(Religion=Delusion) = Delusion

Or focus of that skepticism. You might buy a car with a more powerful engine to offset feelings of sexual inadequacy while AT THE SAME TIME being able to answer a test question correctly about whether this car actually helps you in this area. Or to jump fields: you might have accepted this or that government explanation for something.

Further
is skepticism a good base?
How do we decide this rationally and not intuitively?
Are our choices for when to be skeptical rational or intuitive?

 

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It's rare that an atheist would 'attack' in that manner.

Sounds like an issue with communists.

 

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(Insert title here)

If you had stuck with "delusion", your argument would fare better. The escalation to insanity opens a vital vulnerability. Delusion ranges from merely being misled or deceived all the way to psychosis, a fairly broad range. "Insane", however, is a different question.

One of the criteria for judging whether or not certain behaviors constitute mental illness is whether or not the action interferes with one's ability to engage in normal social relationships. An example of this would be the sexualization of children. There are plenty of guys I know whose heads are turned by a stunning teenager. If we want to be even more creepy about it, at the Subpop twentieth anniversary show a couple weeks ago, there was this girl who was all of eleven or twelve, but you could tell at first glance that she was going to be a heartbreaker, the obsession of countless teenage late-night masturbatory fantasies. At the Ringo Starr show, I saw a girl who was probably nine who will grow up to make men drool. There are plenty of contexts in which to hold such notions distasteful.

Hell, walking into the Ringo show, there were these two girls behind us chattering about something and one of them said, in regard to whatever the hell they were talking about, "I'm not even thirteen yet!" I had seen them both and without the braces, I would have guessed fifteen and not twelve.

That's why every once in a while, if you pay attention, you'll see some guy you know watching a young girl pass and hear him mutter under his breath, "That ain't right."

Some would indict the twelve year-old for looking like that, but in the end, they're commenting on their own attention. And they're correct: it ain't right.

But this is a far cry from the predatory minds we fret about. Most of these ogling bastards aren't dangerous, and don't suffer behavioral complexes when they realize the hot ass they're watching is so ridiculously underage. They aren't the ones trolling for children, or who have trouble getting it up with a woman their own age. Some might disapprove of the fact that they notice at all, but the fact of their attention does not constitute a mental health issue.

Similarly, there are plenty of religious people who are perfectly sane. Their delusions do not cause any significant disruption to normal social relationships. There are two sides to that point, of course, insofar as what is statistically normal in the United States includes religious delusions. But the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of religious believers are, in fact, deluded.

That the lasting moral systems have certain religious derivations should not be surprising. After all, to use the Christian experience as an example, the European heritage into the Americas has seen two millennia of social conditioning around religious moral assignations.

We might consider, for instance, that the Catholic Church at one point made Aristotelian logic canonical law. The functional reason for this is that by Aristotle's arrangement of things, there was a place for everything, and everything belonged in its place, and nothing ever changed. It was an excellent logical foundation for securing and justifying the sociopolitical authority that led to such atrocities as the Inquisitions. From this perspective, we see that logical structures made abstract and for the glory of god actually pervert morality.

Looking to the Bible, we might note that God "hates" certain behaviors, and in the context of the times, that hatred makes sense. When your tribe is wandering lost in the desert for years on end, you shouldn't be wasting seed or having reckless sex. Nor should you be tattooing or ritually flagellating yourself. But the subjectiveness of God's outlook on a behavior is generally insufficient. There are plenty of objective reasons for certain moral standards we find in religion. Stealing from your neighbor, or banging his wife, causes disruption within the community, and when those communities were small enough, such tremors could destroy a people. In a more cosmopolitan "global community" of billions, there are plenty of worries more important than whether Mr. Smith is dabbling 'twixt Mr. Jones' wife's thighs.

Perhaps we should go back to night and day determining the difference between self-defense and murder? Maybe we should cut off women's hands if they interfere too greatly in a fight between men? How about poisoning our wives if we are unsatisfied with them?

I would ask you to consider why prohibitions against incest continue today, while Western society has long since stopped lopping off women's hands for interfering in fights, or poisoning them for not being good enough. The reason is that certain moral standards hold up under objective scrutiny. To borrow a line, you don't get with your relatives because you get babies with nine heads and stuff like that.

I would suggest that your examination of morality, religion, and history is perhaps a bit superficial.

