h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Bomba: Alcoholics in Russia drink a lot of vodka.

Why do we not find vodka addiction arising independently in, say, Australia?

The answer is, I hope, blindingly obvious.

Similarly, Christianity is merely the local and most popular manifestation of a global problem, namely irrational superstition.

SoRB

I think the "Religion Disease" is endemic in every culture on earth. Like flu, it has many strains & varieties.

OK then - let's say it's "Religion Disease" then. The question still applies: Why did this illness become less common (and atheism become more widespread) after the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the discoveries of Darwin, if it's all down to a chemical or physical defect in the brain?

It's not a chemical imbalance IMO. WHO studies show a direct correlation between education and religion. The higher the education level (specifically literacy) in the population, the lower the religious membership.

What about America though that is becoming steadily *more* relgious despite being a first world western country?

Well that's interesting. That would seem to be one piece of evidence against the idea that it is a mental illness.

(That was a reply to SWL, by the way.)

F135418?thread=524287&skip=7157&show=1

Conversely, there are studies suggesting that 'religious experience' is a form of temporal lobe epilepsy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbrain.shtml

What's your point?

Whilst looking for the WHO link, I found this:

Reported "importance of religion" and statistics among nations
The Pew Global Attitudes Project surveyed opinions by nation with the question "How important is religion in your life—very important, somewhat important, not too important, or not at all important?"[6] The report finds that Americans are much more religious than people living in other wealthy nations. In the U.S., 59% of people reported religion was "very important", as compared to 30% in Canada. In this way, the views of Americans are more similar to people in developing countries they surveyed than those in developed countries they surveyed. This proviso of "they surveyed" is mentioned due to the fact there are several developed nations, like Greece or Malta, that are known for high church attendance but were not able to be in this survey. The study found a correlation between the percentage of people reporting that religion was "very important" and the national per-capita GDP. It can be further stated that the nations who scored as most religious tended to have low science scores according to TIMSS.[7] Also an inverse correlation at Nationmaster can be found between mathematical literacy and church attendance[8]. (Although labor regulation and police per capita were far stronger inverse correlations)
http://www.answers.com/topic/religiosity-and-intelligence

The difference between the 'voices in the head' of someone like Sutcliffe and the 'voices in the head' of Christians is that - from an atheist perspective - the voices in the head of theists are imaginary and the voices in the head of the mentally ill are real in some sense.

If I hallucinate, what I am seeing does not exist in the real world, but seems real to me. I'm told by reliable sources that someone who is mentally ill who hears voices actually hears literal, real voices speaking to them in their heads. These voices drive people literally crazy. It's not just one voice "er, I say old chap, God here, kill some women for me, there's a good fellow" - it's persistent nagging, over and over and over.

That's very different to how it feels to have a religious belief. When I was a Christian, I never heard God 'speak', but rather sometimes assigned certain ideas or moods that came into my head to God. But that was just my experience - I defer to those who are Christians on this point.

The other big difference is that religious people have a system of beliefs which is explainable and should be more or less internally consistent (although I personally don't think that homophobic or indeed any right wing Christianity is internally consistent), which is not true of people with mental illness. This consistency is important, and explains why Catholics would not go out on a killing spree even if ordered to by the Pope on the direct orders of God.

You'll also find that most people with religious belief do not claim to be entirely certain about what God wants. This is not the case of people with mental illness, who are sure because they have been told over and over and over again by a real voice. Within Christianity there is actually quite a lot of debate about what's right and wrong, and about how certain commandments should be applied in practice. It's also possible for the vast majority of religious people to change their minds and be persuaded on a particular moral point - by a fellow believer or by someone else.

I bet there's a lot of very reasonable Christians who are cringing at what is said in 'their' name by a lot of these evangelical and fundamentalist activists.

Is there any demographic breakdown of just who is religious and who is not in the States?

I ask because (if nothing else) the hurricane disaster in New Orleans showed us what huge social injsutices there are in the States and that there are huge numbers living in extreme poverty with the USA. Those in that lower class are very likely to be poorly educated compared to their more affluent peers - and hence the religion v. education correlation may well still work.

>>This consistency is important, and explains why Catholics would not go out on a killing spree even if ordered to by the Pope on the direct orders of God.<<

Crusades anyone?

"The difference between the 'voices in the head' of someone like Sutcliffe and the 'voices in the head' of Christians is that - from an atheist perspective - the voices in the head of theists are imaginary and the voices in the head of the mentally ill are real in some sense."

Absolutely false.

*From an atheist perspective* what evidence do we have?

We have two people in front of us, both with a voice in their head. We can't hear it. They say they can. Who are we to say that Christians are just imagining it? They would argue very strongly that they are not.

"That's very different to how it feels to have a religious belief."

HOW DO YOU KNOW?

"When I was a Christian, I never heard God 'speak',"

See, there's a past tense there that's very telling. You *were* a Christian, or thought you were, but you recovered. People like you are not the problem - you were merely misguided. It's the non-recovered Christians, the ones who really do believe they hear their imaginary friend, that are the scary ones.

