iron Age religiosity.

Billy the Pilgrim takes the friendly sheep's guise in enemy territory. You the wastelands of existential vagueness. I'll take to the battle field of ideas. And fight to the end for freedom from the dictates of pious fools. And they're dull, unimaginative culture. On the internet, in the lunchroom, maybe in the stall next to you while we're taking a piss at that psychiatry meeting.

 

[digitlnoize]

I love my chosen specialty. Probably the only place on the internet where this discussion could've happened this thoughtfully and calmly. Mad props.

For my part, I happen to have married into Catholicism. That being said, from my limited understanding of modern quantum mechanics, if the multiverse does indeed exist, then every possible reality also exists. This means that there is indeed a reality where Jesus WAS the Son of God and The Messiah. It also means there's another reality where He wasn't. Who is to say that I don't live in one and Mr. Atheist in another?

Fortunately, there's even a universe ruled by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Plenty of room for everyone in the multiverse.

*My understanding of quantum mechanics and the multiverse may be totally wrong. If so, just ignore me and leave me to my rationalizing. I'm quite content with my current world view and don't want to muck it up too much, hahaha.

 

[Ibid]

Well I see what you're saying and see no reason to continue the discussion here. But this is where you and Dawkins depart form Hitchens, Sam Harris and myself. There is most certainly a moral high ground. And it is ours. If for no other reason than we don't presume to know the ultimate deciding factors on the value of a life such that we describe a punitive system for obtaining an eternal hereafter or who exactly is the arbiter of these conclusions.

Although Harris makes some really intriguing arguments about the nature of free will itself, we are for a definitive declaration of human rights. To inhabit public discourse--very poignantly medicine--without the tyranny of Iron Age religiosity.

Billy the Pilgrim takes the friendly sheep's guise in enemy territory. You the wastelands of existential vagueness. I'll take to the battle field of ideas. And fight to the end for freedom from the dictates of pious fools. And they're dull, unimaginative culture. On the internet, in the lunchroom, maybe in the stall next to you while we're taking a piss at that psychiatry meeting.

Re: Harris. I would be warry of aligning myself to someone who would accept torture as an acceptable solution to any problem, even terrorism. He would also happily accept the killing of foriegn babies (his words) as collateral damage to hopefully prevent a terrorist attack like 9/11.

He posits that the world is more perilous now than in the past because we have nuclear weapons and so the case against religion has an imperative that it didn't in the past. Well I have news for Mr. Harris. Getting rid or religion will not lesson the threat. The nukes would still exist and it doesn't seem hard to believe that he finds thier use acceptable himself in the right circumstances. From what he says given enough benefit (he of course being the final arbitor of that in his own mind) would find no difficulty using them.

Really there is no limit to what he might be capable of deciding is OK. He makes fun of the past but there is no telling what he might find acceptable in the future. He could just as easily decide that killing all homosexuals was imperative after all even if he said it wasn't in the past.

I am sorry he is just looking to replace one sort of tyranny with another so even if the existential moral high ground could be demonstrated to exist, he would not be on it.

One more point. Not everyone is an intellectual but everyone suffers in one way or another. Many people find solace in their beliefs. For me that is enough to leave them (I'm being selective about who them is here) alone. It's one thing to argue the toss in a conversation on the internet its another to tell a mother who has lost a child to put down her bible and pick up Das Kapital.

I am afraid that in the battle of ideas Mr. Harris has come unarmed.

 

[Ibid]

For my part, I happen to have married into Catholicism. That being said, from my limited understanding of modern quantum mechanics, if the multiverse does indeed exist, then every possible reality also exists.

Fortunately, there's even a universe ruled by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Plenty of room for everyone in the multiverse.

*My understanding of quantum mechanics and the multiverse may be totally wrong. If so, just ignore me and leave me to my rationalizing. I'm quite content with my current world view and don't want to muck it up too much, hahaha.

I remeber the last time you made God disappear in a puff of logic. There is prob a universe where he is a bit pissed off with you for that. lol

I guess there will a universe where God intervenes and all the ones where he does not. Is that the metaphysics of metaphysics?

Anyway perhaps there are lots of Gods and they look down on us and vote on how the story should go, with special remotes. That's what I reckon at the moment is going on anyway. (Tomorrow I will believe something else)

 

[billypilgrim37]

Billy the Pilgrim takes the friendly sheep's guise in enemy territory. You the wastelands of existential vagueness. I'll take to the battle field of ideas. And fight to the end for freedom from the dictates of pious fools. And they're dull, unimaginative culture. On the internet, in the lunchroom, maybe in the stall next to you while we're taking a piss at that psychiatry meeting.

