are Religious people mentally Ill?

StellaNova
Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:38:24 +0000

Justification of the question: (not the OP, just thought I should say this) A common characteristic of many mental illnesses are delusions – strong personal beliefs held in spite of invalidating evidence. The belief that people are spying on you or reading your mind, or that a celebrity you have never met is in love with you, or that random things like license plates hold secret messages for you to decipher. You can’t prove these things false, but there’s no reason to believe they’re true. And the person who believes in a great, invisible being who loves them personally, hears their thoughts, and speaks to them through text written centuries before their birth – what about them?

That said, I do NOT think religious people are mentally ill, I just wanted to show that asking that question =/= persecuting minorities.



Please note that 300 years ago “science” had no clue that ultraviolet light existed. The technology and scientific theories necessary to detect and explain electromagnetic waves beyond the visible spectrum did not exist.



300 years ago, you would have found more people who believed that the moon was made of cheese or that lead could be turned into gold than people who believed in “invisible light” that caused skin cancer and sunburns. All three beliefs would have been equally valid, because they were all possible, but (at the time) there was no evidence to support any of them. They were guesses. It’s possible that science will one day find that some of today’s guesses are correct, but it’s statistically much more likely that they’ll be proven false.



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.



You’re not suggesting that the defeat of the Soviet Union was because of atheism? I think they had bigger problems. Like, famine and civil war, for instance.



Religion works to order and restrict the baser impulses of humanity by imposing an external moral absolute.



So does totalitarianism. That doesn’t make it a good thing.