This is a transcript of a youtube video I did for a video response I made to a youtuber called FakeSagan. It's in response to his vid bashing Brian Sapient.
Normality is a worthless criteria for judging sanity and I don't believe you can judge sanity proficiently yet. Psychology is a relatively new field and they still have yet to convince me of their objectivity. Now the first 100 years of psychology is largely bullshit, the last 100 years of psychology has seen progress since they started making more tests. They scrapped most of the good tests in psychology in the last 30 years because they were judged to be inhumane. I also think that's bullshit, if you're going to sign yourself up to be fucked around mentally, then don't be surprised if you do.
Biological psychology can declare itself a science, but psychology as a whole is a soft science. The reason why it doesn't have a hard science standing is because psychology will never have the same straight-forward reproducibility of sciences like physics or chemistry. We simply can't duplicate a single mind experiment because everyone's mind is different in both hardware (biological structuring) and software (environmental conditioning).
I don't believe religion is a mental illness per se. I agree with supexcellency on this. The reason why religion isn't a mental illness is because most people don't take it that seriously, the people who for example the muslim radicals, are insane. Normality is a worthless criteria for distinguishing the sane from the insane since if we zoomed back in time, those muslim radicals would be acting completely sane. Given what was believed in those days, it's perfectly sane to behead your local infidel. A better criteria for distinguishing insane from sane is the ability to function adequately in society, which is still a poor criteria, but it's way better than ‘normalism'. We can have REALLY odd folk functioning fine in society and they could deviate from the norm as much as possible, yet still be able to function. I'd consider those people sane. Then we meet up with the sociopaths, which is another matter entirely…I don't really want to get into that.
Stupidity is not a mental disorder. Until such time you somehow prove stupidity as a mental disorder, religion is not either, and I'm not equating the two either. I just hope someone has the conceptual abstract ability to grasp what I just said.
How a religion person functions adequately in society is how they partition their mind. They have god belief in a separate plane in their brain. They don't apply faith to anything else in life except for godbelief. If they treated everything else like how they treat xianism, then they would be insane, but they don't. Their worldview is hypocritical, but that's how they stay sane. Their worldview is hypocritical in the sense that they don't actually apply the bible across every aspect of their lives, they just pick the tolerable bits and run with it. Having said that, the more seriously you take religious text, the more likely you'll end up crazy.
“dont fear "god." an idea never hurt anyone”
Ideas influence how we behave, of course it can hurt someone. The inquisition was behaving perfectly rationally according to their belief. Now I'm going to use an example Mr. Stefan Molyneux used. I give credit to him for this example. Think of how much society vitrifies the local pedophile. Now imagine that hatred applied to someone 500 years ago that is much more horrible than the local pedophile. What the local pedophile can do PALES in comparison to what the local infidel could do to your kid (if you are an orthodox xian). If that local infidel talked to your kid and made them disbelieve, then the parent would have to watch their kid burn in hell for all of eternity, now that is objectively worse than what any local pedophile could do. These days, everything short of a lynch mob gets tossed at the local pedophile. Given what was believed in those days, it was perfectly rational to hold so much hatred towards the nonbeliever. Ideas can't hurt people, but ideas lead to belief which can and do fuck people up.
Having ideas can make someone have a mental disorder. That idea just has to be exceedingly disruptive to being functional. For example, someone can have the belief that all electronics will eat his soul. He would have to be taken into some rural institution and away from all modern life. I would say that guy was nuts and so would you.
“There's more to life than fucking atheism.”
This is true, that's one reason why I'm on youtube. I needed to pass down my knowledge and move on. I've done ignosticism, I've done the euthyphro dilemma, and now all I have to do is the transcendental argument for god, the TAG.
Now I'll follow up with a thought experiment. I made this up while plumbing the depths of my sanity. I was pondering what would happen if I went insane:
What is more insane?
1.One who believes they're acting normal, but who is completely insane to everyone else?
Or
2.One who knows they're acting insane, but continues to do so anyways.
I posed this question to my favourite forum and across the board, I got the same response of ‘equally insane'. I feel inclined to agree with that response. Now my current bf made a very unique response to this. He said it was a trick question because both of those could be sane. He says the first one is sane (if sanity is based on belief, which it is largely) and the second one is acting insane towards some end.
(c) Sept. 2007