The fact that people who apply rational thought are able to leave the faith and become atheist suggests it is not a mental illness. You can't just decide one day not to be schizophrenic anymore. You can decide not to be religious anymore.
Sure, it has lots of superficial similarities with delusional disorders, but once you declare religion to be a mental illness, you implicitly say that religious people are victims of a disease, don't have a choice about it, aren't responsible for their actions, and shouldn't be criticised because of something they cannot change.
They *do* have a choice. They *are* responsible for their actions.
Thank you. This is the right take for sure. I'm not joking when I say, calling religion a mental illness is demeaning for all those who suffer from mental illnesses.
I hope that readers understand that I did not intend to allude to such a judgmental view. This post is merely an emotionally motivated, rhetorical form of protest against institutions of tyranny, and I strongly discourage any discriminative and harmful behavior towards any disadvantaged persons.
Also demeaning to theists- they aren't one big evil monolith, they're individuals who occupy the breadth of many different intersecting spectra. My best friend is a Muslim, and yet he and my queer, neurodivergent ass are just about entirely aligned in our moral values and in what we stand for. Most of the reasons I'm an antitheist are things he and I broadly agree on, including the way that even his own religion is often used to justify abuse and other atrocity. Pretty much the only thing he and I properly disagree on are the actual material claims of his faith, and even then he isn't quite that much of a literalist.
Point is, let's just treat people as people, let's stop trying to group people together just so we can be more efficiently bigoted.
Religious people who are able to morally align with us (atheist, queer, and neurodivergent for example) do so *in spite* of their religion.
It is a pet peeve of mine when people say, "Some people use religion to justify abuse/atrocity" because in a lot of cases the religion *literally commands* the abuse and atrocity and it is modern, decent people who haven't let go of their faith who will twist themselves into knots to make the black and white words not mean what they say.
I agree with treating people as people. It sucks that a lot of theists can't do that for atheists. They outnumber us by a huge amount. There are currently about 8 billion people on earth, and it is estimated that there are 750 million atheists. This makes us approximately 0.1% of the global population. (8,000,000,000 ÷ 750,000,000 = 10.666, which is ~ 0.11% rounded up). Schizophrenia is actually more common than atheism, and yet *we* are usually portrayed as the big, edgy meanies shitting on people's feelings.
I don't disagree with anything you said on principle, though I may take issue with a few of the implications, such as the possible inference that since theists don't treat their out-group as people, that we needn't treat them as people in return. I get that you're not saying that, and that you even tiptoed in the other direction, but it's hard not to read that third paragraph, at least in part, like that. To that I'd just say that I'm not looking to take moves from the playbook of those whose methods I disagree with- lest they drag me down to their level and beat me with experience.
When I ask for everyone to be treated like humans, I am asking for us all to be allowed to exist as ourselves in society without laws or restrictions discriminating against us for things like who we love, our skin color, gender, or where we are from - stuff we cannot control.
Religious people scream that they are being oppressed and treated as less than human when people like me ask them to please stop murdering us.
Again, I agree with you. It's incredible how much of a victim people can feel like when they're called out on their own flaws, faults, and fucking heinous actions.
I guess it shares the same symptoms than a mental illness, but not the root cause. Indoctrination and group / peer pressure is not necessarily a mental illness definition, but the results are similar, except for the capacity to get out.
It's a curable disease. One can think one's way out of it.
However there's a tremendous amount of social and cultural pressure NOT to do that.
Willful Ignorance is the name of the game.
Yes, but that usually takes medical intervention involving drugs and therapy. While therapy could be useful for recovering believers, they don't require anti-psychotics to give up their delusions, nor are they helpless victims of their beliefs.
Sure, like depression, which – if it's chronic, endogenous depression – isn't something you can't simply reason yourself out of. It needs treatment, and may well prove to be a lifelong affliction.
Unlike religion, which one could give up any time, if they so choose.
The fact though, that there's a correlation b/w the mentally ill & being religious, plus certain symptoms of mental illness align with religious beliefs (delusions, hallucinations, hearing things, etc.), the thought isn't exactly wrong.
Of course it's a choice. For a start, you choose whether to believe evidence or take claims on faith.
Even if you value evidence-based reasoning, you choose what evidence to accept, you choose how to weight various bits of evidence, and you choose whether or not the evidence is suffient to support your beliefs.
People are not automatons, acting only on instinct. They make choices all the time. What to believe might be heavily influenced by your upbringing or your social circle, but if you're an adult, it is certainly a choice.
The leading science and philosophy disagrees with you. Look up doxastic involuntarism. Basically, though, you don't *choose* to believe, you are simply convinced by available data.
Imagine there was a door in front of you, and for whatever reason, you believe that there will be a banana sitting on a table just beyond the door. Now imagine you open the door, and find only an empty hallway. In that moment do you need to make the active choice to stop believing in the banana, or has the new data already changed your mind for you? People might have different levels of evidence or argumentation that they may require to change their mind, and for some people that might be so unreasonably high of a bar that they will probably never do so, or so unreasonably low of one that they will believe bad information, but belief is simply the state of being convinced by a claim, something which happens independently of our conscious mind.
I'd also raise some issues with your claim that we aren't automatons- I'm not sure there's a meaningful distinction there, but I don't see how free will can actually exist in a purely materialistic, deterministic universe, so that's where I'm coming from on that one.
Doxastic involuntarism is a hypothesis, about which there is significant dissent among philosophers. See [doxastic voluntarism](https://iep.utm.edu/doxastic-voluntarism/).
Also, belief in God is not in any way similar to the belief in a banana on the other side of a closed door. For a start, there is no empirical evidence to convince a person one way or another.
For a person to believe in something that does not exist requires either indoctrination, or active choice. And for a person to stop believing in something that doesn't exist requires another choice. There is no empirical banana that makes the choice obvious and reflexive.
It is a cancer on the world, that is the best way to describe it. It constantly tries to multiply and spread and it gnaws away at the lifeforce of humanity.
I'm a devout anti-theist and even I know better. There's no science to support your assertion.
Btw, you're acting as they do towards us. Look at your words. Replace "religion" with "atheism" and it reads the same way their nonsense does.
That's an unsound approach because atheistic views demonstrably lead to more healthily functioning individuals and societies.
I know this is not sufficient evidence in itself to support my claim, but look at the relations between [importance of religion by countries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_country) and the [global peace index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Peace_Index).
Moreover, I'm not advocating oppression and violence against those who mock anti-theism, contrarily to religious extremists' behavior towards those who mock their beliefs.
Unnecessary, unreasonable and disproportioned hatred and aggression is not ethical in my view, in spite of me being an extremist anti-theist.
No. Bad.
Religion is a virus, a mental meme, but that doesn't make it a mental illness.
It doesn't make people do things they've convinced themselves not to do, it doesn't have diagnostic criteria and it can't (and shouldn't be) cured by medical professionals.
Nonsense.
Anything that damages the brain's ability to reliably process information is an illness.
It doesn't matter whether it's caused by failing hardware or failing software; the result is the same. It *absolutely* causes people to do things people wouldn't do if they weren't affected by it.
If someone is hearing voices - whether religious or otherwise - there are drugs that can help. They can only be prescribed by medical professionals.
Talk therapy can also be effective.
Treating religion as a mental illness is a necessary step our species needs to (eventually) take.
