Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled.
Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades.
“Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,” said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. “I can’t buy into that,” he said.
I have presented no arguments suggesting they are harmless. I have not accepted your premise that they cause no harm. Indeed, I have provided a few examples of common, relatively minor harms, as well as references to the 9/11 attacks as non-exhaustive examples.
You acknowledged these harms when you strawmanned my position. You can’t rationally claim that no such harms exist, when you have directly acknowledged they do.
We can disagree on the prevalence of such harms: you have indicated a belief they are rare, and I have refused to waste my time producing an exhaustive list.
You say your problem is that they believe things that are unsupported. Is that all, or do you dislike that because you think it leads to practices you don’t like?
Such things do of course exist, but they don’t constitute the dislike for all religion. Religious beliefs differ wildly and it makes little sense to denounce all of them because some cause problems.
Earlier you said that it wasn’t any specific practices that caused you to dislike religion. So, I focused on your problem just with the unsupported beliefs. Now you again bring up specific practices you don’t like.
I don’t understand what you are even trying to say at this point.
Faith is a disease. In the faithful who aren’t currently hurting anyone, the disease is dormant. They are still infected, and given the right set of circumstances, they will cause harm. A particular variety of the faithful were not putting people at risk, until COVID came around and their faithful infections came to be known as “antivax” and “antimask”.
Trying to stop the “specific practices” without inoculating against faith is like trying to stop the spread of typhoid without innoculating Mary Mallon against the disease. The faithful are the cause and carriers, regardless of whether they are currently showing symptoms.
This makes slightly more sense to me although it is painfully overdramatic.
I could make an argument that any person under the right set of circumstances will cause harm. As far as I am aware, a religious person is not any more of a ticking time bomb than anyone else.
Blaming religion for these problems without tackling the underlying psychological issues is not going to help in any meaningful way. You just spread more hate and make the world a worse place, instead of approaching the situation with the slightest bit of empathy.
I see secular groups acting exactly the same way religious groups youve mentioned do. Its not a characteristic of religion or the lack thereof, its a characteristic of mentally unhealthy people.
If you care so much about these problems, then recognize that the world is not so black and white that you can always find an idea to make your enemy no matter the circumstances. The way to fix these problems is not to alienate massive groups of people because you think they might become bad one day. That’s a childish close-minded world view that only perpetuates the things you claim to hate so much.
Indeed. However, for a faithless person, those circumstances must exist in objective reality. The faithful merely need to imagine the existence of their own triggers.
I do not concede that this is a symptom of mental illness. What I am talking about is an error in judgment, not a defect in the ability to reason.
I’m not sure what groups you are referring to. Do these groups “conflate personal belief with objective reality”? If so, I would likely have the same criticism.
Where did I claim to “hate” anything at all? I believe the strongest criticism I made was “distrust”. I did once use the word “anger” in a description of my position, but I was directly quoting you at the time. You have inserted quite a lot of emotive concepts on my behalf that I have not actually expressed. I will renew my claims of “strawmen” and “gaslighting”.
No, they do not. Anyone can justify any belief regardless of faith. I will admit faith is an easy target to justify horrible things, but its not at all the only way to justify things like that.
That’s just how people work. Instead of admitting their beliefs are wrong, they will do mental gymnastics to justify them. It is very possible to have incorrect reasoning without being religious.
The underlying problem is absolutely bad mental health. Not necessarily a mental illness, but bad mental health in general. Everyone has justified a belief with bad logic because its too difficult to admit you are wrong. I’ve done it and still occasionally catch myself doing it. I believe you’re doing it right now, although I’ll admit I don’t know you well enough to know for sure. I’m guessing you had some negative experience with religion and now justify your distaste for it by claiming religious people are more prone to doing horrible things.
Yes, the only difference is that their bad reasoning is not religious in nature. That’s why your problem should be people that do that, not religious people. They are not related.
Here I was using hate to refer to the examples you gave like anti vaccine and anti mask people. I’m assuming you do hate that, as you should.
Remember what “faith” means in this context: the conflation of personal belief with objective reality. The act of “Justify[ing] any belief” is an act of “faith”.
That is how certain people work, not all people. You have identified a set of people who “conflate their personal beliefs with objective reality”.
I don’t think so, but let’s check on it: is it a mental health issue when we use an incorrect order of operations in a mathematical statement? For example, x=1+2*3. Is the person who gets “7” mentally healthy? Is the person who gets “9” mentally unhealthy? What of the 3-year-old, who has not yet been taught numbers, and scribbles a stick image of a cat on the sheet?
An individual who does not comprehend the meaning of PEMDAS/BEDMAS is still capable of rational thought. The lack of knowledge will lead them to a fallacious conclusion, but their process of reaching that conclusion is still rational.
A deliberate refusal to accept and follow PEMDAS/BEDMAS rules is an error, but is not an indication of mental illness.
The knowledge that individual belief must be subordinate to objective reality is a philosophical model that not everyone has learned, but ignorance of that philosophy is certainly not indicative of a mental health condition.
No. It is literally a function of the human brain. https://www.healthline.com/health/stress/amygdala-hijack#how-to-stop Every single person on earth has done this and will do it again.
That is simple incorrect logic. What I’m talking about is emotions overriding logic.
Having faith in a religion is very different from justifying emotional reactions with bad logic. You are conflating your personal belief that they are the same with objective reality.
Everyone conflates personal belief with objective reality to varying degrees. A mentally healthy person can process their emotions well and recognize when they do so most of the time. A mentally unhealthy person will not recognize it because of their lack of emotional intelligence.
Again, I am not talking about a clinical condition that inhibits clear logic. I’m talking about the ability to process your emotions in a healthy way.
From your link, emphasis mine:
“Belief” is a “conscious input.” Conflating belief with objective reality is a conscious act, as is “declaration of an individual’s religiosity”. “Philosophy” is a consciously-developed worldview. As an unconscious response, “Amygdala hijack” is well outside the scope of these conscious, deliberate acts.
I have confined the scope of my discussion to the realm of consciousness, as it is only within this realm that we are capable of deliberate action. The unconscious realm does not interest me.