[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
Sort of, I guess its not quite what you were doing. I agree that people normally accept things taught to them by their parents, but I also think that after a certain point it becomes blind acceptance. Parents arent authority by expertise, theyre authority by trust. If you never question anything they say, then youre taking that too far, and it could be considered insanity. My parents told me about Santa Claus, and no one is upset that I stopped believing in him.
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Of course, you only stopped believing in Santa Claus because a seed of doubt was planted in your mind by something, and you then proceeded to find further adequate evidence to support your new conclusion. Religious people are told not to look for such evidence, and are given explanations for most of the problems they might encounter. Following such advice, while perhaps inadvisable, is not insane.
[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
It is a valid comparison precisely because god is not independently verifiable. I was trying to point out the level of authority required for different claims. If god isnt independently verifiable, who can be an authority on it?
[/QUOTE]
Oh, so that was what your point was. To a child who (so far as they know) cannot independently verify God, accepting the assertion of a person who claims to have personally experienced God is no more farcical than you believing the dude who claims to have seen the peanut butter. It’s first-hand witness testimony either way. Of course, sooner or later your average religoius person graduates to relying on the battery of their own personal experiences as interpreted by the rules of the world as they understand it. (The doing of which is, again, not insane.)
[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
But the difference between authority saying ‘theres a god’ and authority saying ‘there are atoms’ is that the people espousing the atoms can actually give you real evidence and demonstrations based on that idea. Nuclear power, etc. The authority espousing god cannot. I trust an authority that actually has evidence much more readily than one that does not. I question that there can be an authority on god.
[/QUOTE]
Not the people who told me there were atoms. I assure you there was not a single nuclear reactor in my high school classroom. (We didn’t even have a particle accelerator! Lousy cheap school…)
Your average church has a few hundred thousand testimonials as to the truth of it, including your beloved parents. Anecdotes abound, as well. (“I prayed and then got better!” can be absolutely true, and is only bad if you’ve been trained to default to coincicence as an explantion.) Whether you like it or not, all of this falls under the definition of ‘evidence’. Is it good evidence? Probably not as good as meeting God personally, but it’s better than nothing.
Also, the person espousing god can give you a test to run; pray with all your heart, and you’ll get results. If you don’t get results, the problem is not in the principle; it’s in the text; you didn’t follow the steps properly. First get credulous enough to believe anything, and then try again. Maybe add in a dash of emotional breakdown and desperation, that usually helps. It’ll work eventually. (Or maybe you’ll die first, but that’s your failure, not the principle.)
[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
But do they actually have first hand personal experience with god?
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I assure you, you don’t have enough evidence to answer this question in the negative, and neither does anybody else. It’s simple unverifiable first-hand testimony, and unless you can catch them making blazing factual errors in their claims, they cannot be proven to be lying. Unless somebody’s proven that we know about everything that exists in and out of our universe when I wasn’t looking?
[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
Yeah, those are ‘apologies’, not known repeatable cases. If something goes wrong with my computer, I can fix it. If a part breaks, I can replace it. Then it works again.
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And they pray again, and it maybe works this time. If not, get more faith, or accept that it’s better overall if you don’t get what you want.
And if you pick up your phone and get no dial tone, I seriously doubt that you go out to the main line and repair the break. No, you get on some other phone and appeal to a higher power, and lo and behold, based on the capricious will of the phone company and whether you’ve been faithful with your payments, your service may be restored. Or not. AT&T works in mysterious ways.
With me, my car is the same (as I’m no mechanic). I presume that the reasons for the failure are knowable, but I don’t know them myself. So I appeal to a mechanic, and sometimes his efforts are immidiately successful, sometimes not. (I recall the month I went through four alternator belts.) Because he is not perfectly reliable, am I insane to think that my auto mechanic knows more about cars than I?
[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
Comparing computer problems with prayer problems is laughable. Prayer behaves exactly as if the prayer prayed to god, cthulhu, a horseshoe, or did nothing at all. If something good happens, they praise god for answering the prayers, and how well prayer worked. But when nothing happens, you get to hear all kinds of excuses proclaiming things they have no knowledge of to begin with: god has a plan, sometimes the answer is no, etc.
[/QUOTE]
To a person with little knowledge of computers, the computer is as inexplicable and capricious as your average diety, and depending on your OS, perhaps less helpful. And if you think that’s bad, look at the Lotto! People keep praying to that and coming up dry. Perhaps they’re stupid to do so, but are they insane to think that it is possible that one day their appeal will be rewarded with magnificent reward and riches? Is belief that the lotto occasionally pays out insane?
Infrequency of success is no guarantee that the suppositions feuling the attempt are false.
[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
I dont think premise B is false. If someone has incorrect justification for a belief, and believes it anyway, thats insanity. An exception would be someone who doesnt know that their justification is incorrect. Of course, I would say that blind acceptance is a bit insane. There is no evidence for god, prayer, etc. And in spite of this, holding the belief that god, prayer, etc is real, is insane. I’m not really sure how to put this in logical format. I’ll have to think about it.
[/QUOTE]
Take your time. It should be noted, though, that many of the reasons people have for believing in God are impossible to prove false. So, anybody believing based on such a rationale would fall under your exception.
[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
Isnt delusion a form of insanity? I think thats whats being said here. Its the belief in the face of absolutely no evidence.
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Curse this english language! I am using ‘deluded’ as its past-tense verb form, not in its noun form. I understand that form (as in ‘he deluded her’) to mean something like ‘very badly decieved’. That was what I intended, anyway. And I don’t think that’s the same as being insane.
Now, I’m not saying these people are right. (They can’t possibly all be right.) I’d even be perfectly happy with you declaring that they’re stupid. (Particularly if you focus on ones that are disregarding other more conventionally compelling evidence due to preference for their testimonails and whatnot.) But insane? No. That’s too far; nothing more than an unfounded ad-hominem. And who needs those?