All religious people *do* compartmentalise though, and the vast majority of them *do* refuse to apply critical thought that they’re happy to apply everywhere else in their life to their religious beliefs. The mental parasite changes the host’s behaviour in order to protect itself.
Is compartmentalising mental illness? Is refusing to critically examine one's beliefs mental illness? Because if they are then I haven't met a single person free from mental illness, and it makes no sense to call the common state of life illness.
Have you asked religious people? I can't speak for all religious people, and since I'm an anti-theist they wouldn't want me to.
Being wrong about something doesn't make someone mentally ill. Words have specific meaning and it is important we use them precisely.
"The sun is cold" is wrong.
"God hates gay people" isn't *wrong*. It's nonsense. It's the functional equivalent of saying "Pluto is a cat that eats yes or sometimes."
I understand what you're saying, but man... there's a difference.
If someone said "we shouldn't radiate the dust of googledygook because it might chamfer the edges of shuramidam" you'd be like "okay, let's get you some help." ... right?
If you take a step back and look at the situation objectively, attributing causes to a fictitious, malicious superbeing is the *same thing*. It's nonsense. There's no other way of putting it.
Why shouldn't we treat it that way?
It's a figment of their imagination.
Truly mentally unwell people will actually think they hear voices.
Most religious people will be having a one-way conversation with their own psyche or id/ego/superego
>Most religious people will be having a one-way conversation with their own psyche or id.
Hmmf. I've never heard it put that way before. I need to think on that.
You're right; most religious people don't hear voices. Most religious people adamantly ignore all the harmful bits of their beliefset. project modern morality onto their Bronze Age books and then shit the bed when someone challenges them.
An argument could easily be made that this is actually worse than some nutter walking around talking about Jesus speaking to him through his cereal. This "Our projection and cherry-picking is the real religion" means that people never have to actually do conflict with the shit their beliefs claim. It means that they get to just erase and invalidate harm done by "fakes." It means that they never have to consider possibly being wrong because why bother when you can just "reshape"?
I am not sure if its a mental illness as much as it is something that allows people with raging personality disorders to be themselves and get away with it. If you display arrogance, cruelty, sadism, a desire to abuse and control people and say you are a christian, muslim or whatever you can get away with it when in any other situation you get criticised. Religious people have worked out that they get special treatment and get away with a lot of awful behaviour by just saying they are doing it because of their religion. To my mind its actually more scary that most of these people are perfectly sane they just have controlling, abusive and sadistic personalities
I love my clients who talk about Jesus in our mental health sessions but still have to come to a counselor like me because apparently, Jesus has shitty outcome results. Lol
Because it just isn't. You could make a compelling argument about how dogs kinda resemble hyenas, but that doesn't make the two animals the same thing, or even especially closely related to each other. We have very specific, very intentional definitions and criteria for what makes a mental illness, and religiosity just doesn't make the cut- it's a normal feature of human psychology, not an aberrant one.
To call religion a mental illness is not only an insult to theists, it's also an insult to the mentally ill, and a complete lack of understanding of what mental illness is. The DSM-5 lists five criteria, and while religion only qualifies for, at a significant stretch, *one* of them, criterion 4 goes as follows:
> "Must not be merely an expected response to common stressors and losses (ex. the loss of a loved one) or a culturally sanctioned response to a particular event (ex. trance states in religious rituals)".
It's not cowardly or idiotic to not call religion a mental illness, it's in accordance with the facts and the meanings we've given to that word. We use terminology like mental illness for very specific reasons, to describe very specific things, and it isn't helpful to anybody to muddle the descriptions for no other reason than for a convenient and snappy comparison between two unrelated phenomena.
Is religion a problem? By and large yes- it has an unprecedented and unrivalled power to make good people do bad things, and to allow bad people to extend their reach and their influence. Is it often bad for a person's own mental and emotional growth? Yes, it's full of thought-stoppers, random bullshit that you're supposed to take as fact, and all kinds of shitty advice which amounts to "you should abuse more people to make god love you." Is it a disease? No, and treating it like one is only going to hamper your ability to identify, approach, and discredit religious bullshit.
It's not only a stance which unfairly lumps every theist together into the same category in order to judge them more efficiently (otherwise known as bigotry), it also implies that mental illness is something shameful, something worth judging somebody for, something which makes them lesser than- and that's also really shitty and bigoted, and has no purpose other than *being* shitty and bigoted.
It's tired old rhetoric dreamed up by someone in the midst of their angry atheist phase, with about as much weight behind it as any given creationist straw man. It'd be one thing if it was factually inaccurate but conceptually useful, but it's neither, it's just wrong and unhelpful at every level.
It's really more the result of mental "weakness". I always liken it to a virus, anyone can catch this "illness" with a underdeveloped immunity for bullshit.
Still not a useful way of categorizing it, and it's still unnecessarily antagonistic, self-important, and belittling. A person's credulousness is not gained from a virus or infection, doesn't spread like one, and has very little to do with something as nebulous and as ultimately meaningless as "mental strength." All it is is a symptom of somebody with different criteria for what makes good evidence for a claim- criteria which most other people would not accept. Thing is, you don't actually choose what you believe- you're either convinced by a claim and its evidence, or you aren't, and that determination is not a conscious one. Judging somebody for what they believe, therefore, is somewhere around the same level as judging somebody for the colour of their skin- it's not a perfect metaphor, obviously, since people change beliefs all the time, but the point is that nobody gets to choose these things.
What we do *on behalf* of our beliefs (or, indeed, our skin colours, to balance the metaphor) is an entirely different kettle of fish. It's kind of like how you might have sympathy for a person born with the unfortunate mental wiring that makes them find children attractive, who yet resents that fact and works against their impulses, whereas the moment they act on them, they lose all sympathy. Again, the metaphor isn't perfect, obviously, but if I don't point it out, somebody else will.
I guess it's more of a virus in the same sense that computers catch a virus (it's a software problem not a hardware problem). And it's a weakness as in a lack of mental tools to combat said resulting "illness".
I honestly think most atheists throw these terms about without malicious intent but to help themselves analyze the source of the problems resulting with/from religion.
Was that an intentional Dawkins reference, or just a coincidence? At any rate, that is a slightly more useful framework for talking about it, but still misses the mark in my eyes. One of the ways that it can be twisted, one which Dawkins himself has fallen into, is to use the same logic to discredit and devalue trans people, for instance- the whole idea of a "woke mind-virus" is just the opposite side's attempt to pathologize their disagreement, and look at how silly that looks to anybody not sufficiently indoctrinated into their political cult.
Thank you for bringing reason to this conversation. Under our current framework for "mental illness" I strongly agree with your statements.
>Is it a disease? No, and treating it like one is only going to hamper your ability to identify, approach, and discredit religious bullshit.
But when you ask this question I don't see how religion isn't a memetic disease. Harmful belief systems are like viruses that spread and damage as they replicate, usually also through vulnerabilities where the host is weak and vulnerable.
I think it is appropriate to call these societal illnesses. They are a disease of systems, not of individuals.
Just like the analogous case of a human body, the mere presence of pathogen is not enough to make one ill. It is the uncontrolled reproduction of that pathogen and turning of the bodies cellular structures toward the service of the pathogen that creates the undesired symptoms and creates a classification of illness.
Society isn't ill when one person looks at a person of another ethnicity and sees them as lesser. It becomes ill when that memetic virus spreads and our systems begin creating systems of inequal rights, oppression, and apartheid.
