I’m an atheist, but it strikes me as being incredibly obvious and clear that devout belief and delusion are different things.
A delusion in the sense generally being used here, and in the sense of “Even Almighty” or “Bruce Almighty” where you think you’d actually met and talked to God and He looks like Morgan Freeman, is essentially equivalent to the definition of a hallucination. Actually hearing the voice of God, or seeing signs from God, are auditory and visual hallucinations. A person who frequently has such things and believes them to be true is delusional, and is psychotic.
A person who is devoutly religious is, by definition, a person who is profoundly committed to their religion. It is not necessary to have delusions of any sort to be religious (just as it is not necessary to be religious to be delusional.) A person who believes in (to use this as an example) the divinity of Christ, the reality of God, and the Trinity can be quite a devout Christian, but it is not necessary that they have auditory or visual hallucinations of God speaking or appearing to them. Indeed, I know many devout believers who, if told by someone else they’d actually heard God’s voice, would assume not that the person had really heard from God, but that the person was psychologically troubled - even though they may themselves believe in God.
Which is fine until the fundamental tenets of a religion are disproved by science. As is the case for Fundamentalist Christianity and Islam.
The Catholics are an example of a religion which has modified itself to accept scientific findings, but they seem to be on thin ice as they accept that there was no actual Garden of Eden.
For lots of people when God and truth conflict, God wins.
Okay, I’ve been trying to ignore this diversion because it’s off-topic, but-
The issue with the Jesus sacrifice isn’t that Jesus did it. It’s that God accepted it. God alters his judgement about Fred because he got to watch Jesus suffer and die. Even in my most generous imaginings I’m unable to come up with an explanation for that that doesn’t look very, very bad for God.
The issue with religions that tell their followers that their god wants them to murder people isn’t really the followers - they’re just being obedient. It’s the bloodthirsty god. (Making the assumption that the god and his bloodthirstiness weren’t invented by the followers, of course.)
I don’t think the statement I made above is all that far off-topic, nor do I think that most people would have a problem with calling sacrificing one’s own life to save others “the good kind of human sacrifice.”
Real life and fiction are both full of examples of people sacrificing their lives to save others (e.g. a fireman who rushes into a burning building to save a child, or a soldier who dies defending his comrades). And even if they do these things from religious motives, or even if they think God is telling them to do them, most people consider their actions good, even heroic. And we don’t worry too much about whether those religious motivations are delusional—not nearly as much as we do if someone sacrifices other people’s lives from religious motives or because they think God is telling them to.
As for the rest of what you guys were saying, about God demanding sacrifice, I think you’re right both about it being a problem with some Christian theories of the atonement, and about it being not really on-topic to this thread.
That’s one version of it. Some reject that version entirely, and claim that “Do as Jesus did, and as he said” is all there is to it. Some to the point of rejecting large parts of the Bible as fabrications.
And I respond that such people are neither devout nor moral, and (with the conditions of modern knowledge and information) are - every single one, besides a few mentally incompetent - deliberately lying, and willfully dishonest people.
One significant point (though I doubt this is the right place to make it) is that expressly “religious” hallucinations are not exclusive to the devout, either.
In point of fact, much genuine religious feeling derives from the so-called “mystic experience”, which can (and has) been experienced by religious and non-religious people alike - the exact contents of this experience tends to be interpreted through the lens of whatever culture the person experiencing it is already familiar with.
For example, those with a Judeo-Christian background will tend to interpret it as direct communion with their God; those who are not of that persuasion, as some sort of pantheistic epiphany.
I am firmly of the opinion that it has a purely physical explanation - that it represents some quirk of the human brain. How to characterize it I am less sure. Calling it a “delusion” or “hallucination” seems inadequate, even if in some ways accurate – the important point is whether it improves one’s outlook on life, or causes one to behave in ways that are destructive. Most people who have had this sort of experience view it as entirely positive, for what that is worth.
That’s one of the main reasons I think it’s necessary to acknowledge that God does “exist” - as a part of psychology. God exists in the same way that emotions and thoughts exist - another product/result of being human. But therefore meriting a chapter in every psychology textbook, instead of being anthropomorphized.
God is all in your head, AND that’s a good thing - as long as you make sure he stays there!
Perhaps part of the issue exposed by the OP’s question is that the term “delusional” covers too much territory, and all of it negative.
Same with “hallucination” - the term, in common use at least, implies someone suffering from a more or less severe mental illness.
Yet more or less normal people experience things that are “delusions” or “hallucinations” without being mentally ill – some are very bad (like Sleep paralysis), others are arguably very good (like mystic experiences).
We don’t have much room in our cultural lexicon for the positive aspects of delusions and hallucinations, leaving that territory entirely to either ‘alternative’ new-age-y types, or the drug culture.
I disagree. I don’t believe the are emotions or sensations or mechanisms or whatever in the human head/brain/mind that can be coherently or accurately called God. There are various disparate disconnected and unrelated aspects of human psychology that play into various experiences that people associate with God/spiritualism, but calling these psychological aspects “God” would be like taking the left femur, the right clavicle, and the right eyeball and collectively calling them “Enrique” purely because you want humans to have something called “Enrique” inside of them.
Unless of course when you say that God exists in the same way that thoughts exists you meant that God exists in the same way that things people think about exist - like Frodo Baggins. In which case I’d be happy to concede that, yes, God exists exactly as much as Frodo Baggins.
This is a very good point you make. When a number of people collectively believe something exists, like Sasquatch or aliens or God, that belief exists even if the actual thing does not. People can do some pretty bizarre things based on beliefs they have in things that do not exist. Take weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for example.
