TiffyToo

I don't mean to offend anyone, and I ask this question in all sincerity.

I listen to Mike Malloy on Air America and this is a point he made the other night, with regards to ANY fundamentalist religion, be it Christianity, Islam, etc. I'd always thought something was maybe wrong with me in that the efforts I made towards "getting it" or time I participated in fundamentalism, none of it made sense to me. In fact, the language fundies speak may as well be Greek to me, as I don't get it.

Then I caught a bit of a film yesterday depicting the life of Christ and all I could think of was...hey, that guy was a liberal in his time and what's been done in his name is just horrible and things have really been twisted.

At any rate, do you think that to be a fundamentalist in some way implies mental imbalance or mental illness? If so, what's the "cure?"

espritch

I really don't know. I consider hating larg groups of people because they don't share your world view, or skin color, or sexual preference, to be irrational. I certainly consider strapping on a bomb to kill a bunch of strangers in hopes of getting 72 virgins to be a completely irrational act. But I'm not sure that irrational and insane are synonyms. A lot of relatively sane and functional people embrace rather irrational ideas. It is more the particular nature of the irrational ideas embranced by fundamentalists that makes them dangerous rather than merely eccentric.

Philippe*

Personally I consider the human life as a kind of madness, we are limited beings thrown into this world like shipwrecked people lost in an ocean, people need buoys such as religion, work, sex, music, drug, sport, casino, movies or something else otherwise they sunk. We are conditioned beings but I would say in the end everyone choses more or less his madness.

Philippe

Victoria Silverwolf

Well, certainly some of the most extreme behavior which has an element of religious fundamentalism to it -- I'm talking about people who butcher their children because Satan was in them, and such -- shows clear signs of mental illness. If religion hadn't been the match that lit this fuse, something else might have. Religion just happens to be a very powerful match.

There are certainly many religious fundamentalists who function in daily life, and who don't carry out horrible crimes. You know the type -- "I would never kill a gay person, but I know they all deserve to go to Hell." These folks aren't mentally ill, but they have absorbed a very powerful belief system. It's not just religion, of course; any belief which, at its core, states You must believe this -- doctrinaire Marxism, for one example among many -- can do the same thing.

This is why I think that doubt is one of the most powerful tools of the human mind, particularly self-doubt.

Godless Wonder

As christ-on-a-stick once pointed out, the DSM IV takes special pains to define "delusion" in such a way that it excludes faith in religion. Is this painful exclusion warranted? I don't know.

Is faith really different from delusion?

Is delusion "mental illness?"

I don't know that it's really mental illness, it may just be a case of a meme exploiting a "weakness" of a "normally" operating brain, "normally" being defined in s atatistical way, I suppose, and I further suppose that statistically, it is the non-religious who are "abnormal."

All those "quotes" above, are because I'm trying to take a materialist approach and not assign values to any sides. (Though of course, I ultimately do assign values, just not in the course of trying to decide if religion is equivalent to mental illness. In some respects, it is equivalent. The conscious and purposeful rejection of rational thought in favor of faith as a means of knowing things seems in particular to be possibly squarely in the midst of the insane, to me.)

TiffyToo

All interesting observations and thanks. I guess maybe I'm guilty of projecting a bit of my own stuff into the equation. It's just that I see so much done in the name of religion that makes no sense to me (and I'm not talking about faith here, rather just really bizarre and even horrific things sometimes).

Also, I guess I am guilty of equating fundamentalism with the far right politically, and I do find the behavior of those on the right who support certain things, or seem to be blind to others, to be a bit incomprehensible to me.

EricK

DSM-IV says about delusion:
"A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g. it is not an article of religious faith)."

That last sentence is a bit of a cop-out! Are conspiracy theorists delusional? They certainly fit the first part, but if one defines conspiracy theory belief as a sub-culture then that automatically excludes them. If I start a religion I may be delusional. And my first group of followers may be delusional. But if the religion stays around for long enough, then people with exactly the same beliefs are suddenly not delusional!

Eric

Clivedurdle

I would prescribe a dose of existentialism and humanism!

Clivedurdle

It is worse than a cop out. It is because of a false belief that we have a human right to hold and act on religious beliefs.

I am getting the impression it is politically incorrect to say there are no gods, inclusding Allah, Jesus, Yahweh etc.

But when there are clear correlations between beliefs and actions and some actions are dangerous, what is the problem with calling them mad and saying society has a responsibility to control them. Doctors use the phrase - danger to themselves and others - there isn't any difference between religious beliefs and delusions - I mean, talking to invisible friends should be seen as possibly OK but could become doubtful.

Thread I started in science on religion and hypnosis looks at this.

Religion and hypnosis

EricK

Because of the way most people are (i.e. they don't think too deeply about what they believe or why they believe it) there is a valid distinction to be made between beliefs which are commonplace in your environment and beliefs which are unique to you.

If you are brought up in a monocultural environment with no exposure to alternate points of view it would almost impossible for you to not believe the same things everyone around you believes. It would not be fair to describe those people as delusional. Or if you do, you would need another word to desribe people who, for no rational reason, believe a completely different set of unusual beliefs to those around them.

Also, there is a difference between fundamentalist people who merely believe in the existence of a god and those who beleive that god is talking to them personally.

Eric