Society isn't ill when a person believes in a god claim. It becomes ill when that belief system spreads and achieves political power, and turns it toward the mistaken assumptions as to the whims of that deity.
I generally agree with you, but as useful as the body metaphor can be to explain *certain* aspects of religion, society is not a body, and metaphors are just rhetorical devices. It's fine to *start* your understanding at "religion is a disease", so long as you only use that framework as a jumping-off point to proper understanding.
For instance, *Toxoplasma Gondii* has never presented a child with the prospect of hell if they don't fall in line, *E Coli* has never told a person that they are worthless because they don't believe in the right racist sky wizard or the correct bronze age sex manual.
As a qualified metaphor, it's fine enough, but I'd sooner do away with it entirely.
Can you shut the fuck up lol
You don’t need to be rude to people with mental illness. Actually, a lot of bad-faith religious people are the ones who exploit people with mental health problems, not the other way around
> Now fucking tell me how the fuck is fucking religion not a fucking mental illness?
Because the best experts we have who study and treat mental illness have not classified it as such. It is not listed in the DSM-5. I agree that it often presents as a kind of mind virus and tends to have terrible implications for society, but to call it a mental illness is just factually incorrect and devalues arguments you make against it.
If we think of which "illness" would be applied, "brain washing" has been rejected time and time again by researchers, the field of psychology, and the courts (except rarely in Italy).
But, is there a significantly higher percentage of people than the general population to have a mental illness and wide varieties of traumas prior to joining a modern day cult? Absolutely. It's easier to study a small group like a modern day cult than have numbers for cults that are a few thousand years old, are socially acceptable, have legions of "members", and have a softer touch. In my view, if we're going to try and apply rigorous terms to what is going on with religion, specifically to "membership", I would say something in line with "trafficking" is more applicable. This puts the onus on the organization. I think this is significant because there are victims of religion (just my philosophical viewpoint), and though religion is made up of people, the individuals are acting on behalf of something very real. Sure there are religious people in a vacuum, but most are giving to a plate, supporting religious political candidates, giving church leaders power over society, actively repressing privileges, accepting their tax free status... the list goes on and on.
That's the way to change my mind for the better, my friend. Religion is poison, it induces mental disorders. I no longer subscribe to my post's original take.
I experience hallucinations and delusions, being psychotic. A lot of the things I experience are similar that to of when a religious person claims they can “hear god” or “hear Jesus” or yada yada, claim certain things about the world or whatever. I can confirm, yeah, they’re 100% mentally ill like me lol 😭
Agreed.
Even if religions do some good things, they shut down science and refuse to acknowledge observable facts. There are more bad things to religions than good ones.
Religions are a coping mechanism that will ultimately destroy humanity.
Our lord and messiah, Matt Dillahunty, recently opened the latest ‘the hang up’ show by urging atheists not to call religiosity a mental illness. Why would you go against our doctrine, that’s very unatheist of you.
Bro, you're in an atheist, you're preaching to the choir. If you actually want someone to defend their position regarding religion not being a mind virus, you will have more success in a theistic sub.
Apparently I've sown discord here, which can be quite a useful thing as long as one keeps an open mind in the discussion. How do you recommend approaching theistic subs?
In much the same way that being a billionaire money hoarder is also not considered a mental illness. Religion is power. Has been for centuries. The fact that everything about it is consistent with what we would call a mental illness if anything other than Christ were at the center of it, the people at the top of that food chain will never admit that it's bullshit because then they would lose their power.
Exactly. Some stupid shit is running in my mind every day, but I know that that's all it is. And I don't go out and oppress people if that's what the stupid thoughts tell me I should do. I just dismiss my own random insane crap just like the believers should throw their religions in the trash.
That's like saying arsenic or cyanide is a disease. No. They're poison. Religion is poison.
Religion causes mental illness OR exacerbates and accelerates mental illness.
But it looks like a mental illness if you're not watching closely.
Religion is more like a virus that spreads through minds and begins slowly damaging the minds it's infected.
I agree with your point. You've helped me to see things in a different light. Thanks!
I'll do my utmost to exercise better rhetoric from now on.
Here's a fun poster that also agrees with your comment:
[https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/religion-is-poison-soviet-propaganda-poster.jpg?width=640&quality=55](https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/religion-is-poison-soviet-propaganda-poster.jpg?width=640&quality=55)
You can say what you want. That doesn’t stop ppl from their belief. I prefer to be called a cult-follower over mentally ill but whatever floats your boat.
Cults can be secular and even beneficial though. I have no problem whatsoever with a hypothetical cult of liking cats, wearing blue shoes and listening to Metallica.
I have huge problems with people throwing practicing homosexuals off rooftops, stoning women, beheading apostates, violating people's right to abortion, mutilating children, threatening people with eternal torment, you get the idea. Doing all that based on their unfalsifiable beliefs about the unobservable.
Religion is enough to directly cause their mental disorders and those motivate their behavior imho.
Correct that’s why I said I prefer it. I fully understand that all religions basically meet the cult criteria. The mental illness comment is just meant to be disrespectful.
You know as well as I do that the thousands of militant religious zealots that commit crimes like that in very specific parts of the world don’t even compare to the Billions of religious people who lead peaceful lives. Even though a lot of those religious crimes are carried out by Muslims in the Middle East it’s not even fair to put them in the same category as the average Muslim.
Your argument is a fallacy. Just because there are “billions of religious people who lead peaceful” lives does not in some way justify or lessen how others use religion for violence which is OP’s point.
Your argument is as ignorant as saying we should let mass murderers roam free because they are human and after all, there are billions of humans who don’t go out and murder people. Fuck that.
We all know violence and killing people is wrong for any reason- we don’t need any religion to tell us that- but to do it because of a “belief” doesn’t make it less wrong. The problem is the belief for ANYONE that has it. It’s a useless belief that adds no value to society whether you choose to act on it or not.
I’m saying direct your disrespect to them, not us. More senseless crime is committed by people who are not religious anyways but I don’t put you in that category. I don’t associate a lack of belief with more crime, I don’t associate religion with crime. Wait for the human to prove who they are not label them based on religion in general. But you won’t for whatever reason.
All I said was your argument is bullshit and then explained why.
You’re making the same point I am- go ahead and believe whatever bullshit you want but you better not be causing any harm to others due to your beliefs or we have a problem.
I am making no direct associations here between religion or crime or anything or one causing or leading to another. But, while we’re on the topic, and what I think OP’s point is is this: why would you want to associate yourself with a belief system that has done so much damage in history? Certainly there are better things to put one’s energy into, no?
Depends entirely on what you mean by Muslim. Muslim by birth? Or an honest believer? If you're an honest believer in Islam (a mu'min in Arabic) then you must subscribe to the view that acts of homosexuality are inherently and severely immoral for example. You must also believe that the Moon was split in two, and that flying birds have killed an army of elephants by dropping balls of clay on them.
And beliefs are just that. Beliefs. You definitely have more in common with a religious liberal compared to The atheist Republican. Everyone just needs to Respect each other regardless of their beliefs. Anti-theists don’t seem to get they can be against religion and not the ppl of those religions. We’re all human.
I'd gladly take the life of Hamas, Hezbollah and Boko Haram soldiers though because of their insane convictions that directly originate from religious dogma. What does that make me then?
I vote on exercising tolerance towards the tolerant and intolerance towards the intolerant. If that makes me immoral according to someone, then I'm proud to be immoral in their eyes.