Principles of social equality drawn from the Bible are extrapolated. After all, if slavery was good enough for Jesus, it should be good enough for the Athenians, as well. History suggests strongly that slavery collapsed not because of any traditional religious cause, but rather a slow revolution beginning with the Renaissance and still taking place today.

In the Christian context, we are all equal in the eyes of God. In rendering unto Caesar, however, Western civilization has endured millennia of iniquity by the will of religious authorities who would call themselves Christian.

Unless, of course, there is no evidence of a jumbo jet having crashed into one's dining room.

Few, if any, doubt the influence of religion on moral structures. And whether that influence is, on balance, positive or negative is an argument for the ages. But the religious adoption of philosophical truths has also brought some of the greatest moral inconsistencies in human history. Even today, in twenty-first century America, for instance, there are plenty of church leaders who would presume the authority to judge their fellow man; they haven't faith enough to leave the objects of their hatred to God.

 

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there is a problem with your post tiassa and it shows up when you look at the fundermentilist religions and born again christans among others. you can also be classed as insane when your delusion adversly effects OTHER people

for instance my sister had 3 close friends at school
the firsts family was either catholic, anglican or non religious, for the sake of this argument these positions are pritty close
one was a hindu
the last was a muslim

BTW my family are catholic

now nither my parents nor her first friends cared to much about when they dated, expected her to find someone that they liked when they were ready ect

now the other two girls on the other hand were expected to submit to aranged marriges, both of them actually HAD bfs but they were surposed to be good little girls and do whatever mummy and daddy said. ironically enough the muslim girl had a palistinian BF but this still wasnt good enough for her parents. Now this goes against civil sociaty in australia and really lead to alot of distress for these two girls.


lastly i would just like to point out there is a saying in the mental health sector, your not insane if you belive in god, you are if you belive you ARE god

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Ok! so what your saying is, because I cant specify which god your referring too, you in turn cant specify which one because you don't know either, yes thats cleared it up thanks.

Then post up the differences, thank you.

Google it, Mermaids have been mentioned in books, and painted, since the beginning of time.

Point made, point won. No red herrings please.

Lol, care to back that up.

Sorry don't see the connection here the truth will always be the truth, irregardless of what you might imagine the truth to be, yet your imagination is a great source of inspiration, but it cannot change the truth.

Well you could have those sort of people as vanguards for the truth, I of course will rather have sensible people.

 

what is it about the atheist ideology that makes it immune to expressions of violence?

 

There is no such thing as "the atheist ideology".

 

maybe you should take the issue up with Crunchy Cat
:shrug:

 

What is the point of bringing up this "factual observation"? What was your intention behind writing "Are they insane? No. Just mainly sheeplike."

Granted, theists sometimes argue from what looks like a form of argumentum ad populum (this is true for the humans in general). However, what at least sometimes they are trying to get at is this, as further communication with them can reveal: that because so many people are able to practice a religion, this means it is possible to do it.
This is in reply to those people who claim that religious instructions are either impossible to act upon, or that there are no repeatable results and other objections along these lines. People who make such objections usually simply refuse to practice in line with the religious instructions, or they practice them in line with their own preconceived notions (and aren't aware of those notions or refuse to review them). As such, it is no wonder that the results promised by the religion do not come about for those people, so they conclude that religion is some kind of delusion, or lie.

 

Then why oh why oh why did the OP make all those irrelevant comments regarding numbers, regarding inspiration etc to support your case, if that was not intended as part of the point of the OP?

To make those comments seemingly in support of your case, but to then acknowledge that they should not support your case, is deceitful.

 

“ Farenheit

Is there some particular god you don’t find delusional?
well?

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“

and that’s a great cultural contribution?
I mean, what sort of long standing social ideologies do you attribute to them?
What prominent current apparatus of society/culture lies indebted to mermaids?

“

one good turn deserves another

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“

care to indicate any moral that developed in a social vacuum?