"The other big difference is that religious people have a system of beliefs which is explainable and should be more or less internally consistent"

Oh that's good! Yes, very funny. Do the one about the Englishman, the Irishman and the Pope.

"This consistency is important, and explains why Catholics would not go out on a killing spree even if ordered to by the Pope on the direct orders of God."

Ahem. Spanish Inquisition. Ahem. World War II. etc.

"You'll also find that most people with religious belief do not claim to be entirely certain about what God wants."

And yet there was a crowd outside Parliament the other night who were absolutely certain on one rather specific point.

"Within Christianity there is actually quite a lot of debate about what's right and wrong, and about how certain commandments should be applied in practice. It's also possible for the vast majority of religious people to change their minds and be persuaded on a particular moral point - by a fellow believer or by someone else."

Sorry, these are the same people you were describing above as "consistent", yes? It's just I'm having trouble keeping up...

"I bet there's a lot of very reasonable Christians who are cringing at what is said in 'their' name by a lot of these evangelical and fundamentalist activists."

Well, yes, and I'm sure there are many Muslims who wish July 7th or 9/11 hadn't happened, or at the very least that it hadn't been quite clearly exclusively Muslims responsible. But "reasonable" is quite distinct from "rational", and I don't think I need to go on at length about the fact that the July 7th bombers would probably have been described as "reasonable" by people who knew them, even right up to the point where they started murdering their fellow citizens.

SoRB

Aren't we getting a little nit picky here? I really don't think that all the religious believers across the world can be regarded as meantally ill and I can't help feeling that to say so condemns you to accusations that you are just as bigoted about something that you can't tolerate and don't understand as the christians and others who berate homosexuals are. Kind of ironic, isn't it? Try to understand, plenty of people who have a faith in God (whatever they think his name is) honestly and sincerel believe he exists even though (unlike, as has already been said, people suffering from, say, scysophrenic (sp?) delusions) they cannot 'see' or 'hear' him (or her) in a conventional sense. Surprise, surprise, some of these people are quite smart and well educated, many of them understand quite well the workings of modern science and are not merely ignorant peasants from the pre-renaissance. I personally can't see what they're seeing, but then I feel much the same about celebrity big brother. Please let's not allow the fact that some people interpret their religious doctrine in a way that most people are uncomfortable with as another opportunity to spit bile at people.

"Bearing in mind that I am a *rational*, *objective* observer - which is to say I do not have access to the voices in your head and have to rely on real world evidence that *I* can see - can you explain the *qualitative* difference between your position, and that of Peter Sutcliffe?"

No, I can't. Because you do not wish to listen. You are having too much fun dismissing anyone who opposes you to pay any attention to what they say.

But here's one that has previously been mentioned: I am not insane. I do not go around killing people. I am in fact rational.

Bearing in mind that I am a rational objective observer, can you eplain to me the qualitative difference between your unshakeable position and that of the bigots outside Parliament?

Sorry, that should have been 'explain to me'.

The cart is before the horse on the mental illness issue. It is possible for someone so wired, by nature or nurture, to take the teachings of any religious text and turn it into something wholly repellent to reason and claim to be above the law - just as it is possible for a rational person to take those same lessons and turn it into a gift for humanity everywhere.

The voices in anyone's head aren't put there by words on a page. They're the function of some sort of illness and can just as easily be channeled through a Haynes Manual.

Stay on target!

There is a qualitative difference between how people experience mental illness and how many people experience religious belief. I say this based on personal experience of the latter and a detailed explanation of the former. I don't speak for everyone who has been religious, obviously, but my account of the how religious experience *felt* to me is not unusual by any means.

But if you want to exclude people who experience religion not as a 'voice in the head' but as something else - less tangible and with more room for doubt and reflection - from your category of the mentally ill, then that's fine with me. If you want to confine your analogy only to those who express *certainty* on every moral issue, to the fanatics, then I'm not able to supply you with a criteria to differentiate them from the mentally ill in terms of how they appear to the external atheist. I will have to leave that to the fanatics themselves. (Leaving aside issues of why people need to justify themselves to atheists). But I have supplied reasons for showing that the analogy between mental illness and non-fanatical religious people can be resisted.

My point about religious beliefs is that they have an internal consistency which mental illness does not. It was not an attempt to argue - as should have been obvious from the context - that religions are entirely internally consistent, but that there is a sense of consistency. It should also have been obvious from the context that my point about the Pope ordering a massacre was that people who are religious do not act on a whim or a 'voice', but based on a sense of consistency with their other views.

Again, as should be obvious - a crowd of religious people outside Parliament is not all religious people, nor even representative of religious people as a whole. A few do does not imply all do. It's just as wrong, in my view, to say that all X are Y when it's obvious that only some are, whether X is Christians, Muslims, homosexuals, or the Welsh.

There's no contradiction between having consistent religious views and moral doubt and changing your mind, and I'm rather surprised that you're having trouble 'keeping up' on this point. If X is religious and believes that life is sacred and that minimising suffering is a good thing, it would not be surprising if X found euthanasia a difficult moral issue, and might be persuadable both ways.