(July 12, 2015 at 5:18 pm)Chuck Wrote:(July 12, 2015 at 3:50 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: I think such claims are generally a sign of serious mental problems.
Serious is a relative term. There are 2.3 billion Christians in the world whose mental problems are such that they would believe in a entity who had to fuck his own mother to give himself birth, yet has the power to end the universe, but would come and make things peachy for them for ever regardless, if only they would renounce all the benefits conferred by human progress made since the Iron Age in understanding the world they live in. By comparison just how serious can the mental problem possibly to disbelieve that, but merely believe aliens visited, abducted them, experimented on them, but left them with hardly any lasting effect?
There is a difference between believing someone's silly story and having a delusion of something happening to you. If you want a fair comparison, it would be to people who believe that they can literally hear the voice of god, and have visions of him, and other such things. That is what compares with believing that one has been abducted by aliens.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
