DiscussMormonism.com

Doctor Scratch wrote:Those are excellent questions, Samantabhadra.

No, they're a diversion.

Doctor Scratch wrote:I predict that Maklelan won't answer them, or else he'll cough up some pretzel-ized version of an answer that "answers" without actually, really answering.

One day you're going to be right when you make an assumption about someone else, but that day's a long way off.

Wow, Maklelan: I'm impressed, and I'm more than glad to admit that my prediction was wrong. It's mighty big of you to admit that, per Mormon teachings, this woman successfully got her young kids into the Celestial Kingdom by murdering them.

Now, back to your regularly scheduling debate over whether this kind of belief is "delusional" or not.

Doctor Scratch wrote:Wow, Maklelan: I'm impressed, and I'm more than glad to admit that my prediction was wrong. It's mighty big of you to admit that, per Mormon teachings, this woman successfully got her young kids into the Celestial Kingdom by murdering them.

You certainly see the flagrant spinning that you have to put on this event to make this sound like it supports the point of the OP. Of course, the fact that Latter-day Saints believe children who die before the age of 8 go to the Celestial Kingdom has never been disputed. The fact that a woman who had obvious mental problems committed an atrocious crime and managed, according to LDS ideology, to facilitate her children's entry in the Celestial Kingdom doesn't at all support anything that's being argued here. Another far less manipulative way to characterize the event would be to say that these children are not going to suffer in the eternities because of the horrific sins of their mother. That you would attempt to manipulate such a horrible crime just to score a petty and bigoted rhetorical point is just pathetic of you, Scratch. Have you no decency at all?

Doctor Scratch wrote:Now, back to your regularly scheduling debate over whether this kind of belief is "delusional" or not.

maklelan wrote:managed, according to LDS ideology, to facilitate her children's entry in the Celestial Kingdom

What an odd belief to hold indeed. In this scenario, an individual human, was able to accomplish that which diety cannot; usurp anothers agency and force them into an eternal kingdom.

maklelan wrote:Untrue. The notion that her actions are the "logical conclusion" of LDS soteriology has been asserted by two people now. That's the whole point of this line of argumentation. You're just trying to divert attention away from what they're saying, and I think it's because you can see how asinine that particular argument is.

While I do think the argument that murdering your children before they reach the age of 8 is the "logical conclusion" of Mormon doctrine is silly, I wasn't trying to divert attention away from this question so much as clarify its parameters. And I think you are mistaken that this is the "whole point" of the line of argumentation. The point of this line of argumentation is to draw an explicit connection between Mormonism and clinical delusion, which is after all the topic of this thread.

Anyone who says that Mormonism teaches you to murder your children, or that this woman was somehow representative of Mormons on the whole, clearly has an axe to grind and is not really taking a serious position. But I don't think that's what your opponents here are saying (and please correct me if I'm wrong). What I understand the connection to be is that, given the delusion and cognitive dissonance inherent in believing that Joseph Smith was a holy prophet as opposed to a shameless fraud, any and all TBM's must be suffering from some form of mental disorder.

It's like if a bunch of people decided to follow their "prophet" who solemnly declared the earth was flat, only date and marry people within the Flat Earth Society, only read Flat Earth Society literature, only send their children to a university where all the professors taught Flat Earth Theory, and regard anything which demonstrated the earth to be round as having been invented by Satan for the purpose of leading Flat Earth Society members astray from the truth that the earth is indeed flat. Given that level of delusion--and the assurance that each and every member of the Flat Earth Society has a unique and epistemically unassailable hotline to God--is it really surprising when a member of the Flat Earth Society goes and, say, pushes her kids off the top of Mt. Everest, secure in the knowledge that because Mt. Everest points upward, when they fall they will fall off the edge of the Earth in the direction of God and thereby get to go live with God in the Celestial Kingdom?

