Official delusional religionist thread

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I learned enough about Catholics while attending seminary to put me off Catholicism for life.

That's not to say that Catholics are bad, it's just that I will never willingly choose to ever be one of them again.

You're right, it may be flawed.


Yes, delusions are irrational beliefs, but they are more accurately and formally defined in psychiatry, which are symptoms of any mental disorder or problem like I mentioned before, the other approach is the informal one, which tends to be very subjective, and varies depending on each person and what is their belief system, which are very related to experience, society and culture.

Besides I could ask you wether this "delusion" is a bad or a good thing, if it's a bad thing, would it be ok to get rid of people's freedom of holding any belief? would it be ok to abolish the freedom of religion, in order for people to be more "rational", according to one perspective?

Well, probably most atheists see the belief in God as a false belief, so they could categorize that "false belief" as a delusion, given the certainty atheists would have or their possition, from the opposite point of view, one theist could also argue that an atheist is delutional for holding a false belief, according to him, if that's the case, therefore it varies, and frankly, there is no formal consensus wether what you state as delutional to be accurately the case.


Well, that doesn't seem to be entirely the case, Irrationality actually lacks rationality, and ralitionality is not only related to the scientific method, but goes beyond that, it's also related to other aspects related to philosophy, and well if I'm not mistaken, I believe that things like epistemology and philosophical skepticism have their basis on reason as well, which they could question the level of veracity of the scientific method as an absolute valid justification for the source of truth, heck, nihilism seems to have its basis on reason.


Same as the above you stated, that is subjected to debate within different belief systems, wether faith is necessarily irrational or not, but given that it is very related to the above definition of what is irrational, I see why it is stated as such. Faith is having a belief and trust to an idea, wether that idea is improvable or not, and well, we do have faith in some things, a lot of things we learned from history such as the existence of a figure such as DaVinci, to say an example, we take that for granted and as a fact through Faith. Yes, you could argue that that can be verified if one decides to search for evidence, but then, how many people go searching for proof or evidence on everything they hear and learn? It's impossible to verify everything for ourselves, as well it's impossible to only live by accepting empirical evidence about every thing we learn, as human beings, it is normal and reasonable to take some of things for granted, giving them certain amount of faith.

Believing in a christian God seems to be one aspect of the perception one person has, in order to have that belief, for some it makes much sense, for others it doesn't make any sense. Who is correct here? I believe in the end, is a matter of personal perspective, choice, a subjective truth, if you will, and I can't say more than that.



Well, yes, originally it was a method to gain control and order to a society, establishing laws and norms, and it worked well.


Well, no it isn't, and as I stated earlier, it becomes a matter of personal opinion, just as you said, it does make sense to you.


Well, in my point of view, I believe the more accurately way to describe any belief system is perception or apperception rather than delusion, I rather give the delusion concept to psychiatrists.

Last edited by greenblue on 22 Dec 2008, 5:27 pm, edited 2 times in total.

... et cetera.

As I said, my reasoning may be flawed, but it works for me. This is in spite of my obvious inability to express abstract ideas in words.

There is no *need* to go to church, but rather in the New Testament, membership to a body of believers was one of the things called for by the apostles of the religion, and Paul talked about obeying church leadership. Praying, worshiping, etc, can be done at home, but that does not detract from the Christian need to go to a church group. In any case, church does not necessarily mean organized religion, as there are things such as house churches and such which are more informal, and less rigidly hierarchical. The notion of being banished from a belief, is more that the Catholic church is believed to be an authority on the proper practice of a religion and keeping away from heresy, they cannot determine who is or isn't Christian, but they are considered good judges on the matter. In any case, this isn't universally a problem as seen from the Protestant reformation.

As for the final aspect of that, historically that belief has been considered false, as to be a Christian, one must be considered a follower of Christ's teachings, and certain groups, such as non-trinitarians and gnostics have often be considered to not be truly following these teachings and thus not be Christians. greenblue also has a good verse on the matter of giving money to organizations, and giving up money is considered a necessity by most Christians and is pointed to by their book.

I am a non-sectarian atheist. I feel a responsibility to uphold the truth at all times but my views on religion are not make or break rules: I will unite with religious people towards common goals. I do not view religious people as worthless or meaningless, and I don't think they are wrong about everything. If a theist is correct about something I will uphold and support them on that point and if an atheist is wrong about something I will not withold my criticism.

Many people I admire a great deal were, or are, very religious.

However, flawed reasoning cannot work for anyone. It can have an output, but the issue is that this output must be recognized as problematic.

Dinosaur bones were just put on earth to test our faith in God since everyone knows that the world is only a few thousand years old.

Definitely agree on that much. Ascribing ultimate intelligence, empathy, etc. means that justice would really mean more than the conduit of faith that the particular person practiced. I don't think it impossible that this God could have spoken to us directly at times or inspired, just that I know all of this gets thrown in with the same mash and its very hard to call what's there and what isn't in terms of the quality of any holy text - all you really have is your BS-dar and your intuition.

And that is certainly your prerogative.

Do you mean there might have been a Father Fnord?

God help us!

Whoever believes that strays into intellectual dishonesty, IMO.

If a religious person such as myself is to be intellectually honest, he must be able to freely admit that his beliefs could be wrong.

Why do you people say that those of us who still believe in Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and savior, and yet don't recognize the authority of the Pope, are non-christians? How are we supposed to accept a single person as infallible when there has been a long history in the past of popes being hedonistic?

The Pope's infallibility is limited to church doctrine-- supposedly. Personally, I'm indifferent to this papal infallibility. All it really means is that no one is allowed to argue with the Pope about Catholic doctrine because traditionally, the pontiff is the final arbiter on such matters. The current Pope -Josef Ratzinger- may have policies with which not every Catholic agrees. IMO, there is a lot more to being a good Christian and indeed a good person than toeing the official Vatican party line.

And another thing, I don't think any particular segment of Christianity is superior or inferior to the others. What would Jesus say to such nonsense?

Christians are the new Pharisees.

The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can remedy the situation.

Christians, get off your high horse and shut up all that hypocritical blather!

Jesus would weep.

I am married to a catholic, and his view is more realistic then most religious people I know.

Although that's probably true today, I think that's a newer rationale. The reasoning behind banishing people from a given church or religion I think has its roots in the time before people started thinking about separating religion and governance. During that time there wasn't banishment "from the church", there was just banishment. And that essentially was a death sentence, or at least, that's the way people viewed it rather in spite of the fact that it's well known that a person can survive in isolation. So the threat of banishment from your village at the time was the church/government's way of enforcing the majority opinion about what was or wasn't moral. If a person did or suggested doing "immoral" things (like for example cutting their hair or walking through a particular "sacred" area), they could be threatened with banishment to keep them in line. Once we started talking about the possibility of separating our religious notions from our governance I think the church gradually evolved its rationale for banishment while the state gradually modified the concept to imprisonment. So now I think excommunication from a given church is really just a vestigial organ of the church kind of like your appendix.