“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger, but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”

― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

I think about this kind of thing often. Not specifically about schizophrenia, but about people and their self-awareness in general.

I live in Utah, and Mormonism puts a heavy emphasis on something they call “personal revelation.” Basically, it’s the idea that God gives you feelings about things. A gut feeling, a hunch, an intuition, is actually God sending you a message. And I suspect that makes people just go with their gut feeling instead of taking the time for some introspective.

Whenever I get a feeling about something, I can think to myself, “Why am I feeling this way? What is it about my personality or my life experiences that is making me have this opinion?” But if it’s a personal revelation, it’s not actually you who is feeling that way, it’s a third party that is making you feel that way, and that third party is God, so you’re supposed to go with it.

It’s like an excuse to not take ownership of your own gut feelings.

As someone who does not have schizophrenia, the thoughts don’t have to feel foreign for the religion to work. All it takes is persuasive people convincing you that your very normal, intrusive thoughts aren’t actually just your brain doing brain things. My intrusive thoughts always felt like they were mine, but my former religion convinced me they weren’t.

I also don’t know that we would see a lot less religion if errant thoughts were better understood by regular people. Maybe we’d see less theistic religion, but perhaps people would just gravitate towards some other non-theistic spiritual practice instead.

On the Abraham/Isaac thing, there’s a reason why in religion, generally speaking, parents are pretty much allowed to do anything to their kids (or not strictly forbidden), while kids are required to respect their parents (regardless of what they do to them/how they raise them, “spare the rod spoil the child” and all that). This is how you perpetuate a religion - “You are part of this religion, don’t ask any problematic questions about it, respect ma authoritah!”

(I think it’s also related to Aristotle’s “Give me a child until he’s 7, and I will show you the man”, in the meaning of “indoctrinate them while you can”)

In other words religion is just an internal monologue cranking and failing to turn over.