Are religious people that talk to god through prayer and claim to feel supernatural experiences mentally ill?
If not, why exactly?
Are some voices in the head more equal than others? Help me out here.
The family that comes together talking to an imaginary being in the sky through prayer claiming to receive revelations from such an entity are considered ‘normal’ but the guy that goes around everywhere claiming to be Napoleon Bonaparte is ‘insane’?
Statistics show that 95% of the global population is religious in one degree to another.
Does that mean 95% of the global population is insane?
Better call the global psychiatric associations. We’re going to need more pills! Pharmaceutical companies wet dream.
We all have the same experiences, they’re just defined in different ways, and we all get lost in the definitions, as opposed to see the connection between the experiences.
Unfortunately, some sets of definitions are tainted with that which may harm one who accepts and internalizes the set of definitions.
Basically, what it boils down to is that technically, religious behavior would be treated as mentally unstable aka delusional, BUT since more than 70% of people in most Western countries are religious you can imagine it would be extremely inconvenient to proclaim over a billion people insane. And what do religious people do when faced with the harsh truth? You guessed right, they ignore it and insist on their delusion. So we lie to them and let them lie to themselves to keep relative peace.
The whole Western culture is built on dangerous delusions and lies. Isn’t the world we live in just great?
Patently false. In fact, some psychiatrists integrate religion into their practices.
The simple fact that psychiatrists aren’t willing to call all religious people crazy isn’t evidence that psychiatry doesn’t touch upon religion at all.
People believe in lots of weird and absurd things. You can be wrong without being mentally ill.
Of course, this all depends on how you’re defining mental illness. If you define it as the belief in the supernatural, then your statement that religious people are mentally ill is redundant.
Believing something absurd without any evidence and contrary to existing, substantial evidence fits my definition of delusional.
However I wouldn’t go as far as Tyler and say that religious are retarded, psychotic primates. Perhaps the extremely fanatical ones, but most of them are otherwise normal people with a slight mental issue, but then again, who of us does not have slight mental issues? Moderate religiosity is like the common cold of mental illnesses.
Psychiatry doesn’t dare to touch upon religion. With such an overwhelming percentage of people being religious, calling all of them nuts would definitely cause major conflict and cause further distrust of religious towards psychiatry and generally anything to do with science. Psychiatry simply isn’t relevant enough to get away with such huge claims. Now, if it was something more fundamental to modern humans, like electricity vs religion, I can assure you that even the most religious would become atheists after a few days without electricity
