Ellen Evans writes: And a really good parish priest/pastor/rabbi/whatever can offer precisely this kind of "treatment" to those willing to accept that kind of treatment from a religious person rather than a psychoanalyst.
Agreed. Spiritual leaders can be very effective in helping people deal with the same issues therapists can and, in fact, often have some very similar training. Another similarity lies in the fact that some therapists and spiritual leaders excel at what they do and really help people to cope and grow, etc., while some are mediocre and have little effect and yet others are quite dangerous in that they either don't know what they are doing or they have an agenda (conversion, finding repressed memories of sexual abuse) that can have lasting damaging effects on their victims.
Ellen: And the fact that the person involved is also a religious figure doesn't necessarily mean that therefore psychoanalyis is a religion.
Psychoanalysis is a theory. Metatheory applies to both religion and to scientific theory (regardless of whether that theory is indeed psychoanalytic theory or the theory of gravity). At a metatheoretical level the world views aligned to specific religions or theories can be discussed, but at a more specific level you start start making fruit salad when you try to compare them.
Furthering the problem is that the discussants in this argument
[science vs religion] are postulating from disparate
metatheoretical stances, so that they are often not even talking
about the same concept in the same way. In order to understand the
arguments in this thread (and most other philosophical flamefests)
people must divorce themselves from their world view. Only once one
is able to decenter in this way can one ever fully understand an
argument across the metatheoretical contexts.
