As a kid growing up going to a Catholic grade school I suffered from trying to figure out what was legitimate following of Catholic rules (when to genuflect, don’t eat meat on Fridays during lent, can’t miss mass on Sundays), what was superstition, and what was obsessive compulsive behavior. I found a very thin line between all three and that you couldn’t adhere to all the church’s rituals/rules/beliefs without being somewhat superstitious resulting in some unhealty behavior.
As a teen I left the church and with it any superstitious beliefs I held, church related or not, and all those o/c behaviors behind.
Seems once you’re indoctrinated with these beliefs without questioning or testing them you are by default “delusional” (characterized by or holding idiosyncratic beliefs or impressions that are contradicted by reality or rational argument)
You’re being a cultural supremacist. You exist in a physicalist culture where the claim seems extraordinary, but that’s simply cultural bias. Within many cultural groupings, the claim is not extraordinary. You’re assuming that your culturally engrained presuppositions are the same as objective truth.
Yeah?
What is “objective truth,” then?
Siam Sam:
You may not agree with devout religious adherents, but the overwhelming majority of them (or, I should say, “us”) suffer from no delusions.
I think the word “devout” has two meanings:
To religious people, it means “committed”.
To non-religious people, it means “not committed yet, but ought to be”.
I’m an academic skeptic with Pyrrhonist leanings. I have an opinion on what i think is objective truth, but only justify it based on Kierkegaardian leaps of faith. I know better than to engage in a robust defence of my view of reality. I’m certainly neither a physicalist, nor God-forbid a scientific realist.
The question in the title is easy: delusional means having delusions, i.e. believing things that contradict reality. That’s not the same as believing something unproven, which is what most devout religious believers are.
Bringing up “Evan Almighty” is an attempt to redefine “devoutly religious” to mean "delusional. That movie was about someone who, in the real world, would be fairly characterized as delusional. He would not be fairly characterized as merely “devoutly religious.”
That sort of definition shifting is the actual “No True Scotsman” fallacy. You have changed the definition of “devoutly religious” to mean “hears literal voices from God,” when that is not what the term means. It means “truly believes what their religion teaches, and actually follows through.” It describes a large number of people who are not in any way delusional.
The requirement for delusion is not “believing something I believe is not true.” It is a belief that is maintained despite reality saying otherwise. If you define it as you guys do, then the devoutly religious could claim you atheists are the ones who are delusional. And they outnumber you.
So, you disbelieve emails from Nigerian princes out of cultural bias? Do you believe in Zeus and Odin because to doubt them is a matter of cultural bias?
My cultural bias is around science and engineering, which, unlike religion, work. And which are built around supported hypotheses and doubt all the way.
If religion practiced science, everyone would be deists at best.
Before Einstein, nearly every physicist in the world believed that time was immutable. Were they delusional?
Creationists (YEC) believe that the earth was created a short time ago. Are they delusional? How about the ones who know nothing of the science, and who just blindly believe what their pastors tell them?
The leading creationists, who have read the literature, might be delusional or they just might be lying for what they see as a greater good.
Now those religionists who say “god loves me” and then get struck by cancer might be tending towards the delusional, but sometimes delusions are useful, if they don’t hurt anyone else.
Do you sincerely believe that every single one of these people is illiterate and never went to school?
The leading creationists see themselves manipulating numerous people, feeling powerful, and embezzling lots of money that was supposed to be for good causes. Not one leading creationist is sincere in his beliefs. Not a single one.
If someone says god is talking to them but they’re not wearing a tall, pointy hat, they’re delusional. Every good Catholic knows this.
One difference between delusional and non-delusional religion:
Non-delusional religion always changes when better evidence arrives.
A delusion is a persistent, false belief that isn’t supported by the patient’s culture. By this definition, religion isn’t a delusion.