Hey, I grew up a conservative Southern Baptist and was taught that women should keep their mouths shut during business meetings (they should tell their husbands if they have something to say) and that AIDS was God's punishment for the queers. I spent a few summers with Jerry Falwell. I remember crying with another friend's face in my hands begging him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. I got in trouble when I tried to teach the 3rd grade Sunday School class I taught in college some basic greek. I played fretless bass in a praise band for years.

I'm a little traumatized, and I have a very complicated relationship with religion and faith. My wife is a card carrying atheist. I'm a card carrying religious trauma victim.

I don't think there's a battlefield of ideas to speak of here. There are only people struggling to make meaning out of a meaningless enterprise (how's that for your existential vagueness). And as long as folks don't hurt others with their own pursuit of meaning, I don't see a reason to have the argument. Now, as my old pal Jerry Falwell demonstrated well, our current Christian religious majority hurts a lot of people. So opposing stupid behaviors and advocating against stupid policies is fair game and something I take rather kindly to. For folks like OPD, who I imagine attends a quaint little church in Lake Woebegone, I see no reason to do anything but respect his own pursuit of meaning. He finds it in the Bible. You find it in arguing for rationalism. And I find it watching Hulu and being a friendly sheep (which, by the way, may be one of my favorite descriptions of myself I have ever heard--right up there with being called a "jolly, sardonic fellow" back in college).

 

[Jorje286]

^That PC nonsense always gets me. Not all interpretations of reality and the world are equally valid. I see religiosity as no more than being delusional, which we all do btw at different moments in our lives. We don't always adhere to the more correct interpretations of events based on strict integration of evidence but, a lot of times, on our personal biases which are ultimately distortions. The same thing applies for religion and we don't need to hide and run away from that so we don't offend other people.

 

[digitlnoize]

Not all interpretations of reality and the world are equally valid.

That was my point. If you believe in the quantum multiverse, then all interpretations of reality ARE equally valid.

 

[billypilgrim37]

Not all interpretations of reality and the world are equally valid.

Oh, absolutely. I wouldn't pretend like they were. No one will make fun of post-modernism faster than me. It's just that it doesn't MATTER. Being more rational and more correct doesn't make you any happier, doesn't get you laid more, and doesn't make you any more money.

 

[Iwillheal]

Whenever somebody decides to mention Sam Harris in defense of their point of view, I know that person knows very little about the subject at hand. Or knows little about Harris. Type in Sam's name in google and the word "bigot" just to get an idea of the kinds of things he's been saying about religions in particular Islam and Christianity and people who follow these religions.

It is not unusual that someone with a bachelor's degree in philosophy feels qualified to talk zealously about religion, sociology, etc. We all do it, even those of us with no professional degrees. The shocking part is some powerful people in the media have given him tremendous time and space to voice these views. Hidden agenda indeed!

Once I saw his name mentioned in the wikipedia, next to the name of a great philosophy professor and a major theorist in the field. I thought nothing of it. But then I visited a philosophy site where Chomsky's views were pushed aside because "philosopher Sam Harris" disagreed. Once I watched a debate of his with someone who held a PhD in sociology of religion and masters in Theological Studies from Harvard. I can't recall the exact quote but Sam cut him off and said something like, You don't know religion like I do. And so on...Recently he has obtained his PhD in neuroscience, so I guess the whole slew of books that he will be publishing on religion during the rest of his career will have that additional air of authority.

Sam Harris is what's wrong with the intellectual field these days. Sensationalized but low on real content. And he's certainly not the only one. It's market driven and if there is a demand for rationalizing hate for people who can't do it themselves, well, there is Sam Harris and people like him. I can't help and note the parallel there with the Middle Eastern market for people to religiously justify very violent responses to justified grievances against the West. The two are of course quite different but the one similarity is that neither seems interested or able to understand complexity of the matter at hand. I've studied philosophy and religion. Both can direct you to certain kinds of truth. But both can give you tools to justify just about anything.

Sam and people like him are like the fast food solution to the problem of world hunger. Highly advertised tasty bite sized philosophy...but ultimately offensive enough to get your guts in a twist. I'd much rather have someone like Alan Dershowtiz, brilliant Harvard law professor, someone whose pro-torture and hostile views I have no respect for, someone with a loud and obnoxious personality, make an argument about legality of torture or whatever, than have Sam Harris babble about it. Only one of them knows what they're actually talking about.

 

[PETRAN]

That was my point. If you believe in the quantum multiverse, then all interpretations of reality ARE equally valid.

p.s. This is known as the "Deepak Chopra" interpretation of the quantum universe

 

[digitlnoize]

p.s. This is known as the "Deepak Chopra" interpretation of the quantum universe

But I like my quantum ignorance!