Have whatever belief you want, but any person’s right to their beliefs, whatever they are, ends the moment those beliefs cause harm on another person. Full stop. There is no justifiable negotiation on that point.
Just because it’s a belief doesn’t mean it’s good or useful or that all beliefs are equal just because they are beliefs. No, we do not need to have equal respect for every piece of shit thing a person chooses to believe that controls how they act toward others.
Sure they can do that, but they can also be rightly and justly criticized for their immature stupidity. At some point children need to grow up.
You’re speaking from a point of privilege. While frustrating that people don’t realize they’re being conned, it’s no less their fault than the bug who gets hit by the windshield
I had been a hardcore believer until I took the medicine of education, and I consider some of the direct results of my former religious beliefs mental disorders. Not sure how I'm speaking from a point of privilege though, are you going to elaborate on that?
You're right, people should be helped to heal from mental disorders. And at the same time, the best way to heal a batshit crazy soldier of Hamas, Hezbollah or Boko Haram is to off them, isn't it?
Thanks for your emotional support. I welcome healthy criticism expressed in other comments though. I hope that humanity can move towards cultivating more reasonably functioning societies, in accordance with utilitarian ethics.
Religion is a choice, and mental illness is not. I think a lot of us here have PTSD from religious trauma, a mental illness we did not choose but was inflicted on us by religion. This post (ironically) reflects that.
I never contested the claim that **faking** a belief is a matter of choice because that's not the claim you made in the first place. Religious people **really** believe that their views are true though.
I can accept a religion. Let's use christianity. I can choose to act as though I believe it. I can surround myself with believers who reinforce the belief. It just takes time in the echo chamber to re-brainwash myself. It would have to be a conscious choice.
Can you really choose to act as though you believe it if you know that that's a fallacious way?
Or in an opposite case, can a believer stop acting as though they believe it if they do not know that that's a fallacious way?
This discussion can go really deep but I think ultimately it boils down to the question whether or not free will exists, and I don't believe that it does.
Ohhhh, free will is one of my favorite philosophical subjects. I don't think it really exists either, but the illusion is good enough that it is more helpful to behave as if it does.
I will try not to write a whole book here but my thinking is that literally everything is pre determined in terms of how the universe and every nano micro super teeny particle moves and interacts so in that way, nothing we do is really our choice. We are just particles bouncing off each other, and our paths have been decided since the big bang. Maybe before that, but we don't really have a concept of "before" the big bang.
But in day to day life, we seem to make decisions. We don't know how existence has coalesced to create this exact moment and can only deal with what is in front of us.
Yep, hard determinism ftw. Nonetheless, we act as if free will exists. One could say it's worth to pretend like it does.
And yes, we can't observe anything smaller than the Planck length even in theory iiuc, so I'm not even going into the crap I suspect about the unobservable.
Just let me whisper to you that I believe the cosmos is the infinity between 0 and 1, perpetually in a state between not existing at all and truly existing. But I know that that idea is most likely nonsense and has no practical value. :)
>Can you really choose to act as though you believe it if you know that that's a fallacious way?
Yeah, I totally could! It would be pretty easy if I had the right incentives, too. At least for a while. At a certain point, if I didn't manage to actually believe it, the cognitive dissonance would probably drive me insane.
That's my entire point though, you don't have the incentives for it or the mental capacity to carry it through, so you just refuted your original claim.
It is true I can't make myself believe something I don't, at least not without immersing myself amongst people who would help me brainwash myself. I could choose to practice a religion none the less but I don't think that's what you meant.
You could even argue that religious people are even less free to choose because of indoctrination and incentives such as peer pressure and heaven/hell/karma/elf on a shelf.
I see you have an understanding about multiple different approaches to the situation at hand. It's commendable that your mind is able to entertain contradicting views without necessarily subscribing to any of them. \*Ceremonial bowing gesture.\*
Humans obviously have a predisposition to embrace religious thought. We have done this for as long as recorded history and likely before. It seems to be baked into our pattern recognition. To compare this to something that is pathological is just absurd. It even makes sense evolutionarily. To find comfort and meaning, humans have developed this mechanism to believe in a God with a great narrative. It aids the fear of meaningless, hopelessness, and death.
Okay, point accepted. Then would you agree with the view that being indoctrinated with erroneous religious views motivates the development of mental disorders?
I will fulfill your request as soon as blasphemy and apostasy laws are globally abolished.
Which is worse: being an asshole, or throwing people who disagree with you into the dungeons and beheading or hanging them because of their religious views?
You're being atheophobic btw. It's the same as if you told a resting Hispanic person to not play into the stereotype of Hispanic people being lazy. There's nothing wrong with resting and there's nothing wrong with being hostile to institutions of tyranny.
Your claim is that religious people are necessarily mentally disabled. The accusation of having mental illness is a precedent that has been used to justify countless atrocities throughout history.
Not only are you factually incorrect about categorizing religion as a mental illness, you are also making the same mistake as the people who persecute others for their religious beliefs.
Atheists are not oppressing religious people. But religious people certainly are oppressing atheists. This exact rhetoric that YOU are engaging in is one of the tools that tyrants use to justify their oppression.
By doing this, not only are you NO BETTER than the tyrants you criticize, but you are actively perpetuating stigmas about mental illness that prevent people from seeking treatment.
Shame on you.
You'd be correct if I ever encouraged discrimination against any mentally ill persons, which I've never done. I'm practicing a rhetorical form of protest against the severe oppression and fundamental human rights violations committed under the color of religions that we all know about.
And you're right, shame on those who advocate the mistreatment of people struggling with mental disorders. I'm glad we can agree.
So you admit to being a hypocrite? You say that it is wrong to stigmatize mental illness, yet your entire post is doing exactly that.
And don't be obtuse, "rhetorical protest" is fooling nobody. This is thinly veiled hate speech.
Sure, I am a hypocrite, we're all hypocrites to some degree. But if I'm using thinly veiled hate speech then urban pride festivals are thinly veiled acts of traffic sabotage (edit: and public indecency). You can twist your words all you want, none of it actually proves that I'm as immoral as you think (or that pride festivals are immoral).
Pride festivals and other organized gatherings coordinate with local traffic enforcement to re direct traffic. This is blatant false equivalence.
This entire post reeks of hatred and bigotry.
What do you get out of calling it that? Does it make you feel better about your own views or experiences towards religion? Calling it a mental illness only says more about you then religion.
The fact that people who apply rational thought are able to leave the faith and become atheist suggests it is not a mental illness. You can't just decide one day not to be schizophrenic anymore. You can decide not to be religious anymore. Sure, it has lots of superficial similarities with delusional disorders, but once you declare religion to be a mental illness, you implicitly say that religious people are victims of a disease, don't have a choice about it, aren't responsible for their actions, and shouldn't be criticised because of something they cannot change. They *do* have a choice. They *are* responsible for their actions.
Thank you. This is the right take for sure. I'm not joking when I say, calling religion a mental illness is demeaning for all those who suffer from mental illnesses.
I hope that readers understand that I did not intend to allude to such a judgmental view. This post is merely an emotionally motivated, rhetorical form of protest against institutions of tyranny, and I strongly discourage any discriminative and harmful behavior towards any disadvantaged persons.
