the slippery "F" word - my solution

[yuriythebest]

With no proof whatsoever, people believe in God. That’s fact. They actually believe they can have a one way conversation with an unseen god and that , through some kind of magical telepathy, hears every word they say. Why aren't these people in an Insane Asylum?

They're not because literal religious belief is not yet considered a form of insanity. It may never be. After all, the U.S. Constitution protects it. I personally don't think it's so much insanity so much as it is the effects of brainwashing. Brainwashing is treatable, but most people don't want to admit to having been brainwashed. And I think most people would have a hard time putting most of their relatives in an Insane Asylum. Probably over half the country would be in one.

not half but about 90% of the US. As for calling it brainwashing - I wouldn't quite agree, since when we talk about brainwashing this implies a party who is "sane" feeding the other one false information on purpose, and, while I'm sure there are secretly-atheistic priests most of the time I think the parents/priests/community probably believe it themselves. But if you want to include those people as well then what about just a few hundred years ago when basically everyone was a theist and there were no alternatives in society? what about tribes with no contact with the outside world- are their views about the world brainwashing, or or perhaps more simply they don't know any better? And perhaps we have some facts about the nature of the universe wrong that might be corrected in the next decades or hundreds of years - that would then also have to be included.

I think it's better to use the Meme and idea-organism analogies to describe what is happening.