 

[whopper]

Hmm, well I wonder if Deepak Chopra actually understand quantum mechanics. Regardless of whether or not he does, he certainly banked on the selling of energy crystals and other BS. The guy's made some pretty outlandish claims here and there. I actually like the message he gives, just that it's transparent he has a profit-motive and there's less science behind his claims than he admits there is.

This is coming from a guy that has studied quantum physics though I had a heck of a hard time understanding and the few times I did I just forgot it a few minutes later, and I wish Chopra's comments were true.

 

[OldPsychDoc]

...This is coming from a guy that has studied quantum physics though I had a heck of a hard time understanding and the few times I did I just forgot it a few minutes later.....

Dr. Schroedinger called--he's upset that you killed his cat.

 

[belle54321]

At this point, this thread is pretty off the original topic, which I guess was meant to be provocative. My question is does it really matter if a doctor or in this case a psychiatrist is religious or not in terms of patient outcome? Is there any study out there that gives any data regarding patient outcome and physician's religiosity?

 

[Iwillheal]

At this point, this thread is pretty off the original topic, which I guess was meant to be provocative. My question is does it really matter if a doctor or in this case a psychiatrist is religious or not in terms of patient outcome? Is there any study out there that gives any data regarding patient outcome and physician's religiosity?

Two things: The thread was NOT meant to be provocative and I'm not sure where you getting that idea from. I read a few studies that had noticed a pattern and I was curious as to why it might be. So I decided to ask here. If you are seeing some strong opinions, it is because religion and politics are inherently contentious, and in particular, for certain people. Secondly, yes, the thread is off the original topic...as is your question about whether religiosity would impact patient treatment. But it seems that the mods permit more room for exploring ideas in this subforum so this should be fine.

 

[OldPsychDoc]

Two things: The thread was NOT meant to be provocative and I'm not sure where you getting that idea from. I read a few studies that had noticed a pattern and I was curious as to why it might be. So I decided to ask here. If you are seeing some strong opinions, it is because religion and politics are inherently contentious, and in particular, for certain people. Secondly, yes, the thread is off the original topic...as is your question about whether religiosity would impact patient treatment.....

So are you satisfied with the answer(s) to your OP so far?

But it seems that the mods permit more room for exploring ideas in this subforum so this should be fine.

As long as you all play nicely together...

 

[Abider]

I see no reason to shrink from the support of Harris's ideas or Hitchen's certainly not at the behest of academic liberals who wouldn't know a bar fight was coming until they were getting dragged unconscious into an alley to be raped.

There are cultures of violence brewing. They are things bumping in the night. Chomsky--for his long respectable humanitarian career--is missing the boat. Islamofascism is the threat of our era. And their bridesmaides are apologetic western liberals.

I see more reason to learn proficiency in the use of an assault rifle than the academic study of philosophy. Anyone who doesn't isn't watching the ball on the field. Their in the skybox chatting over caviar and wine.

I use the life of Ayann Hirsi Ali as my exhibit A. And more than relish the liberal squirm at her similitude of Harris's supposed bigotry.

 

[Ibid]

Two things: The thread was NOT meant to be provocative and I'm not sure where you getting that idea from. I read a few studies that had noticed a pattern and I was curious as to why it might be. So I decided to ask here. If you are seeing some strong opinions, it is because religion and politics are inherently contentious, and in particular, for certain people. Secondly, yes, the thread is off the original topic...as is your question about whether religiosity would impact patient treatment. But it seems that the mods permit more room for exploring ideas in this subforum so this should be fine.

Rabbi's little helper

Forget 'Big Brother': Psychiatric drugs are frequently administered within the Haredi community at leaders' requests, in order to bring members in line with norms, say sources.

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/rabbi-s-little-helper-1.422985

And the follow up...

Published 02:23 22.04.12
Latest update 02:23 22.04.12
Psychiatric drugs become talk of the ultra-Orthodox community

Haaretz report exposing rabbi involvement in prescription of psychiatric drugs leads to people coming forward to tell their stories, some doubt anything will change.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/feature...talk-of-the-ultra-orthodox-community-1.425727

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haaretz

 

[Iwillheal]

So are you satisfied with the answer(s) to your OP so far?

LOL. In reality I am/was. Thanks for your input. Several people, yourself included, tried to answer my question to the best of their ability, and I appreciate you guys doing that, despite my newbie status. A few people, one in particular, have been rude and making bigoted comments and frankly I'm surprised why their posts are not deleted. As far as us playing "nicely together", I have been amongst those who have done that, I think. And given that my favorite NHL team, Vancouver, were eliminated yesterday, and I'm pissed drunk and mad, I'm proud of myself for not taking it out on the aforementioned member(s) here. But overall I'm satisfied so if you need to lock this thread or whatever, I'm okay with it.