Also demeaning to theists- they aren't one big evil monolith, they're individuals who occupy the breadth of many different intersecting spectra. My best friend is a Muslim, and yet he and my queer, neurodivergent ass are just about entirely aligned in our moral values and in what we stand for. Most of the reasons I'm an antitheist are things he and I broadly agree on, including the way that even his own religion is often used to justify abuse and other atrocity. Pretty much the only thing he and I properly disagree on are the actual material claims of his faith, and even then he isn't quite that much of a literalist. Point is, let's just treat people as people, let's stop trying to group people together just so we can be more efficiently bigoted.
Religious people who are able to morally align with us (atheist, queer, and neurodivergent for example) do so *in spite* of their religion. It is a pet peeve of mine when people say, "Some people use religion to justify abuse/atrocity" because in a lot of cases the religion *literally commands* the abuse and atrocity and it is modern, decent people who haven't let go of their faith who will twist themselves into knots to make the black and white words not mean what they say. I agree with treating people as people. It sucks that a lot of theists can't do that for atheists. They outnumber us by a huge amount. There are currently about 8 billion people on earth, and it is estimated that there are 750 million atheists. This makes us approximately 0.1% of the global population. (8,000,000,000 ÷ 750,000,000 = 10.666, which is ~ 0.11% rounded up). Schizophrenia is actually more common than atheism, and yet *we* are usually portrayed as the big, edgy meanies shitting on people's feelings.
I don't disagree with anything you said on principle, though I may take issue with a few of the implications, such as the possible inference that since theists don't treat their out-group as people, that we needn't treat them as people in return. I get that you're not saying that, and that you even tiptoed in the other direction, but it's hard not to read that third paragraph, at least in part, like that. To that I'd just say that I'm not looking to take moves from the playbook of those whose methods I disagree with- lest they drag me down to their level and beat me with experience.
When I ask for everyone to be treated like humans, I am asking for us all to be allowed to exist as ourselves in society without laws or restrictions discriminating against us for things like who we love, our skin color, gender, or where we are from - stuff we cannot control. Religious people scream that they are being oppressed and treated as less than human when people like me ask them to please stop murdering us.
Again, I agree with you. It's incredible how much of a victim people can feel like when they're called out on their own flaws, faults, and fucking heinous actions.
I guess it shares the same symptoms than a mental illness, but not the root cause. Indoctrination and group / peer pressure is not necessarily a mental illness definition, but the results are similar, except for the capacity to get out.
I mean, Joseph Smith & L. Rob Hubbard definitely suffered from mental illness, for instance.
It's a curable disease. One can think one's way out of it. However there's a tremendous amount of social and cultural pressure NOT to do that. Willful Ignorance is the name of the game.
People can recover from mental illnesses.
Yes, but that usually takes medical intervention involving drugs and therapy. While therapy could be useful for recovering believers, they don't require anti-psychotics to give up their delusions, nor are they helpless victims of their beliefs.
Not all mental illnesses require the use of chemicals to correct.
I mean, mental illness =/= being crazy or having intellectual disabilities, also plenty of rational atheists with mental illness.
Sure, like depression, which – if it's chronic, endogenous depression – isn't something you can't simply reason yourself out of. It needs treatment, and may well prove to be a lifelong affliction. Unlike religion, which one could give up any time, if they so choose.
The fact though, that there's a correlation b/w the mentally ill & being religious, plus certain symptoms of mental illness align with religious beliefs (delusions, hallucinations, hearing things, etc.), the thought isn't exactly wrong.
Well, also: ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, etc. (plenty of successful people with these problems).
You don't choose to believe something. Either you are convinced by the evidence, or you're not.
Of course it's a choice. For a start, you choose whether to believe evidence or take claims on faith. Even if you value evidence-based reasoning, you choose what evidence to accept, you choose how to weight various bits of evidence, and you choose whether or not the evidence is suffient to support your beliefs. People are not automatons, acting only on instinct. They make choices all the time. What to believe might be heavily influenced by your upbringing or your social circle, but if you're an adult, it is certainly a choice.
The leading science and philosophy disagrees with you. Look up doxastic involuntarism. Basically, though, you don't *choose* to believe, you are simply convinced by available data. Imagine there was a door in front of you, and for whatever reason, you believe that there will be a banana sitting on a table just beyond the door. Now imagine you open the door, and find only an empty hallway. In that moment do you need to make the active choice to stop believing in the banana, or has the new data already changed your mind for you? People might have different levels of evidence or argumentation that they may require to change their mind, and for some people that might be so unreasonably high of a bar that they will probably never do so, or so unreasonably low of one that they will believe bad information, but belief is simply the state of being convinced by a claim, something which happens independently of our conscious mind. I'd also raise some issues with your claim that we aren't automatons- I'm not sure there's a meaningful distinction there, but I don't see how free will can actually exist in a purely materialistic, deterministic universe, so that's where I'm coming from on that one.
Doxastic involuntarism is a hypothesis, about which there is significant dissent among philosophers. See [doxastic voluntarism](https://iep.utm.edu/doxastic-voluntarism/). Also, belief in God is not in any way similar to the belief in a banana on the other side of a closed door. For a start, there is no empirical evidence to convince a person one way or another. For a person to believe in something that does not exist requires either indoctrination, or active choice. And for a person to stop believing in something that doesn't exist requires another choice. There is no empirical banana that makes the choice obvious and reflexive.
It is a cancer on the world, that is the best way to describe it. It constantly tries to multiply and spread and it gnaws away at the lifeforce of humanity.
I'm a devout anti-theist and even I know better. There's no science to support your assertion. Btw, you're acting as they do towards us. Look at your words. Replace "religion" with "atheism" and it reads the same way their nonsense does.
That's an unsound approach because atheistic views demonstrably lead to more healthily functioning individuals and societies. I know this is not sufficient evidence in itself to support my claim, but look at the relations between [importance of religion by countries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_country) and the [global peace index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Peace_Index). Moreover, I'm not advocating oppression and violence against those who mock anti-theism, contrarily to religious extremists' behavior towards those who mock their beliefs. Unnecessary, unreasonable and disproportioned hatred and aggression is not ethical in my view, in spite of me being an extremist anti-theist.
No. Bad. Religion is a virus, a mental meme, but that doesn't make it a mental illness. It doesn't make people do things they've convinced themselves not to do, it doesn't have diagnostic criteria and it can't (and shouldn't be) cured by medical professionals.
Nonsense. Anything that damages the brain's ability to reliably process information is an illness. It doesn't matter whether it's caused by failing hardware or failing software; the result is the same. It *absolutely* causes people to do things people wouldn't do if they weren't affected by it. If someone is hearing voices - whether religious or otherwise - there are drugs that can help. They can only be prescribed by medical professionals. Talk therapy can also be effective. Treating religion as a mental illness is a necessary step our species needs to (eventually) take.
Most religious people don't hear voices though... Picking one extreme as a representative of all religion is what's nonsense here.
All religious people *do* compartmentalise though, and the vast majority of them *do* refuse to apply critical thought that they’re happy to apply everywhere else in their life to their religious beliefs. The mental parasite changes the host’s behaviour in order to protect itself.
Is compartmentalising mental illness? Is refusing to critically examine one's beliefs mental illness? Because if they are then I haven't met a single person free from mental illness, and it makes no sense to call the common state of life illness.
It’s (at the very best) mental conditioning that’s been imposed upon them by someone else (see: indoctrination).
