Recovering from Christianity, a Personal View.

[Learner]

I should add that the really crazy crazies are mostly gone or society identifies and deals with them. The ones who's psychoses caused them to leap from cliffs or pick up venomous snakes are gone. What remains are the ones who tell us they can do these things with the help of the spaceman but don't actually try. Natural selection has eliminated most of the certifiably insane.

Not all ... Natural selection has dealt only with the religious crazies and left the other crazies - everybody else - in the context of your analysis. People are still doing dumb founded harmful things. Spaceman or aliens regards another group of individuals this is why you may find difficulty with double speak .

I don't think its a 'diagnosis' you've made but rather a 'labelling'.

 

[bilby]

I prefer to refer to religion as a "Social Illness" rather than a "Mental Illness." Everyone understands that a person's social group influences them, and everyone has some familiarity with dysfunctional social groups that warp its members. We can avoid some of the confrontationalism by speaking to the effects of the social group rather than individual problems of perception. For my part, my own realization of my mental blinders came as a result of seeing the flaws of my social group.

I tend to agree with the idea of Social Illness. People who grow up in an environment that favours poor choices are not entirely mentally well, but they usually fall short of the strict definition of 'mentally ill', if only because their condition is so widespread.

Children who grow up thinking that the only way to get anything is to steal it; Or who grow up thinking that the only way to get respect is through the use of violence; Or who grow up thinking that the way to find out what is true is to believe the local priest, are being poorly treated, and poorly prepared for the wider world. How harmful this ends up being depends on a wide range of factors, not least being the prevalence of the same bad ideas in their immediate community - if enough of one's peers share these poor ways of thinking or acting, then they become self-sustaining, and the only way to survive is to fit in, or ship out. The criminal underclass is in many ways analogous to a religion - there are rewards for 'correct' beliefs or actions; and punishments for 'incorrect' beliefs or actions - and these overrule and override the wider implications of those beliefs and actions in the rest of the world, which is viewed as hostile and unworthy.

 

[Angry Floof]

I prefer to refer to religion as a "Social Illness" rather than a "Mental Illness." Everyone understands that a person's social group influences them, and everyone has some familiarity with dysfunctional social groups that warp its members. We can avoid some of the confrontationalism by speaking to the effects of the social group rather than individual problems of perception. For my part, my own realization of my mental blinders came as a result of seeing the flaws of my social group.

I tend to agree with the idea of Social Illness. People who grow up in an environment that favours poor choices are not entirely mentally well, but they usually fall short of the strict definition of 'mentally ill', if only because their condition is so widespread.

Good post. This is why I prefer not to use the term mental illness. It deserves its own language, as religious belief has only recently become the focus of scientific examination, and it's neither mental illness nor healthy. I mean healthy as in not burdened by specific religious systems that do little to cultivate critical thinking but plenty to hijack the limbic system and cognitive error. Non-religious beliefs can be just as wrong or dangerous, but organized religion corners the market on mass manipulation of brains, mainly the ones that forbid questioning of how they mass manipulate brains.

 

[rousseau]

I wouldn't describe religion as a social illness.

In strict terms, belief-systems are irrelevant to how people work. For the brunt of the history of civilization religion has been our de facto explanation in lieu of scientific evidence. If you're a human being in 600 B.C. capable of thinking and rationalizing, you need to come up with some, any theory on why you exist. Religion is the off-spring of that.

But when we're talking about human cultures there are deeper, more important structures in place than religion: sexual rituals, marriage, child-rearing norms, etc, all with the aim of having us pop out more kids. No society can exist without pro-creation, so culture is fundamentally about that, even the un-conscious elements of religion.

So getting back to why religion isn't a social illness. You could call it that with the aim of eradicating it, which would be fair enough. But objectively religions are just belief systems which exist as a conduit between pre-history and post-modernism. They gained a strong old when science didn't exist, and now we need to snap out of it, and we will.

In other words, it's not like we made some grand mistake in Ancient Roman times and chose religion when we could have done otherwise. Rather, we chose religion because we had no other viable explanation to why we existed at the time. And now, in 2017 we're just at the dawn of modernity and an atheistic world, where literally thousands of years has shaped our religious thought, and only a few centuries our atheistic thought.

