Blind faith is nothing but a socially acceptable mental illness.
The one question I ask people that always grinds their gears: “if you were born in India, where 80% follow Hinduism, do you still think you would have been Christian, or just believe whatever your parents taught you?”
The difference between a religion and a cult is scale, that’s all.
There’s a famous quote in sociolinguistics: “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.” I think the same thing applies here. A religion is just a cult with an army and a navy, because then they can enforce it onto others.
Yes, I think scale is typically what determines strength of control upon individuals. Cults are smaller and thus any charismatic cult leader can exert greater control on his small flock. The larger your religion gets though, the less likely the leader himself can micromanage and exert control, thus leading to the delegation of responsibilities and power.
They’re not insane. They’re just desperate for answers to life’s great questions. They’re afraid of death and can’t cope with life. They’re affraid to face reality that this is just what it is and death is just death. This is their way of dealing with all that, hiding reality behind a fairy tale to give it some artificial mean, because “life cannot be just an accident. We…I am too important for that”
It’s not simply insanity, they don’t have an affliction, it’s a very conscious, well thought out decision to run and hide. It’s, at best, a fault of emotion, not a fault of mental capabilities.
Exactly this. Some people are afraid of the idea that the universe is indifferent, void of meaning besides that which we create, and that when you die your neurological processes stop and your identity and consciousness wink away, leaving the you who lived your life as nothing but memories of those still living. I basically explained this to a girl once who asked about my beliefs and she said, that’s scary I don’t like it
No, most religion is people who don’t have the capacity to understand the universe looking for answers to the great questions.
It is also people defending that they were indoctrinated into when they were kids. Looking this if you remove the people who end up non-religious there is a 86% chance that you will match the religion of your parents; if they are both of the same faith. There is a good reason that we indoctrinate kids; it works…really well.
I indoctrinate (instill into) my kids into; thinking education is important, reading is fun and questioning and critical thinking is right and proper. We all push our beliefs onto our kids, it is nice when we see it reflected back to us.
I would say cowardice is an affliction. Also that the percentage of religious people who have thought this out and made a conscious decision to choose fantasy over reality is tiny; the majority (at least from my experience of Christianity in America) don’t even have the brain function to consider fantasy vs reality due to lifelong indoctrination.
A lot of mythology originates from someone’s dad or older brother or uncle messing with them.
Let’s examine the myth that you’ll find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. There isn’t an end to a rainbow, someone was messing with a kid and it got passed on. It’s like sending the new kid at work to go down to the basement or go ask for a long weight.
When I worked at a pizza place it was the ‘dough patch kit’
When I worked on airplanes it was exhaust samples and the id-10-t form.
When I worked as a mechanic it was blinker fluid. When I worked as a chef it was the bucket of steam.
