RE: When is a Religious Belief Delusional?
August 31, 2018 at 2:37 pm
(This post was last modified: August 31, 2018 at 2:39 pm by Fake Messiah.)
(August 31, 2018 at 10:01 am)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: For a non-believer, to lump mainstream Christians in with people who are clearly mentally ill and failing to acknowledge various safe guards (that are by no means infallible) built into religious traditions, is at best IMHO thoughtless and at worst offensive and provocative
Oh, the horror of admitting to yourself that you are mentally ill. It doesn't mean that if you're mentally ill that you are automatically fit to be locked up in a rubber room for good. Society has strong prejudices toward mental illness, but rest assured there are ways to recuperate yourself from religion.
But yeah you consider yourself not to be mentally ill, so let's analyze what you think: sitting at a table over pancakes, saying a prayer and believing that a pancake is now Elvis Priestley is insane, but doing the same thing over a cracker and believing that a cracker is now Jesus makes you normal and a Catholic. I mean give me a break.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"