Schizophrenia Forum - Sz & Christianity

Core vs. Cortex

a "reason why" for evil, allowed on earth by god? The tree at the center of the garden was never to be touched, it was a test. Maybe to make the devil feel bad, teach him a lesson, 'cause if everyone just ignored him and ignored the tree, don't you think that would hurt the devil's feelings, and have an effect on evil itself?
Or, I once heard the story of a man who took three younger girls and put them into a different country where they couldn't speak the language, and was hoping one would become his mate, after being "purified" by this process. Maybe this is what god is doing with us, putting us in a test situation, giving us a clue, and hoping we find our way back to him.
Or these were my thoughts last year, when I was going throught the catholicism myself;

for about one year, I thought that a catholic spirituality I had discovered was the most effective part of a cure that also included closer family ties, prayer, abstention from just about everything ( I went pretty far with it, taking only cold showers, going to mass several times a week), and I could hear the angels talking to me during mass, during communion - voices, but nothing like the regular ones in tone or nature of the material, rather they were teaching me how to pray, and showing me heaven. I had gone to midnight mass with my devout brother-in-law and their whole family, and because I see visions in my head in the evening, this two or three hour mass was quite an event for me, and after it was over I said it had been like an exorcism. I thought I had seen a writhing cat come out of my shoulder and fly up into the church ceiling and the next night when I went to sleep to look in the demon world, everyone was gone; like showing up in new york city after a nuclear bomb or something. Just saw one demon left, deep underground in an old building, sitting at a desk, writing.
It was a good year, and I was increasingly normal, but it also cost me more energy than is sustainable I think. The following easter, for two nights leading up to it I had intense dreams of demon interventions, and during the second easter vigil mass it was intense as ever, but coming out after I was again maniacal, like a demon.
My visions behind the eyes got more and more intense over the course of that year. My brother in law tried to counsel me saying "if you re in a place that god is pleased with, the devil has to worry about you, and work on you harder".
And maybe it was true, because after that second easter I broke up with my girlfriend and then quit going to church and went back pretty much to my old set of beliefs, (crazy, unique esoteric stuff based on shamanism, astrophysics, and whatever else!), and my family seems disappointed, and think i'm insane, I think, but I feel this is me, this is where i'm supposed to be, and that ultimately I am actually against what the catholic religion was doing to me. For a while I loved it, and was saying that all sz people should try it, that the catholic church was "by schizophrenics, for schizophrenics".
Curiously I had an idea while watching "terminator 3". Man against machine. Man creates machine but then machine gets carried away and threatens to takeover, and we of course all root for mankind to win the battle. Our human brains have a reptilian core, then a mammalian cortex that surrounds it. What came first? The core! Then should we be rooting in any way for the cortex to take over, against the core? Wouldn't that be like machines taking over man? Core vs. Cortex.; the core came first, it should be the cortex for the core; machines for man. The word "catholic" means all inclusive. But they exclude demons (not to mention other people's dissenting ways of life, though that doesn't apply to me). Should they be "exorcizing" demons? "destroying" demons? "aborting" demons (as they say judas did)? What came first, demons or religion? Core or cortex? Man or machine? Shouldn't it be, then, religion for the demons, rather than trying to kick the ladder out from under itself?
This "call" to "heaven" that my brother in law speaks of, why is this is something we should listen to? Maybe it's like we're all pine trees, in a field, and a lumberjack comes along and "calls" several of the trees, to "give up" their roots in the soil, the underworld, and fly away to a "better place" where all the other trees that have been disappearing from the field have already gone? We are from the earth, this is our home, and i'm not going anywhere. I love the human world, and I love the demon world, these are all creatures in the same situation, all in need of help. No one should be excluded in true perfection.

My experience of devout catholicism taught me that jesus is powerful magic, a powerful shaman, but how fair is it? How one-sided? Kill the demons? Abort them? Exorcize them? They are part of the everything! And a truly magical, beatific jet can 'hold high the broken bowl' and bring enlightenment and god to all, demons included.
The bible progresses like a beautiful dream, , but I think it leaves out realities so fundamental that it is as if you got up in the morning and planned your week without allowing for food or sleep. The need for these things would gradually creep in and obstruct the fulfillment of the original plan. And so I think it is with the demons, contraversial and unpleasant as this idea may be. So do you "exorcize" the hunger and the sleepiness? Fight it and pray for it to go? Wouldn't it be more effective to allocate it it's proper place in the creation of the initial plan?

It is as if the universe itself, made up of brilliant balls of light and vast swaths of darkness as well as the ultimately dark 'black holes', decided to pray only for light. Beautiful suns would light up, and at first it would seem like wonderful magic, but something about this is not right.Darkness, even black holes, are an integral part of this universe we a re so graciously presented with. Could it be this universe is our truest "bible", revealing unimaginable beauty and power, as an infinite guide and even a role-model - the human spirit as a microcosm of the universe, which contains within it two opposites, and uses it's very being as a unification of these opposites?