"As My Mother counseled you in the past, sin is insanity, and you will see all manner of actions coming forth from the darkness within your children, even your neighbors.”
– The Bayside Prophecies
Jesus, September 14, 1979
Sin as insanity
Fulton Sheen noted in one of his talks that he once brought holy Communion to a person in a mental hospital. At the hospital, several patients reacted violently as he passed by, even though the pyx containing the blessed Sacrament was hidden from view. One of the classic signs of possession is that the possessed has an intense hatred for holy things. Another sign is that the possessed clearly knows things that are distant or hidden (such as the hidden presence of the blessed Sacrament).
Peter Kreeft writes:
“How could a sane person prefer hell to heaven? And if it takes insanity to make that choice, how can anyone be blamed for it? The same argument “proves” there's no sin on earth either. All sin is insanity: preferring self without God to God. All sin is a little souvenir from hell. It is crazy. But it's real.” (Peter Kreeft, Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics, chapter 10).
The German philosophy Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that “to have lost God means madness; and when mankind will discover that it has lost God, universal madness will break out.” (quoted in Sin and Madness, Shirley Sugerman, p. 17) According to R.D. Laing, the Scottish psychiatrist, man’s radical estrangement from God and idolatry of his own self means madness. He writes, “We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer darkness is the state of sin—that is, alienation or estrangement from the inner light.” (quoted in Sin and Madness, Shirley Sugerman, p. 17)
Shirley Sugerman has several enlightening quotes from her book, Sin and Madness:
“Sin and madness are ways of understanding man as a creature who flees from himself.” (Sin and Madness, Shirley Sugerman, p. 64)
Our contemporary despair, our estrangement from ourselves, from our world, and from God, was once called sin. By calling the Biblical tradition into question we have lost this tradition as one of the ways we have understood ourselves—as imago Dei. We have lost the category of sin as part of that understanding. Nietzsche was prophetic on this subject. He was “keenly aware of … the manner in which the non-existence of God would threaten human life with a complete loss of significance,” in fact, with madness. (ibid., p. 69)
Madness evokes what men have meant through the centuries when they have spoken in theological language of sin and the destructiveness of pride. Whether we speak of narcissism, or of the sin of pride, or of the divided self, we are concerned with a spiritual disorder of the individual and of mankind. This understanding of the flight from the self as madness and as sin and the resulting despair that issues from this state is a prior condition for its reversal. It is a call for a radical transformation of consciousness—metanoia, a total change of mind—which would mean the breaking of the shell of the old false self, the courage to drop the mask, a loss of the self to gain the self, death for there to be rebirth. Rather than a sanity that has been madness, we need a madness that might lead to a true sanity. For this we might give thanks, as for a special grace. (ibid., p. 67)
This is what we have known, in the language of sin, as the rebellion against the given or true self—the refusal to be one’s self, as Soren Kierkegaard saw it. Rather than willing to be the self that it is, the self wills to construct itself. Translated into the twentieth-century language of phenomenological depth psychology, we find that this disorder of the spirit, which is at the center of the sickness of the psyche, understood as madness, has become the equivalent of what has been understood as sin. (ibid., pp. 84-85)
Our Lady of the Roses has told us:
"O My children, do not be deceived by the ways of satan that he sets among you. He will not come to you so that he will be recognized immediately. He will come to you as an angel of light. He will give you all that appeals to your human nature, but it will sicken your immortal soul.” (Our Lady, October 2, 1976)
The diabolical
Pope Paul VI stated at the General Audience of November 15, 1972:
Evil is not merely a lack of something, but an effective agent, a living spiritual being, perverted and perverting. A terrible reality. Mysterious and frightening. It is contrary to the teaching of the Bible and the Church to refuse to recognize the existence of such a reality, or to regard it as a principle in itself which does not draw its origin from God like every other creature: or to explain it as a pseudo-reality, a conceptual and fanciful personification of the unknown causes of our misfortunes.
