To me, true sanity is based on these things:
How successfully can you predict things?
Do you have a good sense of progress and benifite?
How efficient are you?
I think it’s crazy to waste time, or believe in things that wont happen,
or sit around all day picking your butthole with a monkeywrench.
I think religion is insane when it looses sight of progress, and
believes in things that either didn’t happen, or will not happen, or don’t exist.
Anybody who believes in “progress” is insane.
This thread reminds me of this lousy, homeless bum off the street (who I see on a consistent basis) yelling about God’s imminent return and how I’m going to Hell, telling ME how insane I am.
He obviously doesn’t realize who is sane and not.
And pray tell what you mean by “wasting time”.
I’m sure you can lecture everybody here about what constitutes a “useful” occupation of time.
With you on the:
How successfully can you predict things?
But not sure of the others.
I’d probably go with:
To what extent are you able to do what you believe/say you can do…?
And, perhaps a little whimscally:
How happy are you…?
Debaitor, I suspect you’re using a rather broad version of progress, not to mention being rather… Combative. Dan has an opinion, rather than simply attack his right to have one, maybe you better form one yourself first…?
If sanity is based on happiness than crackpot Christians and Islamic suicide bombers are the height of sanity.
Also weed smokers and meth addicts.
Nah, they ain’t happy, but you know that don’t you. Those happy in themselves do not need God, likewise they are seldom driven to blow themselves up.
Now attempt to prove those statements.
The problem is that Christians are happy being part of their flock. However, that does not make them “sane”. What is sanity?
It’s an accusatory identification, usually directed at those who cannot “integrate into society”.
The real “insane” person (although I don’t believe it) is the individualist, the one who does not ‘conform’, the one who does not know “when to shut up” like everybody else.
The insane one is seen as unreasonable; he should just sit down, shut up, and take the lumps like the rest of us poor suckers. Then, when we all complain together, about nobody doing anything, we won’t realize the contradiction of one going against our own self imposed status quo.
Sanity is hypocrisy.
I think that would show how functional someone is.
But to function is different than to be correct.
People can preform bad functions.
Therefor I believe that enlightenment is all about how well someone understands morals and values.
Due to politics, we can’t say every christian is insane.
We can say that nazis are bad, though.
So we’re partially able to judge people, and partially not allowed to, in modernism.
No, it’s not.
Wrong again.
All created and endowed by Mankind. Men direct each other how to live and how to organize society.
Nothing supernatural about it, at all.
Yes, we can.
Nazis are bad if you’re Jewish. If you’re non Jewish, then you may have another opinion.
People are only “bad” if they try to kill you. Is a lion “bad” because he kills a gazelle? No, of course not. Men are the same way.
Men prey upon other (weaker) men.
That doesn’t make any sense.
Debaitor, I think you sound retarded.
Address my arguments and points, not me.
You were saying something about “sanity”?
To me sanity is bound up in the degree of parity between statement and behaviour, intent and outcome.
I don’t believe the greater number of people can perform bad actions, unless they’ve already fallen foul of the first indicator of sanity - the ability to make sound predictions.
Sanity is realizing you are part of the entire universe.
Insanity is attempting to cognize this fact.
"People are only ‘bad’ if they try to kill you.
I’m following the Rand, Nietzsche combo punch here debate guy, and I dig.
But that statement does sound retarded. I mean that in the most literal way.
FLD.
to make slow; delay the development or progress of (an action, process, etc.); hinder or impede.
It doesn’t matter if it “sounds retarded” as long as it’s right.
How can you compliment and rebuke me at the same time? Does. Not. Compute. 
True psychological insanity (psychosis) is a disorganization of the mind. It can be characterized by several different things:
Short term memory loss. Due to an inability to “hold on to” thoughts, the individual finds themselves unable to solve the simplest of problem or carry out simple mental activities (counting out twenty pieces of something might seem difficult to someone in a psychosis). Short term memory loss could arguably be the source of all the other symptoms of insanity.
Confusion
Inability to control thoughts. Certain thoughts may seem “too loud”, “too fast”, or just simply incomprehensible.
Difficulty speaking. It might be difficult for the individual to find certain words (at much more severe level than a person would normally experience), or the individual will find that when they try speaking, they forget what they are saying mid-sentence, or their voice is too distorted by fear/anxiety for them to finish what they are saying. They might also ramble on about something insignificant, or what they are saying will be non-sequitur, irrelevant, or grammatically inaccurate to the point of being incomprehensible).
Paranoia - being worried about something without a probable reason. Individuals may feel like other people are plotting against them, or the individual may feel as if he is under constant persecution. The individual may also feel like something bad is about to happen and they aren’t able to do anything about it; or that something bad has happened/is going to happen, and they feel responsible (although they might not even have a reason for feeling responsible)…
Intense fear and dysphoria usually accompany all of the above.
There’s also other types of psychological phenomena that are sometimes referred to as “insanity”, such as public hysteria (Salem Witch Trials, for example), or a Mania (such as with bi-polar disorder).
Wow… you must get really bored.
My apologies for veering just a tad off topic, here.
Its amusing to me when people talk about a topic (and oh so much more when its something as abstract as insanity) as if it is unrelated to the speaker. We’re in this, ladies and gentlemen. We ARE this. You can catagorize, and try your best to sound objective (text book tonality), but you are IT. There is most certainly a truth, many. Don’t forget that the only ones we have access to are soft, and wet.
FLD.
Oh, and about complimenting and rebuking you at the same time, I can’t for the life of me understand what is so hard to understand about that. If it does not compute, buy a new motherboard, amigo.
Surely an individual can be both insane and perfectly capable of predicting things (at least to their own mind), depending on the complexity of the predictions. If you are so out of touch with reality that you cannot predict gravity as you step off the roof then you are clearly delusional, however given that insanity affects how we interpret the world it is perfectly possible to predict ‘correctly’ given that the results that you are predicting may not be independent from your own malfunctioning neurological patterns.
If by correct you mean some form of inter-subjective, socially derived standard of correctness (again referring to more complex predictions here) and you wish to say that your predictions align with what the majority would say is the correct result that’s fine, that’s more defensible. It obviously has some weird consequences but that may be your intention.
Your examples link prediction and progress, except that invoking ‘progress’ (in its simplest terms, deprived of any teleological reading) expands upon that reading, giving the agent a past and a present, contextualised state to ground their predictive capabilities. Again this is vulnerable to the same criticism as the previous one, where the method of the insane allows for correct predictions because it is the insane who judges the progress to be correctly followed. Broadly speaking, if by progress you mean some form of rational awareness, a failure of this faculty is indicative of insanity. Unfortunately this line of reasoning can start to make both insanity and sanity equally ungrounded in the sense that it starts referring to mental capabilities rather than facts, but that’s okay, if we want to check we are sane we can always go punch a wall.
‘Efficiency’? Odd. Why efficiency. I can’t get the image of the philosophical OCD-zombie to leave my mind, perfectly efficient, perfectly crazy. It seems you’re trying to diagnose some social malady rather than insanity in itself.