Friendly Atheism

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Rationalizations can be made for any behavior/belief. It does not make the behavior/belief rational. 

And Boru makes an excellent point.

I think its fair to distinguish between first-person and third-person rationality, but both are still observer-dependant. We can agree that psychotic behavior is rational for the one with the psychotic disorder. But what are the criteria for classifying something as rational from a third-person perspective? Many psychotic behaviors are categorized as such based on statistical analysis; they are abnormal because they are infrequent, deviating from the average, not necessarily because they are inherently abnormal or irrational (Barlow & Durand, 2015).

Even third-person observers are bound to differ on their classification. For you, someone being afraid of butterflies may appear irrational; it poses no threat. But from my perspective, it is reasonable given its underlying infrastructure; we understand why phobias happen. In other words, phobias are rational not because of the butterfly, but because of how the person's brain is processing it. It makes sense why they are responding that way.

If you're going to classify beliefs and behaviors as objectively rational/irrational, you need to give an objective way to measure and classify it.

Reference: Barlow, D. H., & Durand, V. M. (2015). Abnormal psychology: An integrative approach (7th ed.). Stanford: Cengage Learning.

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There seems to be an obvious connection between, 'It is rational to believe Jesus died for our sins because it is rational to people who hold that view' and, 'It is rational to believe that it's OK to torture children because this behaviour is rational to child torturers.'

Hmm I don't know if I agree. Something is missing. For example, would you say its rational to believe vaccines work on account of scientists believing that it works? It seems to me that something needs to be added to the equation, so that believing scientists is rational, believing child torturers is not, and believing Christians falls somewhere between the two. There's a hidden variable there you're not taking into account, and I'm not sure what it is.

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EDIT: I just did a quick search through the DSM 5. There is no indication that rational/irrational are ever used as diagnostic criteria.

No, I would not say it is rational to believe vaccines work because scientists believe they work.  I would say that it is rational to believe that vaccines work because vaccines work.  But you have the proposition exactly backwards.  Would you believe someone is rational because they believe vaccines DON'T work?

Irrationality (as far as regards the topic at hand) seems to mean either believing a proposition to be true when there is no good reason for supposing it is, or believing a proposition to be false in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is true. 

Let's take the virgin birth of Jesus as an example from religion.  Parthenogenesis never occurs naturally in mammals - it isn't physically possible.  However, it can be induced in mammals with some very complex procedures, such as gene splicing and fiddling about with stem cells.  It is therefore non-rational to believe that Jesus was the result of a virgin birth (a much more likely explanation is that Mary told a fib or two).  It doesn't matter how may people believe that it happened, or how sincerely this belief is.  Since it flies in the face of the observed facts, it is not a rational belief.

Boru