(Funda)mental illness

[Cartoonist]

Here's a catch-22 that's been getting some threadplay lately.

Whenever some really horrific religiously motivated crime goes down, the apologists crawl out of their confessionals and blame it on mental illness. To them, religion is blameless even if the perpetrator gives all credit to God.

To a certain extent, I agree. I hold that believing in invisible beings is a mental shortcoming, not necessarily an illness, though it can be. The apologists don't like that assertion even though if you tell one of them you believe that a blue frog from Mars talks to you in your sleep, they will think you are nuts.

There's a causal argument they often make about the universe that claims "someone" had to get things rolling. They abandon that position when religion is found to be the cause of horrific crimes.

I've posted it before, and I'm posting it again, the fundamental problem with religion is that it is based on fantasy. Some people can believe the craziest things and still be good citizens. Some can't. The twisting of reality and its replacement with totally made up shit can't be healthy for the mind. When someone finally short-circuits, how can religion remain blameless?

[DetlefK]

1. I think, you are mixing up personal beliefs and religion as a general world-view.

It wasn't the general world-view that drove him to that crime, it was the specific beliefs that he derived for himself from this world-view.

Another example is science. Science is a mathematically/philosophically wonderful world-view and its many practical successes are testament to its veracity and power.
However, you can also use science as a moral justification for doing horrible things.



It's not the world-view per se. You decide what imperatives you read out of that world-view. It's you.

[Pope George Ringo II]

3. Even so, "It's magic" is not even a world-view grounded in reality.

One of the more entertaining exercises is asking, say, a christian if they'd be willing to live in a house with a robot programmed to enforce all the biblical laws absolutely. Pretty much everyone with a survival impulse says no for some reason, demonstrating that humans have to compromise the religion in order to live. I would suggest that picking and choosing which parts of the religion they want to observe is less the problem than a religion which explicitly requires them to be homicidal maniacs.

[Cartoonist]

4. Was that intentional nonsense?

A personal belief in a general world-view. We're talking about the same thing, right?

I've read your post several times. I still don't see a point.

It's you. WTF. I guess you missed my point about good citizens. Sure, some people can drink the God-ade and be just fine. Others have an allergic reaction. When they do, can we blame the God-ade instead of the person?

[DetlefK]

6. Why do assume that's nonsense?

There is a world-view.
You can use that for all kinds of personal justifications for moral teachings. These justifications, and the moral teachings derived from them, are your personal belief.
(This is how the scifi-author Iain Banks saw religious belief and I agree with his analysis.)

My point was that it's not inherently the world-view's fault if you use the world-view to come up with excuses for your actions. Of course, some world-views are easier to abuse and twist to selfish ends than others.

But it's not exclusively/inherently the fault of the world-view: You choose how to apply a certain world-view in real life. You believe what you want to believe.

[Cartoonist]

7. Still unclear

First, I like the late Iain Banks.

I disagree with what I think you're saying. That's just a rewording of what apologists say. It's not religion's fault if someone uses religion to commit evil. I say that's BS.

[DetlefK]

9. Is it science's fault if someone uses science for evil?

[Cartoonist]

10. Show me

Give me ONE example of science telling people how to behave.

Here's one from the Bible:
Leviticus - If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death.

Your turn.

[DetlefK]

12. For the third time:

It's not about the world-view. It's about using the world-view as an excuse/justification for your own opinion.

e.g. Abortion is barely mentioned in the Bible and the few obscure passages that do kinda-sorta support it. And yet having an abortion is somehow unchristian and murder.
e.g. Lying is bad. Yet the Catholic Church later added the exemption that lying is okay if it's done for the sake of spreading Christianity.

e.g. The racism of early 20th-century Europe was largely based on a misconception of darwinian evolution. The general public misunderstood darwinian evolution and thought that it meant that there are superior and inferior races. And all of a sudden the european Anti-Semitism that was born in the Middle-Ages had scientific support.

[Cartoonist]

13. Great examples

Of how religion Foster's evil. Now come up with some similar examples for science. No, your Darwin example isn't even close. Chuck never said anything about superior races. That was religion again.

[Act_of_Reparation]

16. Religion gives moral directives. Science does not.

Science is simply a means to arrive at truth, or as close to truth as one can get. It doesn't tell you what you should do with that truth. That's what ethics are for.

[Lordquinton]

15. Except when it comes to using science as a moral justification

It's usually based on faulty logic, and can be easily torn apart. Religion gets a pass because, as demonstrated here, you can't argue any beliefs.

[Pope George Ringo II]

2. That puts the cat among the pigeons

I wound up putting a poster on ignore after the last time I said this. For about a week, pretty much every post that wasn't misdefining atheism as a strawman wound up being a whinge about me saying this. He was offering even less of coherence than usual, which was quite a feat.

[Voltaire2]

5. We have the largest religious organization in the world conducting "professional" exorcisms

and when an amateur does the same thing, filling in the dots routinely draws outrage. You may not be able to teach crazy (although there certainly are many examples of just that, for example the Manson Family, Jonestown, etc.) but your crazy teachings can certainly influence people to do awful things.

It is like the gunner argument that guns don't kill people. Yes agency is required, but the device is also involved.

[Cartoonist]

8. I was going to say that

Unfortunately, that argument doesn't work with gun nuts. They'll point to a stabbing and say, "what about knives?" Just like we'll hear from some here, "what about nationalism?"

[trotsky]

11. I have asked a question many times, and have never gotten an answer.

Your post basically says the same thing.

How can we tell the difference between sincere religious belief, and genuine mental illness?

[uriel1972]

14. The two can be intertwined...

and reinforce each other in a feed-back loop, so it becomes even more difficult.

On another thought: Even if (and they weren't) the leaders of the Nazi Party were all Atheists or 'Pagan', the vast majority of the Nazi party were your bog-standard Protestant or Catholic church-goer/Fine upstanding Citizen who believed they were doing 'God's Good Work'. You don't have to be frothing at the mouth crazy or fanatical to be an active participent in one of the world's darkest chapters.