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define insane here.

I think modern social acceptability hinges more on the degree to which personal beliefs infringe on others, at least in the west.

If someone refuses to personally eat pasta because they believe in the great spaghetti monster, they can knock themselves out for all I care.




To the extent that your neighbors believe in false or unprovable things that don’t exist in our tangible reality, that should concern you. This can absolutely lead to horrifying violence, and has repeatedly done so in the past. The good thing about most major organized religions is that they’ve developed (some) guardrails against murdering the non-believers based on the theory that some intangible being requires this of them.


I can't prove it, but I believe that everyone on this planet believes at least one thing false or something that can't be proven.

I'm concerned, but not about that. Division concerns me. Balanced compassion for self and others is the only solution I can think of.


All first principles are unprovable. Theism does not have a monopoly on violence, so I don't see why I should be more concerned about it then anything else.


Because you can't reason with someone who doesn't employ reason. That doesn't mean they won't kill you - it just shuts down one avenue by which you might talk them out of it.


But religious people can be reasonable and atheist can be unreasonable.


You can't reason about first principles. What first principles someone chooses as their "axioms" doesn't alter their ability to be reasonable. Materialism or empiricism are just as much a random choice for a base principle as deism or theism or many others.

A lot of the evils that the hardcore atheist crowd (Dawkins, Sam Harris, that crowd) ascribes to religion is oftentimes much better understood as imperialism and other purely political ambitions couched in what was the most common first principle of the time. The desire of European kings (including the Pope) to hold Jerusalem and later Constantinople were much better understood as a desire to control trade and expand their territory/influence rather than some deeply seated religious fervor, just for the example of the crusades. And for things like the inquisition, we can see today as well plenty of largely secular demonization and oppression of marginalized groups.


> If someone refuses to personally eat pasta because they believe in the great spaghetti monster, they can knock themselves out for all I care.

But that doesn't make them sane.


Like I said above, define insane.

I don't think it's possible to act as a human without irrational belief, and everyone harbors them because there is no rational answer to the question "why?".


There is an immense difference between "Every human being believes things that are irrational, and is not rational" and "The very first step in nearly every major religion is insisting that WE have the answers as long as you `have faith` in us and follow what we tell you to do"

It was trivial for southern baptist sermons to convince white southerners that black people being slaves was "as god wants it", and therefore should be defended with their very lives, precisely because in Christianity at least, god asks you to do pretty awful things all the time.... At least if you listen to your preacher".

Look at the religious right insisting that jesus is "woke" and that Trump should deport an american citizen because she preached peace. There's only so many words said by jesus in most bibles, not a single one about trans people, so why do they insist so ferociously that trans people are evil?

This goes double for all those "great awakening" neo-"Christian" ~cults~ religions in the US that insist that the bible is not just inerrant, but trivially understandable by even the dumbest human beings, which is just fundamentally false.

30 million american adults explicitly say that the earth was created within the past 10k years by god exactly as it is now. They believe that evolution is not just wrong, but a hoax that most of science is in on. They believe that science is a conspiracy by Satan to keep them from god's light.

People on this very forum espouse these beliefs. Just the other day someone posted Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis as a resource, despite it being an organization that spreads outright lies, and is still trying to get evolution out of schools, and they are winning.

These are the same organizations, groups, families, etc that created the Scopes Monkey trial back in 1925. Understand that they considered it a success. 100 years later and we might very well see creationism back in US schools, despite overwhelming and conclusive evidence of evolution as the means of speciation.


My point is that bad ideas, values, and ideas are not exclusive to religion, but orthogonal. I see plenty of secular lies and misinformation posted every day as well.

The very first step in nearly every human group is insisting that WE have the answers as long as you `have faith` in us and follow what we tell you to do.

That goes for Republicans, communists, Nazis, or the DNC. Bullshit and unthinking conformance transgresses the boundary of secular and religious ideology.

Do you think the zizan rationalists are free from bullshit because they Atheist? Meanwhile they claim that AI from the future will put people into torture simulations as punishment if they aren't vegan, and that the only rational thing to do is kill your landlord with a katana.




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