Why Isn't The Belief In God Considered Mental Illness?

[Kriswest]

Artimas, that about naive was tongue in cheek humor about ignorance…

James, pssst, might wanna check your spell check, literal, not liberal…

[James_S_Saint]

@Kriswest

Artimas, that about naive was tongue in cheek humor about ignorance…

James, pssst, might wanna check your spell check, literal, not liberal…

Oopsss …
… gotta stop reading while I’m still yawning …

[Kriswest]

Some liberals are literals as are some conservatives.

Lol my spellcheck wants to put liberal as well must be a what you used most thing.

[Artimas]

I’m not liberal, I am not associated with either parties. Both sides have some stupid and some good points.

[CelineK]

Nihilism makes only sense when admitting that 'no monopoly religion/dogmas" has improved humanity. But the problem is that under such a circumstance, nihilism is just another dogma and will lead to the same results. Religions promote altruism toward those of the same faith and all state that they are the only “true path” to God, hence the hatred/violence they help spread…the Nihilist dialectic just does the same.

THE ONLY MENTAL ILLNESS:
Only people who don’t have a strong sense of self-love could continue the condition of slavery, can continue to perpetuate it and continue to accept it. Therefore only a species that hates itself can thus perpetuate its own enslavement and participate in its own enslavement. Therefore the solution is self-love before any other form of love/empathy. M. Passio

just look for the empathic currency and society on my site for further input.

[Ierrellus]

What God are we talking about here? The fundy skydaddy or the reasonable cause and preserver of existence?
Atheists are not immune to mental illness.

[CelineK]

Why Isn’t The Belief In God Considered Mental Illness?

the only insanity is expecting a group/community to represent one’s own beliefs. Experience with God/Universe is a very personal experience. Group thinks are the problem. Spiritual dogmas are cultural marxism

[Artimas]

@CelineK

Why Isn’t The Belief In God Considered Mental Illness?

the only insanity is expecting a group/community to represent one’s own beliefs. Experience with God/Universe is a very personal experience. Group thinks are the problem. Spiritual dogmas are cultural marxism

Spirituality > religion

Looking up at the universe is a spiritual experience, not a religious one. Going to church to read a systematic dogmatic book, that’s religion.

[Ierrellus]

So there can be no spirituality in group think?

[Bob]

Spirituality is where it all begins, religion is where it ends … A shame, that is true, because it is well meant, but experience shows that religion is often the death of spirituality.

Human beings are naturally spiritual and their expressions of this are often masterful and ingenious, showing the variety of cultural development. But once we get dogmatic, the art and poetry dies, which is the natural way to express spiritual feeling.

[Ierrellus]

@Bob

Spirituality is where it all begins, religion is where it ends … A shame, that is true, because it is well meant, but experience shows that religion is often the death of spirituality.

Human beings are naturally spiritual and their expressions of this are often masterful and ingenious, showing the variety of cultural development. But once we get dogmatic, the art and poetry dies, which is the natural way to express spiritual feeling.

How can this be construed as mental illness?

[Bob]

@Ierrellus

@Bob

Spirituality is where it all begins, religion is where it ends … A shame, that is true, because it is well meant, but experience shows that religion is often the death of spirituality.

Human beings are naturally spiritual and their expressions of this are often masterful and ingenious, showing the variety of cultural development. But once we get dogmatic, the art and poetry dies, which is the natural way to express spiritual feeling.

How can this be construed as mental illness?

I don’t see it as a mental illness in the sense that some people have been suggesting, but it is a disorder of a kind. Those effected by this disorder have an egocentric world view in which they suppose to be given an inside look at the “mind of God” and are in on the secret, that God will punish all those who fail to “believe” and they only will escape because they do.

It isnt so much a belief in a God, as the expansion of that belief and this being an insider, having the holy spirit, who tells secrets. I am still a theist or deist to some degree, but the spoutings of some Christians depress me.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

@James S Saint

@Ultimate Philosophy 1001

@James S Saint

As long as a person hates in the politically correct direction, it is called neither hatred nor prejudice (for example hating white males is never pointed out as anything but appropriate and justified behavior).

I don’t get why hating white males are getting all the hate. We should spread it around, hating humans in general.
Drop this white male thing and let’s make it hip to hate the whole human race.
When I was a kid, there was a periscope turret on the top of the fort.

Because it is a race war between those who own the media (the programming of the youth) and those who didn’t contrive to own it.

Remind me again, who owns the media?