Shirley Sugerman writes:
Kierkegaard describes the “demonic” as the silent, while the self that is able to be in relation to an other he describes as transparent. Modern analysis measures therapeutic movement by means of progressive communication. Resistance is indicated by interruption of the flow of communication. (Sin and Madness, Shirley Sugerman, p. 151)
Scott Peck, M.D., says that he wrote a chapter in his book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil:
entitled “Towards a Psychology of Evil” precisely because we do not yet have a body of scientific knowledge about human evil deserving of being called a psychology. Why not? The concept of evil has been central to religious thought for millennia. Yet it is virtually absent from our science of psychology—which one might think would be vitally concerned with the matter. (People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, pp. 39-40)
Scott Peck also writes:
As well as being the Father of Lies, Satan may be said to be the spirit of mental illness. In The Road Less Traveled I defined mental health as “an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” Satan is utterly dedicated to opposing that process. In fact, the best definition I have for Satan is that it is a real spirit of unreality. (p. 207)
David Berkowitz (the “Son of Sam”), when asked why he killed, told the police that Sam was a 6000 year old man, who was actually a fallen angel come to earth to destroy, and his 1000 year dog commanded him to do so. The defense stated that he was insane. Berkowitz himself claims he was a victim of childhood possession and admitted that he had become a satanist:
I became friends with some guys whom I thought were cool. They were satanists. Foolishly I joined the group. I started doing the rituals. Then at some point I passed the threshold of no return. I went from a casual participant to an actual devil worshiper. ("My Story" by David Berkowitz)
Our Lady of the Roses confirmed the fact, that David Berkowitz was possessed by satan:
“My children, the evil, the spirits of darkness always reveal themselves with time. They cannot conceal their farce and lies. My children, you will understand now that satan is trying to conceal his nature and his being to mankind to deceive you. If you do not believe in the existence of Lucifer, satan, and his agents, demons, he can go forward working his will among you unseen, unknown, unbelieved but creating disaster and death to souls. My children, the man you call 'Sam' is satan in a human body. He has powers beyond what most human beings could understand.” (Our Lady, November 21, 1977)
Scott Peck states that he would have been tempted to write a book on the relationship between evil and possession, had not Fr. Malachi Martin already done so:
Since the relationship between possession and ordinary evil is obscure at best, it would be highly unrealistic to devote half these pages to the subject. Nonetheless, I might be tempted to do so were it not for the fact that there is a book that describes quite well five cases of possession—Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Devil. All of my experience confirms the accuracy and depth of understanding of Martin’s work, and a case description of my own would contribute practically nothing beyond his writings. (pp. 183-184)
Lies, deceit and confusion
Much of the behavior listed below are symptoms of many of the “mental disorders.” The question is, how many of the people labeled as “mentally ill” are in reality simply evil people?
Scott Peck writes:
There is another reaction that the evil frequently engender in us: confusion. Describing an encounter with an evil person, one woman wrote, it was “as if I’d suddenly lost my ability to think.” Once again, this reaction is quite appropriate. Lies confuse. The evil are “the people of the lie,” deceiving others as they also build layer upon layer of self-deception. (p. 66)
Making a distinction between maliciously evil people, and those who sometimes commit sin, Dr. Peck writes:
It is not their sins per se that characterize evil people, rather it is the subtlety and persistence and consistency of their sins. This is because the central defect of the evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it. (p. 69)
Referrring to scapegoating behavior, Scott Peck writes:
A predominant characteristic, however, of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection. (p. 73)
Scott Peck explains other characteristics found in evil people:
Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection. Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world’s fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil; on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others. (pp. 73-74)
Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it. It often happens, then, that the evil may be recognized by its very disguise. The lie can be perceived before the misdeed it is designed to hide—the cover-up before the fact. We see the smile that hides the hatred, the smooth and oily manner that masks the fury, the velvet glove that covers the fist. Because they are such experts at disguise, it is seldom possible to pinpoint the maliciousness of the evil. (p. 76)
The evil deny the suffering of their guilt—the painful awareness of their sin, inadequacy, and imperfection—by casting their pain onto others through projection and scapegoating. They themselves may not suffer, but those around them do. They cause suffering. The evil create for those under their dominion a miniature sick society. (pp. 123-124)
Think of the psychic energy required for the continued maintenance of the pretense so characteristic of the evil! They perhaps direct at least as much energy into their devious rationalizations and destructive compensations as the healthiest do into loving behavior. Why? What possesses them, drives them? Basically, it is fear. They are terrified that the pretense will break down and they will be exposed to the world and to themselves. They are continually frightened that they will come face-to-face with their own evil. Of all emotions, fear is the most painful. Regardless of how well they attempt to appear calm and collected in their daily dealings, the evil live their lives in fear. It is a terror—and a suffering—so chronic, so interwoven into the fabric of their being, that they may not even feel it as such. And if they could, their omnipresent narcissism will prohibit them from ever acknowledging it. (pp. 124-125)
“Mentally” ill, or actually spiritually ill?
