The twentieth century was the age of scientific materialism. Freud, Marx and
Darwin replaced traditional religions. Materialism brought great advances
in technology and our standard of living skyrocketed. However, materialism
also had its dark sides, and one of them was psychiatry.
Some of the worst nightmares of this century were perpetrated by
psychiatrists. Hitler didn't design and authorize the death chambers; they
were urged upon him by psychiatrists in mental hospitals. These scientists
wanted to relieve mental patients and the retarded of the burden of their
"hopeless" lives. Radovan Karadzic of Bosnian "ethnic cleansing" is the only
psychiatrist known to ever head a government. Twentieth century psychiatry
is what happens when people are regarded as complex machines powered by a
complex computer-like mechanism called a brain. "Doctors of the mind" begin
to think of themselves as super-mechanics. Those psychiatrists who didn't
look for parents or someone else to blame for "damaging" the machine, and
causing mental illness, used lobotomy and shock treatments to try to fix the
machine. They administered psychotropic drugs to make it run more
efficiently. Free will has no place in a machine, and many materialists of
this century have suggested free will is an illusion and doesn't really
exist. Materialists see people as either comprised of genetic instincts and
a mechanical brain, or as the automatic result of environmental programming.
(A pole has shown ninety seven percent of psychiatrists are Atheists.)
Bertvan
http://members.aol.com/bertvan