[Mictlantecuhtli]

@Artimas

@Ierrellus

Billions of people claim to have had a God experience. Can they all be wrong or insane? The unfortunate claims of this thread avoid the legitimate need of many for religious assurances of the right to exist. Again, the thread mistakes religious dupery for religious sanity. It’s yet another thread about look at all the bad things religion has done without accrediting religion for the good it has done. The imaginary friend argument pales before the facts of actual God experience. It is at best a mistaking of a child’s sense of wonder for an adolescent mockery of what minds can do and of what minds need.

… Billions of people also said the Earth was flat. Truth doesn’t weigh off of perspective. Biggest flaw in humanity. It WILL be the downfall too.

People look at the bad more, because more bad has been done.

It wasn’t religion that brought critical thinking, it was philosophy… And religion derived out of philosophy, a cancer that goes against it’s very foundation of seeking knowledge (modern and systematic/dogmatic religion at least). There are fewer religious people who think philosophically than there are who don’t.

So to claim religion has done so much good and peopld should focus on it is kind of a fallacy.

Sure, god could exist, but there are also tons of questions and contradicting confusions that must be dealt with if one settled with it, I myself doubt it after thinking about it all, but again, perspective does not mean truth. It is only a path in a maze of which could be right or a wrong dead end.

Most people do not understand what religion is… simply believing a god exists is not religion, it is spirituality or just simple ideal. Religion tends to be systematic, coercive communion while mixed with faith and dogmatic principle.

Most people talking about all the ‘good’ of religion shriek in horror when all the destructive aspects of it comes out in conversational circulation.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Behind every curtain of authority, tyranny, or government there is the justification of god and religion.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

@Artimas

I don’t view buddhism as religion, it isn’t coercive or a system, the Buddha never asked or wanted worship, not like the religions that are poisonous. Take away the churches, the dogma, the heaven (false promise/hope) and hell (coercion) and would it still be considered religion? I personally don’t think so, it would be an actual philosophy/possibility without working off of control or manipulating the gullible.

If I may ask, when was religion first introduced to you? At all, any part of it, childhood? It was for me and it is for near all others, now let me ask another question, as a child who is naturally gullible, less logical, more imaginative and creative… Did you get a choice? Did anyone else get a choice?

The problem is not people getting together to express themselves and their ideas, it is the FORCE that comes with religion that is the problem, the hypocritical contradictory method.

You see, most religious are against abortion because they say “the baby gets no choice” yet turn around and whisper in their own gullible childs ear “praise the lord and go to heaven, worship Jesus if you don’t want to be burned in hell”

Does THAT child get a choice? No, they don’t. That my friend, is poison and I do not stand for it. That is mental disease and sickening, to willingly shape a child who could be a potential genius in whatever they wanted.

Children are not pieces of clay to be shaped by others, they need to be allowed to shape themselves and if religious can’t agree to that then they ARE diseased.

Research Buddhist segregationist genocide in Myanmar.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

@James S Saint

People who manipulate people always force their preference. Science is forced upon people today every bit as much as any other religion has been. It is just what people do.

Your complaint should be against intentional hypnosis, forced, or coerced behavior. What does it matter if someone is calling it “religion” or “government” or “marketing”. The separation of state and religion was support to help in that regard. The effort to ban religion is exactly what the problem is - “intentional hypnosis, forced, or coerced behavior”.

The difference is that science doesn’t try to regulate everybody socially. Religion on the other hand does.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

@Kriswest

Scientists do not all follow the same beliefs, theories or methods anymore than the religious or Athiest’s do. And any teacher that signed a contract prohibiting them from saying certain things should have common sense enough to keep their mouth shut. They broke their word and they broke their contract. They can not complain legitimately afterwards. But, apparently now your word and a contract means nothing.

Independent science doesn’t exist anymore in that all of it is heavily controlled, financed, and regulated by government along with the military industrial complex. Government being a historical extension of religion…

[Mictlantecuhtli]

@Ierrellus

Only in religious fundamentalism does one find concepts of eternal punishment. Their god could reasonably be called insane as could their worship of their god. But!!! God is love. As love he cannot punish us for following our own energies (Blake). God is not a loser. He will reclaim all souls eventually as Paul notes.
God is known in personal relationships with people, places and things. He is real as hands and feet for those who would only believe in him without the baggage of the notion that justice is a matter to be settled in the hereafter.
That being said, referring to God as he is only for grammatical usage. God is force, not a gender.

All religions are fundamentalist to their core.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

@Ierrellus

C, H, O, N,S–carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur are ingredients of living organisms that may be found on billions of planets that are the right distance from their star. God is life. So why would we limit the God of the universe, who is the universe, to our paltry planet?
Your God is too small if–

1. God is only involved with inhabitants of Earth–
2. God is totally described by human religions
3. God does not exist except in the minds of men

Either god exists or doesn’t. The universe is the universe, not god.