Are religions mental disorders?

Friday, January 24, 2020.

I stumbled into this interesting news: Iceland Declares All Religions Are Mental Disorders.

It took me some time to realize that it is just a satire on Andrew Hall’s Laughing in Disbelief blog.

But I love this joke. Maybe that’s what we need. It is time for Christians to feel how a homosexual feels in a society where homosexuality is considered a mental disorder.

And more importantly: It is time for humanity to realize that the Good News is not a religion. No religion is made by God and no religion is eternal. Religions are only the human echo of God’s Love. They are human cultures, and human cultures come and go. Only God is eternal. And we can only believe –or not– that he loves us and has an eternal Good News for us.

Christians need to understand that Jesus brought us the Good News, not a new religion. We must understand that believing means I choose to do as if, although I know that I don’t know. The friends of Jesus already started to understand that we are much more than a religion. Christianity is a faith beyond any religion. We are the Jesus Fan Club, the Church, the world-wide community of those who trust in the person of Jesus. And we use those historical intriguing texts about his life and his message because they help us to live a fully blessed life.

You cannot understand this message, at least not in a measurable scientific way. “If you understand it, then it’s not God” wrote Saint Augustine. But if you discover or perceive or hear or realize this message, you unavoidably want to share it with your beloved, your children, and all humans. You unavoidably want to cultivate it. Despite the fact that is beyond any reason.

It’s a good thing for Iceland that this was just a joke. Okay, we are at the beginning of the digital revolution. We only started to discover that human cultures can survive and grow in the digital space. This infrastructural change is probably greater than the coming of book printing 500 years ago. I can imagine all this, but I cannot imagine how to explain the Good News without the Bible, how to cultivate faith without a religion.

Refusing religions would throw away the child together with the bath water. How would they cultivate hope without any religion? They would become the most hopeless country in the world. Or even worse: the government would have to replace religion. Their judges would have to decide which blog post is a mental disorder and which one isn’t, who is mentally sane and who isn’t…