Mental illness isn’t well defined like the speed of light. There are mountains in the Himalayas that are so treacherous, that you could take a knife and stab yourself in the gut, and you’d have a better chance of surviving than if you tried to climb one of those mountains. But if climb a mountain, you’re sane. If you stab yourself, you’ll be committed. Why? Society says it’s sane to risk your life climbing a mountain. Why is it crazy to carve someone’s name in your arm, but ok to get a tattoo? Again, society says so.
I’d generally try to distinguish “I hear god” from “I hear god speaking specific words into my ears”. Most believers, when pressed, will admit they “hear god” in dreams, or through very indirect means. The people who actually hear voices in their head probably have a mental disorder, but this has little to do with earnest religious belief.
This is a good post all around, but I am actually really curious about this part. Could you provide some more details (maybe in another thread)? 
Depends what the detail of the religion as to whether it is delusional or not. Get someone to define the properties of their alleged god or gods and we can then discuss it. If you claim the actual and real ability to turn water into wine, raise the dead, fly on winged horses, create thunder from a magic hammer etc. Then yes, those are clear delusions without evidence and which are completely at odds with the world as we know it.
The religious are often very careful about all this and define their gods in such a way as to be unfalsifiable and unproveable (that is when they ever dare to define them in a meaningful way at all). And the accompanying theology is little more than an extended “aaaaaah!” (as Lee and Herring nicely put it)
I disbelieve 419 scams because the people perpetrating them also disbelieve them. Again, I’m a pyrrhonist, so any argument regarding zeus or Odin is fair game for scepticism. Where we differ is that I feel arguments around science and engineering are also fair game for scepticism. I’m not sure that they ‘work’ the same way you think they do. I am am engineer and I can assure you that at least 75% of the time, the numbers do not match our observations. It is rare that I make a calculation and the real world hits it. That’s why we use tolerances. We assume that our explanation of reality is approximation. Regardless though, from a philosophical perspective, we don’t know that what we’re describing is real. What we know is that it produces outcomes that may or may not be desirable.
We run into the evolutionary tiger problem. Natural selection does not require that our senses observe the world truely. They require that whichever way we observe the world confer a survival advantage. If observing the world incorrectly confers a survival advantage, then that’s what we would observe. And how would we even know since it’s our senses that we use to determine reality?
I’m not sure how you establish the latter if you can’t establish the latter. By the by, do you obey traffic laws and stop at red lights? And if so, why? You don’t even know that they’re real.
Hard solipsism is a philosophical curiosity and a huge waste of time, not a meaningful path of argument. Regardless of whether or not our senses give us accurate sensory data, we must necessarily live as though they do - we have no other choice if we are to make any sense of the reality around us. And if we cannot share that assumption, literally any further discussion on this issue (or indeed any issue relating to physical reality) is a huge waste of time.
I disagree, especially in this context. I do agree that we have to act or at least we probably should. I also agree that we likely have to have some idea of what we believe reality to be. Where I disagree is that if someone else disagrees with our assessment it is due to some sort of mental defect. This privileges our own cultural view of reality. An example would be if I were in rural southern Africa and said, last night I saw my dead grandmother come into my room and tell me to be kind to my brother. For many of them, this would not be an extraordinary claim and might almost be banal. A westerner might instead claim that these visitations are mass hallucinations or psychological manifestations of guilt or some other physicalist jargon. It is basically telling me to deny my own senses because they don’t fit in with your culture’s dominant paradigm. That troubles me. While it may be true that accepting a physicalist worldview ‘works’ in the sense of producing technology or productivity or whatever you consider desirable, I’m not sure that it necessarily ‘works’ in the sense of describing some sort of objective truth.
Dead people have never come back to life and there is no evidence that ghosts or spirits exist outside of the mind.
Hallucinations, on the other hand, do happen and they may well be culturally influenced. That a certain type of hallucination is common in another culture doesn’t give it any special credence.
More than half of Icelanders believe in trolls, All that means is that a lot of Icelanders believe in trolls, not that trolls are real.
To divide this into “Western” reality vs. “Eastern” reality is to give a false equivalency, and it insults those in the rest of the world that understand the difference between reality and fantasy/mythology.