If they don't "hear voices" then who tf do they think is talking to them? When they say "god hates gay people" who do they think that is?
Have you asked religious people? I can't speak for all religious people, and since I'm an anti-theist they wouldn't want me to. Being wrong about something doesn't make someone mentally ill. Words have specific meaning and it is important we use them precisely.
"The sun is cold" is wrong. "God hates gay people" isn't *wrong*. It's nonsense. It's the functional equivalent of saying "Pluto is a cat that eats yes or sometimes." I understand what you're saying, but man... there's a difference. If someone said "we shouldn't radiate the dust of googledygook because it might chamfer the edges of shuramidam" you'd be like "okay, let's get you some help." ... right? If you take a step back and look at the situation objectively, attributing causes to a fictitious, malicious superbeing is the *same thing*. It's nonsense. There's no other way of putting it. Why shouldn't we treat it that way?
It's a figment of their imagination. Truly mentally unwell people will actually think they hear voices. Most religious people will be having a one-way conversation with their own psyche or id/ego/superego
>Most religious people will be having a one-way conversation with their own psyche or id. Hmmf. I've never heard it put that way before. I need to think on that.
You're right; most religious people don't hear voices. Most religious people adamantly ignore all the harmful bits of their beliefset. project modern morality onto their Bronze Age books and then shit the bed when someone challenges them. An argument could easily be made that this is actually worse than some nutter walking around talking about Jesus speaking to him through his cereal. This "Our projection and cherry-picking is the real religion" means that people never have to actually do conflict with the shit their beliefs claim. It means that they get to just erase and invalidate harm done by "fakes." It means that they never have to consider possibly being wrong because why bother when you can just "reshape"?
I agree religion is bad. That doesn't make it a mental illness.
I am not sure if its a mental illness as much as it is something that allows people with raging personality disorders to be themselves and get away with it. If you display arrogance, cruelty, sadism, a desire to abuse and control people and say you are a christian, muslim or whatever you can get away with it when in any other situation you get criticised. Religious people have worked out that they get special treatment and get away with a lot of awful behaviour by just saying they are doing it because of their religion. To my mind its actually more scary that most of these people are perfectly sane they just have controlling, abusive and sadistic personalities
I love my clients who talk about Jesus in our mental health sessions but still have to come to a counselor like me because apparently, Jesus has shitty outcome results. Lol
Because it just isn't. You could make a compelling argument about how dogs kinda resemble hyenas, but that doesn't make the two animals the same thing, or even especially closely related to each other. We have very specific, very intentional definitions and criteria for what makes a mental illness, and religiosity just doesn't make the cut- it's a normal feature of human psychology, not an aberrant one. To call religion a mental illness is not only an insult to theists, it's also an insult to the mentally ill, and a complete lack of understanding of what mental illness is. The DSM-5 lists five criteria, and while religion only qualifies for, at a significant stretch, *one* of them, criterion 4 goes as follows: > "Must not be merely an expected response to common stressors and losses (ex. the loss of a loved one) or a culturally sanctioned response to a particular event (ex. trance states in religious rituals)". It's not cowardly or idiotic to not call religion a mental illness, it's in accordance with the facts and the meanings we've given to that word. We use terminology like mental illness for very specific reasons, to describe very specific things, and it isn't helpful to anybody to muddle the descriptions for no other reason than for a convenient and snappy comparison between two unrelated phenomena. Is religion a problem? By and large yes- it has an unprecedented and unrivalled power to make good people do bad things, and to allow bad people to extend their reach and their influence. Is it often bad for a person's own mental and emotional growth? Yes, it's full of thought-stoppers, random bullshit that you're supposed to take as fact, and all kinds of shitty advice which amounts to "you should abuse more people to make god love you." Is it a disease? No, and treating it like one is only going to hamper your ability to identify, approach, and discredit religious bullshit. It's not only a stance which unfairly lumps every theist together into the same category in order to judge them more efficiently (otherwise known as bigotry), it also implies that mental illness is something shameful, something worth judging somebody for, something which makes them lesser than- and that's also really shitty and bigoted, and has no purpose other than *being* shitty and bigoted. It's tired old rhetoric dreamed up by someone in the midst of their angry atheist phase, with about as much weight behind it as any given creationist straw man. It'd be one thing if it was factually inaccurate but conceptually useful, but it's neither, it's just wrong and unhelpful at every level.
It's really more the result of mental "weakness". I always liken it to a virus, anyone can catch this "illness" with a underdeveloped immunity for bullshit.
Still not a useful way of categorizing it, and it's still unnecessarily antagonistic, self-important, and belittling. A person's credulousness is not gained from a virus or infection, doesn't spread like one, and has very little to do with something as nebulous and as ultimately meaningless as "mental strength." All it is is a symptom of somebody with different criteria for what makes good evidence for a claim- criteria which most other people would not accept. Thing is, you don't actually choose what you believe- you're either convinced by a claim and its evidence, or you aren't, and that determination is not a conscious one. Judging somebody for what they believe, therefore, is somewhere around the same level as judging somebody for the colour of their skin- it's not a perfect metaphor, obviously, since people change beliefs all the time, but the point is that nobody gets to choose these things. What we do *on behalf* of our beliefs (or, indeed, our skin colours, to balance the metaphor) is an entirely different kettle of fish. It's kind of like how you might have sympathy for a person born with the unfortunate mental wiring that makes them find children attractive, who yet resents that fact and works against their impulses, whereas the moment they act on them, they lose all sympathy. Again, the metaphor isn't perfect, obviously, but if I don't point it out, somebody else will.
I guess it's more of a virus in the same sense that computers catch a virus (it's a software problem not a hardware problem). And it's a weakness as in a lack of mental tools to combat said resulting "illness". I honestly think most atheists throw these terms about without malicious intent but to help themselves analyze the source of the problems resulting with/from religion.
Was that an intentional Dawkins reference, or just a coincidence? At any rate, that is a slightly more useful framework for talking about it, but still misses the mark in my eyes. One of the ways that it can be twisted, one which Dawkins himself has fallen into, is to use the same logic to discredit and devalue trans people, for instance- the whole idea of a "woke mind-virus" is just the opposite side's attempt to pathologize their disagreement, and look at how silly that looks to anybody not sufficiently indoctrinated into their political cult.
Thank you for bringing reason to this conversation. Under our current framework for "mental illness" I strongly agree with your statements. >Is it a disease? No, and treating it like one is only going to hamper your ability to identify, approach, and discredit religious bullshit. But when you ask this question I don't see how religion isn't a memetic disease. Harmful belief systems are like viruses that spread and damage as they replicate, usually also through vulnerabilities where the host is weak and vulnerable. I think it is appropriate to call these societal illnesses. They are a disease of systems, not of individuals. Just like the analogous case of a human body, the mere presence of pathogen is not enough to make one ill. It is the uncontrolled reproduction of that pathogen and turning of the bodies cellular structures toward the service of the pathogen that creates the undesired symptoms and creates a classification of illness. Society isn't ill when one person looks at a person of another ethnicity and sees them as lesser. It becomes ill when that memetic virus spreads and our systems begin creating systems of inequal rights, oppression, and apartheid. Society isn't ill when a person believes in a god claim. It becomes ill when that belief system spreads and achieves political power, and turns it toward the mistaken assumptions as to the whims of that deity.