 

[rousseau]

I guess I should add that the problems of irrationality are biological, and not social. Obviously religion is shitty and needs an update, I just have trouble describing something we had little to no conscious control over a 'social illness'.

 

[bilby]

I guess I should add that the problems of irrationality are biological, and not social. Obviously religion is shitty and needs an update, I just have trouble describing something we had little to no conscious control over a 'social illness'.

But adults DO have conscious control over their religion - they just usually refuse to exercise that control due to their childhood indoctrination. There's nothing biological about religion - irrationality is partly innate, but religion is a social phenomenon that hijacks that innate irrationality.

It's analogous to the difference between a genetic propensity to lung cancer, and smoking 40 a day. Nobody has control over the former, but the latter is a matter of choice. That the right choice is less easy after a long period of exposure to the wrong one is not an indication that the behaviour is innate - just that it is addictive.

 

[rousseau]

I guess I should add that the problems of irrationality are biological, and not social. Obviously religion is shitty and needs an update, I just have trouble describing something we had little to no conscious control over a 'social illness'.

But adults DO have conscious control over their religion - they just usually refuse to exercise that control due to their childhood indoctrination. There's nothing biological about religion - irrationality is partly innate, but religion is a social phenomenon that hijacks that innate irrationality.

It's analogous to the difference between a genetic propensity to lung cancer, and smoking 40 a day. Nobody has control over the former, but the latter is a matter of choice. That the right choice is less easy after a long period of exposure to the wrong one is not an indication that the behaviour is innate - just that it is addictive.

I don't disagree, my point is only to say that inaccurate belief systems are a symptom of how people work and them having incomplete knowledge.

If we term religion a 'social illness' then every time a person doesn't conform to some subjective criteria someone comes up with we need to call them just short of mentally ill.

I'd think it's more accurate to say that the very nature of belief tends to be faulty due to some epistemological principle. It's a pedantic argument but I think it makes religion a little more clear.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Or do you just base this on the idea that we believe in something that you don't think is rational?

If I tell you I read LOTR fourty-eleven times and from that learned how to forge a magic sword to fight off the orcs that live under my basement, you'll form an opinion of my sanity.

If I say I wrote to Dr. Gregory House with the symptoms I'm experiencing, and he came to my house at midnight and cured me, you'll form an opinion.

My friend who played D&D with me went to sick call and gave the symptoms his elf mage exhibited after the character slept with a whore in a tavern in Greyhawk, and fumbled his 'save versus STDs' roll and woke up with an invisible dick... The Navy has an official opinion on his sanity. A widely accepted one, too...

IF I tell you that the second time I met my FTB Detailer, he asked what billet I wanted, and I said I wanted to be the Intel officer on the USS Enterprise, and he thought I meant the aircraft carrier, but I insisted it was NCC 1701, and demanded the Intel school, you'd form an opinion.






But if you tell me that your favorite skybeast was going to throw you into Hell, for eternity, to punish you for, at a minimum, someone else fucking things up and dooming all their descendants, like you, to pay for THEIR sin, but your second favorite skybeast stood up for you, arguing with the first skybeast, (who is the same skybeast) because he came to Earth and got tortured to death...by descendants of the first sinners... But this time he forgave them their sins, rather than curse them even more...
You tell me this and, what, I'm supposed to say, Hey, it's your opinion....?

There's obviously more than a little OCD going on. Once I mentioned to someone that I bake bread, the kind Jesus ate at the last supper, not today's fake factory bread made with beer yeast. Boy did I open up a can of worms! It so happens that if Jesus ate leavened bread their whole world is in the shitter and the New Testament is up for question and God's word is no longer inerrant and holy shit! Scholars have argued this for centuries because of contradictions. I mean, someone needs a fucking life.

Trying to explain to someone that all bread is leavened, it's just a matter of allowing the leaven to work doesn't cut it. I guess it somehow destroys the magic to think otherwise. And don't forget to roast the goat flesh, boiling isn't allowed. The bible is living proof that psychosis occurs at the group level.