sharon45

No, religion is general and can be as logical or as outlandish as its creator/s wish/es to define. It has to be known by at least one person and it doesn't have to be followed by anyone.

Jagella

Not all scientists are atheists, but the large majority of them are. As for “wasting time studying religion,�? a significant number of scientists do study it.

I’ve decided to start a new personal rule here on this forum. Anybody who continues to attack me personally, I will ignore. You have your first warning.

I won’t exclude fundamentalists. What kind of an argument defending the emotional stability of religionists would exclude fundamentalists? It’s like saying: “Nobody in my church is crazy, but I insist that you ignore the members that are nuts.�?

I don’t place “over reliance�? on man. I judge people for what they are able to do. If I deem them incapable, then I don’t rely on them.

Under that definition, Muhammad, Joseph Smith, Moses, and Jesus are all charlatans. It’s a statement I won’t disagree with.

I haven’t failed to notice that religionists love large numbers of people that share their beliefs. Jesse Ventura said it well when he stated:

You mean I should make up my own religion? Why not just adopt a religion that somebody else made up like most people do?

I have no such feelings. The silly notion of “God�? has no appeal for me. I just like to study it to see why so many people believe in something that doesn’t exist.

Jagella

Jagella

What does any of this have to do with atheism? Perhaps it is an argument for atheism. That is, how could God—assuming he exists—create such monsters and then allow them to murder millions of people? Such a God would be stupid, or evil, or both.

Then educate me. What good has religion done? I can’t think of anything.

Jagella

Jagella

I don’t believe that one needs to hold a doctorate in philosophy to see that gods cannot exist. They are as credible as ghosts, fairies, or magical dwarves.

I am very pleased to see that at least one member of this forum has good reading comprehension.

Jagella

Oxymoron

Fine; I ain't selling it, it's too valuable

That's pretty glib. What has complexity got to do with it anyway?

All.

Yes. Dead serious. But worse than Santa, because most adults don't actually believe in Santa; and the jolly guy in red rarely advocates the killing of doctors, the persecution of gays and so on and so forth.

Rather than regurgitate what I've written in the past:

This and this.

Evoken

Oh I did, the problem is that you are talking simply about faith in broad terms and not specific ones. Not everyone has the same beliefs.

Oxymoron

Tell us about yours.

Are yours representative of mainstream religious "thought", or are you an outlier?

muTron the homeless

Ture most adults don't believe in the Santa. Maybe because his myth is not as powerful of the myth of God.

As for the abscence of evil in Santa lore: The jolly red guy doesn't seem particularly interested in feeding the poor and tending to the sick either or seeking justice for the wronged widow. Wisdom is vindicated by her actions. Because some religious people have done evil things does not make religion evil in and of itself.

As for your links:
Very interesting ideas. Fairly persuassive as well. however I have another question.

1) As in the second thread you seem to indicate that we all suffer from varying degrees of this mental illness, the difference is theists suppress it and rationalists meet in headon. Would you say that some theists are less mentally ill than others? Since religion is a coping device to be able to compensate for the fear in living in a dangerous world (and from the above post you indicate all theism is equally fair game and not just "religion") would you say a non-religious Deist who belives in Spinoza's God is less mentally ill than a religious Xian (by religious I mean one who prays and attends church regularly etc.)

Oxymoron

Of course, for the vast majority of history (ie billions of years), "religion" did not exist in any shape or form. It is a thing created by people, it does not have its own existence. Therefore it is intrinsically bad to some degree because the actions of its believers are what make it good or bad.

Interesting. As I've argued, what we term "mental illness" is often gauged by its severity, and whether it fits some norm or not. Eg continuous depression resulting in inaction and negativity is probably a mantal illness. Whereas getting depressed because your dog died is an understandable reaction. They are fundamentally the same phenomenon, however. Recent research suggests that depression is a protective mechanism activated to prevent an individual participating in activities potentially detrimental to his or her survival. Of course, what is and is not detrimental is entirely determined by how the person models the world. With a poor (unsynchronised) model people are gonna get down needlessly.

So there are degrees, but it's not clear-cut. How it manifests, cultural and individual elements dictate the severity. A story on the news this morning in which African immigrants in the UK were beating their children to exorcise demons horrified me. These people are quite obviously badly-adjusted, yet their beliefs are held at least as earnestly as a xian churghgoer. And within their own community they are as sane as the next (wo)man

Stephen T-B

I have to say, I didn't much care for the "Religion as mental illness" bit in the OP - though I've known some very abnormal people who've been very religious. Indeed, some churches seem to harbour more than their fair share of them, and I can speculate as to why, but I don't think what I'd have to say on the subject is particularly useful.

My view is that there's a paradox at the heart of religious faith: the believer constantly looks for evidence to prove the reality of the god he/she believes in, but if ever if it were unambiguously supplied, belief would be made redundant, and the need for faith extinguished.
What all believers do is to confuse the reality of their belief with the reality of what they believe in, and this leads to fierce disagreements because the mind's construct of a god has no external reality and therefore there is no universal model which can be referred to. As I see it, the function of religious leaders is to fix the god of their belief by precise definition so that their followers have a shared idea of what to believe in.
The followers' duty is to accept that definition, even though it conflicts in some small degree with their own.
Indeed, by overcoming this conflict, they know they are being obedient. A significant sacrifice is being required of them, and "obedience" and "sacrifice" being esteemed elements in much religious teaching, they are therefore rewarded with a sense of worthy achievement.
If the conflict becomes too great, however, cohesion is broken and schism results, often followed by the violent antagonisms which arise between people who know the truth but cannot agree what it is.

I suggest that religious belief remains strong and ubiquitous because it performs a number of still-relevant functions.
It addresses deep-seated insecurities by claiming the ability to put all-powerful beings on our side; it stimulates emotions which some people find highly pleasurable; it seems to explain unsettling imponderables like How did it all begin? What are we here for? and What happens when we die? It supplies an exciting, mysterious, highly-attractive dimension to otherwise prosaic, cause-and-affect ruled lives; it gives the individual the rewarding sense of being special to an almighty, supernatural entity, and it satisfies the yearning to serve, this being a deeply-embedded element within our psychological make-up which we derive from a long history as a social animal, and is arguably associated with the requirement, among all such animals, to cooperate with each other and to a greater or lesser extent subordinate purely selfish interests to those of the community.
In this context it is worth mentioning a less widespread impulse but one which nevertheless derives from the same historical background: the need, within strictly hierarchical social systems, to obey. Religion in most of its manifestations, is also hierarchical and holds out the promise that obedience shall receive due recognition and reward.
By acting as a conduit between the people and their gods, the priestly caste exerts an influence which has, from time to time, inflicted immeasurable misery upon very large numbers of people.
It was only natural that its power tended to be subsumed by the political classes which then had authorioty over men's souls as well as their lives - as we see in Iran (and to a less overt extent) in the USA.

And non-believers, sad to say, are doomed to rail against priests and priestly-politicians in vain.