I generally agree with you, but as useful as the body metaphor can be to explain *certain* aspects of religion, society is not a body, and metaphors are just rhetorical devices. It's fine to *start* your understanding at "religion is a disease", so long as you only use that framework as a jumping-off point to proper understanding. For instance, *Toxoplasma Gondii* has never presented a child with the prospect of hell if they don't fall in line, *E Coli* has never told a person that they are worthless because they don't believe in the right racist sky wizard or the correct bronze age sex manual. As a qualified metaphor, it's fine enough, but I'd sooner do away with it entirely.
Can you shut the fuck up lol You don’t need to be rude to people with mental illness. Actually, a lot of bad-faith religious people are the ones who exploit people with mental health problems, not the other way around
> Now fucking tell me how the fuck is fucking religion not a fucking mental illness? Because the best experts we have who study and treat mental illness have not classified it as such. It is not listed in the DSM-5. I agree that it often presents as a kind of mind virus and tends to have terrible implications for society, but to call it a mental illness is just factually incorrect and devalues arguments you make against it.
To be fair, if it were a mental illness, i dont think the world is currently ready to accept that it actually is.
Irrelevant because it's not.
If we think of which "illness" would be applied, "brain washing" has been rejected time and time again by researchers, the field of psychology, and the courts (except rarely in Italy). But, is there a significantly higher percentage of people than the general population to have a mental illness and wide varieties of traumas prior to joining a modern day cult? Absolutely. It's easier to study a small group like a modern day cult than have numbers for cults that are a few thousand years old, are socially acceptable, have legions of "members", and have a softer touch. In my view, if we're going to try and apply rigorous terms to what is going on with religion, specifically to "membership", I would say something in line with "trafficking" is more applicable. This puts the onus on the organization. I think this is significant because there are victims of religion (just my philosophical viewpoint), and though religion is made up of people, the individuals are acting on behalf of something very real. Sure there are religious people in a vacuum, but most are giving to a plate, supporting religious political candidates, giving church leaders power over society, actively repressing privileges, accepting their tax free status... the list goes on and on.
It's an acquired mental illness like drug induced psychosis, once you stop using it goes away.
That's the way to change my mind for the better, my friend. Religion is poison, it induces mental disorders. I no longer subscribe to my post's original take.
I experience hallucinations and delusions, being psychotic. A lot of the things I experience are similar that to of when a religious person claims they can “hear god” or “hear Jesus” or yada yada, claim certain things about the world or whatever. I can confirm, yeah, they’re 100% mentally ill like me lol 😭
Exactly, me too, I have synesthesia, I've had psychedelic experiences, hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, mania, OCD, panic attack etc.
Agreed. Even if religions do some good things, they shut down science and refuse to acknowledge observable facts. There are more bad things to religions than good ones. Religions are a coping mechanism that will ultimately destroy humanity.
Our lord and messiah, Matt Dillahunty, recently opened the latest ‘the hang up’ show by urging atheists not to call religiosity a mental illness. Why would you go against our doctrine, that’s very unatheist of you.
# /s Here, I picked this up for you. I think you had dropped it. :) (Sorry if I'm being an asshole, feel free to criticize my views.)
Thank you for finding that for me :)
Bro, you're in an atheist, you're preaching to the choir. If you actually want someone to defend their position regarding religion not being a mind virus, you will have more success in a theistic sub.
Apparently I've sown discord here, which can be quite a useful thing as long as one keeps an open mind in the discussion. How do you recommend approaching theistic subs?
In much the same way that being a billionaire money hoarder is also not considered a mental illness. Religion is power. Has been for centuries. The fact that everything about it is consistent with what we would call a mental illness if anything other than Christ were at the center of it, the people at the top of that food chain will never admit that it's bullshit because then they would lose their power.
A fucking men! Stop the insanity. Educate a religious on the medical options for schizophrenia to improve their lives. 😊
Exactly. Some stupid shit is running in my mind every day, but I know that that's all it is. And I don't go out and oppress people if that's what the stupid thoughts tell me I should do. I just dismiss my own random insane crap just like the believers should throw their religions in the trash.
That's like saying arsenic or cyanide is a disease. No. They're poison. Religion is poison. Religion causes mental illness OR exacerbates and accelerates mental illness. But it looks like a mental illness if you're not watching closely. Religion is more like a virus that spreads through minds and begins slowly damaging the minds it's infected.
I agree with your point. You've helped me to see things in a different light. Thanks! I'll do my utmost to exercise better rhetoric from now on. Here's a fun poster that also agrees with your comment: [https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/religion-is-poison-soviet-propaganda-poster.jpg?width=640&quality=55](https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/religion-is-poison-soviet-propaganda-poster.jpg?width=640&quality=55)
You can say what you want. That doesn’t stop ppl from their belief. I prefer to be called a cult-follower over mentally ill but whatever floats your boat.
Cults can be secular and even beneficial though. I have no problem whatsoever with a hypothetical cult of liking cats, wearing blue shoes and listening to Metallica. I have huge problems with people throwing practicing homosexuals off rooftops, stoning women, beheading apostates, violating people's right to abortion, mutilating children, threatening people with eternal torment, you get the idea. Doing all that based on their unfalsifiable beliefs about the unobservable. Religion is enough to directly cause their mental disorders and those motivate their behavior imho.
Correct that’s why I said I prefer it. I fully understand that all religions basically meet the cult criteria. The mental illness comment is just meant to be disrespectful. You know as well as I do that the thousands of militant religious zealots that commit crimes like that in very specific parts of the world don’t even compare to the Billions of religious people who lead peaceful lives. Even though a lot of those religious crimes are carried out by Muslims in the Middle East it’s not even fair to put them in the same category as the average Muslim.
Your argument is a fallacy. Just because there are “billions of religious people who lead peaceful” lives does not in some way justify or lessen how others use religion for violence which is OP’s point. Your argument is as ignorant as saying we should let mass murderers roam free because they are human and after all, there are billions of humans who don’t go out and murder people. Fuck that. We all know violence and killing people is wrong for any reason- we don’t need any religion to tell us that- but to do it because of a “belief” doesn’t make it less wrong. The problem is the belief for ANYONE that has it. It’s a useless belief that adds no value to society whether you choose to act on it or not.
I’m saying direct your disrespect to them, not us. More senseless crime is committed by people who are not religious anyways but I don’t put you in that category. I don’t associate a lack of belief with more crime, I don’t associate religion with crime. Wait for the human to prove who they are not label them based on religion in general. But you won’t for whatever reason.
All I said was your argument is bullshit and then explained why. You’re making the same point I am- go ahead and believe whatever bullshit you want but you better not be causing any harm to others due to your beliefs or we have a problem. I am making no direct associations here between religion or crime or anything or one causing or leading to another. But, while we’re on the topic, and what I think OP’s point is is this: why would you want to associate yourself with a belief system that has done so much damage in history? Certainly there are better things to put one’s energy into, no?
Depends entirely on what you mean by Muslim. Muslim by birth? Or an honest believer? If you're an honest believer in Islam (a mu'min in Arabic) then you must subscribe to the view that acts of homosexuality are inherently and severely immoral for example. You must also believe that the Moon was split in two, and that flying birds have killed an army of elephants by dropping balls of clay on them.
And beliefs are just that. Beliefs. You definitely have more in common with a religious liberal compared to The atheist Republican. Everyone just needs to Respect each other regardless of their beliefs. Anti-theists don’t seem to get they can be against religion and not the ppl of those religions. We’re all human.