Thomas S. Szasz, M.D contested the entire analogy between mental and physical illness in The Myth of Mental Illness. He also insists that the phrase “mental illness” is no more than a metaphor:
… physicians are trained to treat bodily ills—economic, moral, racial, religious, or political ‘ills.’ And they themselves (except psychiatrists) expect, and in turn are expected by their patients, to treat bodily diseases, not envy and rage, fear and folly, poverty and stupidity, and all the other miseries that beset man. Strictly speaking, then, disease or illness can affect only the body. Hence, there can be no such thing as mental illness. The term ‘mental illness’ is a metaphor. (The Myth of Mental Illness, Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., p. ix)
He goes on to say that he is opposed to the labeling of people as hopelessly determined and set in their ways, by emphasizing personal freedom, choice, and responsibility:
I wish only to maximize the scope of voluntaristic explanations—in other words, to reintroduce freedom, choice, and responsibility into the conceptual framework and vocabulary of psychiatry. (ibid., p. 6)
Scott Peck, M.D. writes:
Knowing so little about the nature of evil, we currently lack the skill to heal it. Our therapeutic ineptness is hardly remarkable, however, in view of the fact that we have not even yet discerned evil as a specific disease. (People of the Lie, p. 67)
Sin and personal responsibility
Take for example the true story of a man labeled as manic-depressive who convinced himself that he was not responsible for going to Church and obeying the Commandments because he was “sick”, and was therefore not responsible. He had convinced himself that his sickness has given him a carte blanche to live the way he wanted. Yet he was fully lucid and capable to do anything that was pleasing to him: taking trips, going to restaurants, etc., but he felt incapacitated to go to Church.
Something is terribly wrong with this picture.
Thomas S. Szasz, M.D explains that the invention of “mental diseases” has erroneously removed the sense of personal responsibility:
… whereas in modern medicine new diseases were discovered, in modern psychiatry they were invented. Paresis was proved to be a disease; hysteria was declared to be one. It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of this shift in the criteria of what constitutes illness. Under its impact, persons who complained of pains and paralyses but were apparently physically intact in their bodies—that is, were healthy, by the old standards—were now declared to be suffering from a “functional illness.” Thus was hysteria invented. And thus were all the other mental illnesses invented—each identified by the various complaints or functional-behavioral alterations of the person affected by them. And thus was a compelling parallel constructed between bodily and mental illness: for example, as paresis was considered to be a structural disease of the brain, so hysteria and other mental illnesses were considered to be functional diseases of the same organ. So-called functional illnesses were thus placed in the same category as structural illnesses and were distinguished from imitated or faked illnesses by means of the criterion of voluntary falsification. Accordingly, hysteria, neurasthenia, depression, paranoia, and so forth were regarded as diseases that happened to people. Mentally sick persons did not “will” their pathological behavior and were therefore considered “not responsible” for it. (The Myth of Mental Illness, Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., pp. 12-13)
The Catholic Church, however, teaches just the opposite on personal responsibility:
The position taken by the Holy Office and that stated by Pius XII in his address on the education of Christian conscience (AAS 44 (1952) 270-278) and in the address to psychotherapists (AAS (1953) 278-286) have clarified one limit beyond which speculation as to human responsibility cannot go without deviating from traditional Catholic doctrine. Normal human beings—normal being understood as signifying not ideally normal, or perfectly healthy persons, but the common run of men—under ordinary circumstance (including circumstances of temptation, stress, and pressure) possess sufficient freedom to be capable of sin and indeed, of mortal sin. (Catholic Encyclopedia, “Responsibility,” p. 397)
Thomas Szasz writes, “We have thus come to regard addiction, delinquency, divorce, homosexuality, homicide, suicide, and so on almost without limit, as psychiatric illnesses. This is a colossal and costly mistake.” (The Myth of Mental Illness, p. 38) As Daniel Duke laments, “Finding someone or something to blame for social problems has emerged as a full-time occupation for a host of social scientists. The recent history of research in the social sciences has witnessed the unrelenting depersonalization of blame.”[1] Garth Wood's views are quite similar: “It has become the fashion of late to consider that the development of an unsatisfactory personality should carry with it no implications of blame [and] should not occasion feelings of guilt…”[2] Stanton Peele, in his book, The Diseasing of America, writes, “At the larger social level, I address how our society is going wrong in excusing crime, compelling people to undergo treatment, and wildly mixing up moral responsibility with disease diagnosis.” (pp. 4-5) Peele also laments:
We now look almost exclusively for sources of emotional distress and behavioral excesses in the chemistry of drugs and people’s bodies. In seeking biological cures for emotional disorders and addictions, we are going in exactly the opposite direction we need to follow…. (p. 11)
By revising notions of personal responsibility, our disease conceptions undercut moral and legal standards exactly at a time when we suffer most from a general loss of social morality. (p. 27)
Disease notions actually increase the incidence of behaviors of concern. They legitimize, reinforce, and excuse the behaviors in question—convincing people, contrary to all evidence, that their behavior is not their own. (p. 28)
This urge to reduce moral problems to biological dimensions goes back a long way: Benjamin Rush, the eighteenth century founder of the disease concept of alcoholism, also thought that lying, murder, and political dissent were diseases. (pp. 53-54)
The very notion of illness based on behavior—albeit “uncontrollable” behavior—suggests a myriad of potential new diseases. There are an awful lot of things that people do that they know they shouldn’t or that they regret doing more of than they want to. Once this pattern has been defined as a disease, almost anything can be treated as a medical problem. Jules Masserman, a past president of the American Psychiatric Association, pointed out, “Addiction to drink is a ‘disease’ only in the sense that excessive eating, sleeping, smoking, wandering, or lechery may also be so classified.” (p. 117)
We seem rapidly to be creating a future world of people who identify themselves primarily in terms of their diseases. (p. 133)
It is hard to escape the conclusion that ownership of an emotional-behavioral-appetitive disease is the norm in America. (pp. 140-141)
By elevating the unhealthy side of normal functioning to the status of disease state, therapists and others who claim the mantle of science now guarantee the preeminence, pervasiveness, and persistence of sickness in everyday life. (p. 143)
The selling of the idea of addiction is a major contribution to the undermining of moral values and behavior in our era. (p. 206)
Psychologist Donald Campbell, a past president of the American Psychological Association, sees in contemporary America a “non-optimal production of underinhibited, overly narcissistic and overly selfish individuals.” He also says there is “social functionality and psychological validity to the concepts of sin and temptation and of original sin due to human carnal, animal nature.”[3]
The phrase “mental illness” would be more truthfully called a metaphor. Thomas Szasz writes, “Indeed, labeling individuals displaying or disabled by problems in living as ‘mentally ill’ has only impeded and retarded the recognition of the essential moral and political nature of the phenomena to which psychiatrists address themselves.” (The Myth of Mental Illness, p. 25) Szasz also writes, “The fact that atomic energy is used in warfare does not make international conflicts problems in physics; likewise, the fact that the brain is used in human behavior does not make moral and personal conflicts problems in medicine.” (ibid., p. 26) Szasz furthermore rejects “the medicalization of personal problems,” (ibid., 73) moral problems that have nothing to do with medicine.
In many cases, the phrase “mentally ill” is used to describe a moral, spiritual disorder, a sickness of soul. But in our materialistic age that denies the manifestations of the spiritual, the effects of the spiritual must be deceitfully squeezed in the scientists’ materialistic box. Thus we have the phrase “mental illness” to describe many conditions that have no known physical cause, as do real medical illnesses, such as pneumonia. Scott Peck writes: “As my priest friend commented, evil is ‘the ultimate disease.’ Despite their pretense to sanity, the evil are the most insane of all.” (p. 264)
Our Lady has the most fitting and logical definition of all: “sin is insanity.”
[1] Daniel Duke, “Student Behavior, the Depersonalization of Blame and the Society of Victims,”; see Keith Baker and Robert Rubel, eds., Violence and Crime in the Schools (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1980), 31-47.[1]
[2] Garth Wood, The Myth of Neurosis, 41-42.
[3] Quoted in Psychology as Religion, Paul Vitz, p. 46.
"Much, My children, you must accept in faith. Scientists of your world and your psychologists and psychiatrists rationalize everything, until sin is accepted as a way of life--scientists who are ever searching but never coming to the truth! The supernatural cannot be rejected, because if you reject the supernatural, you do not have the armor to fight it. It is a crafty plan of satan to make himself unknown, so that he may go among you, and destroying like a ravenous wolf.”
– The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, December 7, 1977
SOURCE:
The electronic form of this document is copyrighted.
Quotations are permissible as long as this web site is acknowledged with a hyperlink to: https://www.tldm.org
Copyright © These Last Days Ministries, Inc. 1996 - 2019 All rights reserved.