Religion as socially-accepted mental illness

“If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: "Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being." Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible. (23)”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I like Sam, but oversimple moral creeds such as that one are just as dangerous and potentially immoral as the ones found in the Bible. I mean, yeah, obviously a non-violent path has the appearance of goodness, but allowing your enemy to kill you and yours isn't a moral action. Sometimes it is moral to injure or kill. Sometimes torture is moral. Insults sometimes lead to clarity, as they can disabuse people of bad ideas. (That's why I've never believed in blanket, blind politeness in discourse; I don't require your respect, and I'm not giving you any until you've earned it)

Back to Sam, though, he's a bit of a Buddhist, and I've seen him get torn apart when he makes idiotic statements like "there has never been a Buddhist suicide bomber." His view of Buddhism and other eastern religions is that of a new convert--all good, no bad, and way too much optimism.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I like the idea of not killing or injuring or enslaving or torturing. Though maybe not 100% practical in every situation, like all moral ideals it's a good vision to aim for.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I disagree. It's good to aim for in certain aspects of your life, but in others, it isn't. Teaching it as a general rule is a mistake, in my opinion.

 

how are christians any different in this regard than, say, any nations military or any nations religion?

also, people do not do the things you mentioned just because they have read the bible, or ANY holy book for that matter.

push much?

 

That's a brilliant one!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Seriously, Ms. Sarcasm? How about you stop trolling and actually contribute for a change?

Depression is a mental illness. Depression isn't insanity. Therefore, sane people can have mental illnesses.

 

So sanity equals mental illness?

 

...What?

Having a mental illness does not mean you are insane. Just like being sick doesn't mean you're dying, or being hungry doesn't mean you're starving. Or how being blue doesn't mean you're the fucking sky. Is that really such a difficult concept?

 

Actually I'm not much on absolutizing morality at all into some set of authorative laws for all people in all situations. I think moral action is a consequence of reasonable judgement made in the context of a specific situation. Some people are better at it than others. But people who need laws or neat formulas to tell them right from wrong, particularly religious people, don't even cultivate this ability. Instead they reduce morality to blind obedience to a higher will, a kind of morality of servitude no more noble than that a slave must have for his master. Morality suddenly becomes the opposite of reasonable behavior, which is why we have a bloody history of religious massacre and persecution dating back millenia.

 

Killing witches, killing disobedient children, killing homosexuals, killing prostitutes, killing idolaters, killing adulterers, killing raped women, killing blasphemers, killing all the Canaanites that happen to already live on your promised holy land. The Bible set many such gory precedents that christians down thru the ages have repeated with no qualms whatsoever. (See below) Then there was all that bloody business about heresy strictly punished by the Catholic Church thruout the dark ages with torture and execution. Oh you know--all those REALLY evil folk like the pagans and the Cathars and the Moors and the Jews who happened to have different religious beliefs than their Catholic neighbors. These were exclusively religiously-motivated atrocities committed by religious people on their fellow human beings.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Actions_punishable_by_death_in_the_Old_Testament

 

Mr persecutor of Christians take notice before you continue vomiting your BS. Christ is the lieder, He did not kill antibody He raised people from the death , A true Christian will not kill anybody, those that kill are your people who disquiet themselves as Christians , you know that and all that have read the New Testament > So stop playing that same music over and over . You make it hard for me to be a Christian. I am supposed to love you, but you make it difficult for me.

 

Nope! Sane people can be mentally ill. That does not mean that sanity equals mental illness.

Fit people can get cancer. That does not mean that fitness equals cancer. Smart people can go bankrupt. That does not mean that intelligence equals bankruptcy.

 

Which is why I think to call religious laws "morality" is a misnomer. It actually has nothing to do with human conceptions of right and wrong, certainly nothing to do with justice. They are simply behaviors intended to get a person into the "good" afterlife. None of the monotheistic texts bother making a case for why such behaviors are beneficial to your life except in the context of how they make God feel, so I see no reason to accept them even as moral lessons. What is learned, except for what pleases some hypothetical god?

 

A person cannot be simultaneously healthy and ill in the same category.

A person cannot simultaneously have their left leg both broken and whole.
A person's mind cannot be simultaneously healthy and ill.

:shrug:

 

Sanity and depression or OCD aren't "in the same category," just as bones and ligaments aren't in the same category.

A person can have a torn ligament and no damage to the bone. They can break a bone and suffer no ligament damage. Likewise, you can be perfectly sane yet suffer from OCD. Or you can be completely bonkers and not suffer from depression.

Other aspects of their mind can be healthy when one isn't, just as when you sprain an ankle, your thigh is uninjured. Or when you break your foot, your ankle and calf are fine.

I'm pretty sure LG patented that. You'll be getting a call from his lawyers.

 

you have once again evaded the question.

i guess you never heard of gengis khan, you know, that guy that did all of the above just because he felt his shit didn't stink.
no, you definitely do not need to be religious to be a throat slitter, or a baby killer.
oh yes, let's not forget hitler, i guess you didn't know he was an atheist.

 

Wow. Whatever credibility you had is shattered now. Even the religious loons on this board don't try to claim Hitler was an atheist.

 

Agreed. But they can certainly be sane and ill. Mentally ill does not equal insane.

You can, of course, disagree with every doctor out there if you like, but if you do not many people will take you seriously.

 

So you are saying that anyone with religion training cannot be an atheists even if they stopped and began to live by the atheist philosophy of man playing god? Darwin also had early religious training so the father of evolution was religious? Or do atheist cherry pick to stack the deck based on the outcome?

Are more religious people or liberal atheists on drugs?