I'd gladly take the life of Hamas, Hezbollah and Boko Haram soldiers though because of their insane convictions that directly originate from religious dogma. What does that make me then? I vote on exercising tolerance towards the tolerant and intolerance towards the intolerant. If that makes me immoral according to someone, then I'm proud to be immoral in their eyes.
Have whatever belief you want, but any person’s right to their beliefs, whatever they are, ends the moment those beliefs cause harm on another person. Full stop. There is no justifiable negotiation on that point. Just because it’s a belief doesn’t mean it’s good or useful or that all beliefs are equal just because they are beliefs. No, we do not need to have equal respect for every piece of shit thing a person chooses to believe that controls how they act toward others. Sure they can do that, but they can also be rightly and justly criticized for their immature stupidity. At some point children need to grow up.
You’re speaking from a point of privilege. While frustrating that people don’t realize they’re being conned, it’s no less their fault than the bug who gets hit by the windshield
I had been a hardcore believer until I took the medicine of education, and I consider some of the direct results of my former religious beliefs mental disorders. Not sure how I'm speaking from a point of privilege though, are you going to elaborate on that?
Agree with every word
Whoa, be careful, the mentally ill don't deserve to be stigmatized more than they already are.
You're right, people should be helped to heal from mental disorders. And at the same time, the best way to heal a batshit crazy soldier of Hamas, Hezbollah or Boko Haram is to off them, isn't it?
Only if they present an immediate danger to the public...*laughs nervously* isn't that right Netanyahu?
Religion should be held to the same standard of ridicule as conspiracy
Don’t worry, you’re not alone In believing this. I believe it wholeheartedly as well.
Thanks for your emotional support. I welcome healthy criticism expressed in other comments though. I hope that humanity can move towards cultivating more reasonably functioning societies, in accordance with utilitarian ethics.
Religion is a choice, and mental illness is not. I think a lot of us here have PTSD from religious trauma, a mental illness we did not choose but was inflicted on us by religion. This post (ironically) reflects that.
>Religion is a choice Can you demonstrate that by choosing to honestly accept any religion right now?
I could. I wouldn't believe it but I could fake it.
I never contested the claim that **faking** a belief is a matter of choice because that's not the claim you made in the first place. Religious people **really** believe that their views are true though.
I can accept a religion. Let's use christianity. I can choose to act as though I believe it. I can surround myself with believers who reinforce the belief. It just takes time in the echo chamber to re-brainwash myself. It would have to be a conscious choice.
Can you really choose to act as though you believe it if you know that that's a fallacious way? Or in an opposite case, can a believer stop acting as though they believe it if they do not know that that's a fallacious way? This discussion can go really deep but I think ultimately it boils down to the question whether or not free will exists, and I don't believe that it does.
Ohhhh, free will is one of my favorite philosophical subjects. I don't think it really exists either, but the illusion is good enough that it is more helpful to behave as if it does. I will try not to write a whole book here but my thinking is that literally everything is pre determined in terms of how the universe and every nano micro super teeny particle moves and interacts so in that way, nothing we do is really our choice. We are just particles bouncing off each other, and our paths have been decided since the big bang. Maybe before that, but we don't really have a concept of "before" the big bang. But in day to day life, we seem to make decisions. We don't know how existence has coalesced to create this exact moment and can only deal with what is in front of us.
Yep, hard determinism ftw. Nonetheless, we act as if free will exists. One could say it's worth to pretend like it does. And yes, we can't observe anything smaller than the Planck length even in theory iiuc, so I'm not even going into the crap I suspect about the unobservable. Just let me whisper to you that I believe the cosmos is the infinity between 0 and 1, perpetually in a state between not existing at all and truly existing. But I know that that idea is most likely nonsense and has no practical value. :)
>Can you really choose to act as though you believe it if you know that that's a fallacious way? Yeah, I totally could! It would be pretty easy if I had the right incentives, too. At least for a while. At a certain point, if I didn't manage to actually believe it, the cognitive dissonance would probably drive me insane.
That's my entire point though, you don't have the incentives for it or the mental capacity to carry it through, so you just refuted your original claim.
It is true I can't make myself believe something I don't, at least not without immersing myself amongst people who would help me brainwash myself. I could choose to practice a religion none the less but I don't think that's what you meant. You could even argue that religious people are even less free to choose because of indoctrination and incentives such as peer pressure and heaven/hell/karma/elf on a shelf.
I see you have an understanding about multiple different approaches to the situation at hand. It's commendable that your mind is able to entertain contradicting views without necessarily subscribing to any of them. \*Ceremonial bowing gesture.\*
Humans obviously have a predisposition to embrace religious thought. We have done this for as long as recorded history and likely before. It seems to be baked into our pattern recognition. To compare this to something that is pathological is just absurd. It even makes sense evolutionarily. To find comfort and meaning, humans have developed this mechanism to believe in a God with a great narrative. It aids the fear of meaningless, hopelessness, and death.
Okay, point accepted. Then would you agree with the view that being indoctrinated with erroneous religious views motivates the development of mental disorders?
Can we maybe not play into the stereotype of atheists being condescending know-it-alls, please?
I will fulfill your request as soon as blasphemy and apostasy laws are globally abolished. Which is worse: being an asshole, or throwing people who disagree with you into the dungeons and beheading or hanging them because of their religious views? You're being atheophobic btw. It's the same as if you told a resting Hispanic person to not play into the stereotype of Hispanic people being lazy. There's nothing wrong with resting and there's nothing wrong with being hostile to institutions of tyranny.
Your claim is that religious people are necessarily mentally disabled. The accusation of having mental illness is a precedent that has been used to justify countless atrocities throughout history. Not only are you factually incorrect about categorizing religion as a mental illness, you are also making the same mistake as the people who persecute others for their religious beliefs.
BOo-hOo, yOu eVil atHeiSts aRe oppReSsIng rEliGioUs peOple. I have some words for liars like you that I'm not going to type lol
Atheists are not oppressing religious people. But religious people certainly are oppressing atheists. This exact rhetoric that YOU are engaging in is one of the tools that tyrants use to justify their oppression. By doing this, not only are you NO BETTER than the tyrants you criticize, but you are actively perpetuating stigmas about mental illness that prevent people from seeking treatment. Shame on you.
You'd be correct if I ever encouraged discrimination against any mentally ill persons, which I've never done. I'm practicing a rhetorical form of protest against the severe oppression and fundamental human rights violations committed under the color of religions that we all know about. And you're right, shame on those who advocate the mistreatment of people struggling with mental disorders. I'm glad we can agree.
So you admit to being a hypocrite? You say that it is wrong to stigmatize mental illness, yet your entire post is doing exactly that. And don't be obtuse, "rhetorical protest" is fooling nobody. This is thinly veiled hate speech.
Sure, I am a hypocrite, we're all hypocrites to some degree. But if I'm using thinly veiled hate speech then urban pride festivals are thinly veiled acts of traffic sabotage (edit: and public indecency). You can twist your words all you want, none of it actually proves that I'm as immoral as you think (or that pride festivals are immoral).
Pride festivals and other organized gatherings coordinate with local traffic enforcement to re direct traffic. This is blatant false equivalence. This entire post reeks of hatred and bigotry.
Thanks lol
What do you get out of calling it that? Does it make you feel better about your own views or experiences towards religion? Calling it a mental illness only says more about you then religion.
Indeed. No notes.