are Religious people mentally Ill?

Alone
Sat, 03 Jan 2009 03:17:05 +0000

Stella and others, we tend to believe to feel safe and comfortable. For some people comfort is, say, God, afterlife, etc. For some people it is independence and consequently no God, afterlife, etc.

We all believe, and it is not like we have any choice. If you do not accept some things as axioms, you won’t go far. You need to BELIEVE that you can trust your senses, namely eyes, ears, and touches. If you don’t - hey, you might be in a programmed environment, and all of us around you may be not ‘real’ (definition of real - no idea… come with it on your own). But you won’t be comfortable believing in that, would you? It is uncertainty, most of people do not like uncertainties. So they prefer to KNOW (while it is actually an unsupported belief) that there is/there is no God, and that they will/will not go to afterlife, or w/e. Not believing in anything makes life harder and not so interesting (at least for me). There simply is no point in living, when you become pragmatic and realize why people do certain things. You also understand that sometimes you wish you could believe in something you consider absurd right now :)

Now concerning the examples of more or less ‘realistic’ idea of God, and ‘not realistic’ idea of a of umm… Pink horse under the earth? We find God more realistic because he/she was mentioned in Holy Books, has more or less established presence. The pink horse doesn’t. And YES, if it was presented in some books, and we were raised in a contact with some culture that used it as some God, we would have had different beliefs. But it is not comfortable to believe so… Just not comfortable. Not comfortable to realize that there are no morals, that thousand years ago one thing was right, and in 500 years people will look at us and laugh, not comfortable to realize that we will die and nothing will change. So we believe in something, and feel happy.

Stella, I cannot imagine how you could possibly logically prove that there is no Santa. I mean, you can probably prove that your parents put the present under the tree, but again, no proof that there is no Santa, even using an axiom of trusting our senses.



The best argument for their being some actual value to religion is that there has never, never been a great athiest society/culture. The old Soviet Union tried it back before World War II. The birth rate declined and no one would fight for Mother Russia. The Soviets had to allow religion to defeat the National Socialists from Germany.



I do not believe that past exists (elaborated in 1984), but given the historical records and my contacts with veterans etc. (I come from former Soviet Union), you are wrong. Soviet Union never ‘allowed’ religion anywhere close to the WW2, and people were throwing themselves on guns to help ‘our glorious union’, as they were quite seriously brainwashed by the government. But you are right that for an Atheistic society it will be harder to keep an order; when you are religious you have moral values imposed by a Book or deity, and you ‘know’ you can’t break them. When you are atheist you may still realize that you need those moral values to survive in a society, but sometimes it is not enough.