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to say the least, just as well that the astronomer who discovered brown dwarfs thought differently (IOW many intelligent people don’t hesitate to imagine how they would set about to discover something before they actually do so) …

“

sensible people with no imagination …. goodluck

 

“ Sarkus

Maybe I didn’t say it clear enough

Numbers does not equal truth.
(you seem to have that part down)

Truth is revealed by investigation.
(so like if say 95% of people from 95% of history say something is true, and practically anything culturally valuable is due to the influence of it, you might feel inspired investigate it)

This thread is examining the delusional basis for atheists not bothering to investigate
(kind of like going with 5% of 5% as a basis for not even trying to investigate)

 

Whoops

Fair enough; I certainly failed to cover that base. The broader point I would hope to convey is the difference between what I did manage to cover and your point. While we cannot escalate to insanity, delusion is fair game. Among redemptive monotheists, the question is the nature of faith. I can think of one person, offhand, who vaguely believes, yet does so for hope—not of redemption but for civility and decency. It would be presumptuous to assert that she is the only one. But the faith that is most commonly described, even by the believers, that there is a real God as described in this or that holy book, seems a working example of delusion.

 

I don't think Atheism has an ideology. It's just the non-acceptance of one particular assertion. I have observed that organic atheism tends to arise when there is adequate fuel, resources, protection, and opportunity. Atheists resulting from that type of environment tend to require little or no idology and have their own ways of meeting their psychological needs.

I'll speculate that organic athests growing up in the ebove type of environment have had a wide variety of of their epigenetic markers triggered that make them less prone (but no immune) to expressions of violence.

 

They tend to outsource their violence and then deny it.

 

Please explain, I am not aware of any violence outsourced in the name of atheism.

 

You are talking bollocks ! Do you make it up as you go along ?

 

I am American. The educated middle and classes both secular and religious has indeed tended to outsource its violence in my country. I would guess it is similar in yours if your country has much of an army or intelligence services. Take, for example, what the CIA did in the 80s in Latin America. In the Vietnam war, with tacit and open approval of the above mentioned groups, poor men were sent across the world to kill Vietnamese.

I think arguments can also be made in relation to the police in the States.

Crunchy cat seemed to think his class of people out there in the suburbs are somehow immune from being causal in violence. The fact is they don't have to get their hands dirty.

It was more of a class based (both intra-national and international) reaction than a religious one.

But I do see nothing, nothing at all that indicates that becoming an athiest somehow reduces one's chances of contributing to violence. And people who walk around calling themselves atheists seem just as likely to vote for war and deny the actions of their intelligence services and their nation's corporations and how these affect the citizens of other countries.

I think CC's post is smug and self-servingly naive.

If you can somehow prove, Myles, that atheists are somehow less violent or less approving of violence and less causal, please go ahead. I see little in world history that shows this.

So keep you bollocks to yourself.

 

Then you will likely not get anywhere, as your understanding / use of atheism is flawed.

Atheism is merely a non-belief in God - which people have told you again, and again, and again.

There is no "delusional basis" for atheists not bothering.
The atheists that are not bothered see no beneficial purpose in investigating, and see the trade off between investigation and reward as insufficient. This is not a delusional basis.

Your criticism is with those few strong atheists who argue that God does NOT exist, and that anyone who thinks that God does is delusional (they are a few and far between breed). And your argument, that your roll out again and again, is one of them not following the right path to investigate.

They are not delusional either - as to be delusional there must be rational and overwhelming contradictory evidence to what they are saying.
Yet you are unable to point it out to them - but instead spout the "you need to know how to look" routine.

Their argument that God exists = delusion is based on what they see as a total lack of evidence to support the fact that God does exist.
In order to counter this, you must surely provide them with evidence, no?

Your current argument requires what you consider a blind man to start seeing: no matter what texts you put in front of him, he won't read them.

Surely you would be better off trying to find ways within his capabilities to get him to read, no?... but instead you bang on about the blind man not reading with his eyes.

 

The people in the USA who outsource violence, as you put it, would claim to be Christrians if asked. Polls have shown that about 90+ % of Americans believe in god , or say they do. So where are all these atheists you are talking about ?

Perhaps the Russians outsourced violence to the Vatican .

I don't have to prove that atheists are less violent. Common sense suggests that some people are violent, irrespective of what they believe. What you have to show is that those who profess a belief in god are less violent than atheists. Now you have a problem, so work on it instead of trying to pass the buck. As theists are in the majority...

George Bush, that well known born-again, has outsourced torture under the euphemistic name of rendering. Stalin did his own dirty work. So start at the top and work down.

For the record , I am Irish. I was brought up in a theocracy which I was happy to abandon in my youth. I'm sure you are aware of all that sectarian "atheism "in Northern between Catholics and Protestants.

If you think about it, you haven't got a leg to stand on. You really are talking bollocks when you suggest that atheists outsource violence.