The issue is not that the Flat Earth Society teaches people to push their kids off Mt. Everest. The issue is that once you believe the earth is flat, you are now capable of believing anything at all. And that, in order to maintain your ironclad certainty that the earth is flat, you must engage in all kinds of destructive cognitive habits--selective filtering, confirmation bias, etc.--that are known to produce deleterious results.

Maxrep wrote:

maklelan wrote:managed, according to LDS ideology, to facilitate her children's entry in the Celestial Kingdom

What an odd belief to hold indeed. In this scenario, an individual human, was able to accomplish that which diety cannot; usurp anothers agency and force them into an eternal kingdom.

And yet, there it is - just one of a myriad of logical contradictions, internal inconsistencies and unintended consequences that result from of an ad hoc, make it up as you go along, say anything religion.

DrW wrote:And yet, there it is - just one of a myriad of logical contradictions, internal inconsistencies and unintended consequences that result from of an ad hoc, make it up as you go along, say anything religion.

For risks or side effects, please ask ... ooops ... who to ask?

I case of medicines, there are doctors or pharmacists or other health professionals.
Who is a professional of religion's risk?

Chap wrote:
If enough people believe it, you have a legitimate religion.

I haven't read all the posts after this one, but the reason for this is that delusional thoughts are meant to be descriptive of a psychotically disordered cognitive process. Religious beliefs that one acquires through their culture don't usually get into a person's head via psychotic thinking.

So I worked with a schizophrenic woman who believed that she was receiving revelations from a god she called the time lord about the nature of time. These fractured thoughts led to her doing hilarious/sad things like obsessively collecting and worshiping clocks. That's a delusion. It's a delusion even though it can't be proved "false" in the way Mak says Mormonism can't be proved false.

But if a Catholic thinks that a man-god came to earth and preached the importance of engaging in ritualistic cannibalism, that's not going to be considered delusional. I'd say both are objectively unreasonable, but we seem to be honing in on something more than that when we talk about delusions.

This distinction is sometimes fuzzy around the borders and is far from perfect, but that's where the it comes from.

EA wrote:So I worked with a schizophrenic woman who believed that she was receiving revelations from a god she called the time lord about the nature of time. These fractured thoughts led to her doing hilarious/sad things like obsessively collecting and worshiping clocks.

Do you think this is similar to the apologists obsessively collecting books and suffering from the delusion that Mopologetics is real scholarship?

Ultimately, everyone is delusional. The more drastically different two cultures are, the more each side is going to consider the other one delusional.

I don't know what other atheists think about their reality and experience, but the truth is that, no matter what you do or don't believe, everything we perceive is a reconstruction of a very narrow spectrum of reality. Our cognition is very much determined by our own personal culture.

In the article I linked to earlier, it raises some interesting ideas about how our brains can be more receptive to one culture over another. It isn't just an answer to political alignment. People with overwhelming fear responses could be more likely to be fundamentalists and be more likely to lack the ability to see something from another point of view because it is terrifying.

Most people, regardless of religious beliefs, believe that they are better than most other drivers. Is this a delusion? Of course. It actually takes intelligence to assess one's own abilities accurately, so, the dumber you are, the more delusional you are going to be about your own abilities. Think about how young men often are over-confident when they are hitting on girls at a bar... or other places. They are delusional about their own worth BUT, it is a successful mating strategy that individuals aren't always consciously aware of. This delusion of young men serves a purpose.

In certain cultures, certain delusions serve the purpose of helping people fit into their communities. So many of these delusions are the result of a reproductive strategy that individuals are unable to be aware because people are not aware of the unconscious processes that determine what they want and what they think will make them happy. People are notoriously horrible (delusional) about assuming money will make them happy. It does, to a certain point, but once you have met a certain hierarchy of needs, more money is useless.

Cigarette smokers are delusional about the dangers of smoking. Many people support the death penalty and, at the same time, are anti-abortion. Most people have no problem with killing innocent women and children overseas, but, again, no problem with abortion. Okay with torture? More likely to be against abortion. Nevermind that the Bible doesn't directly address abortion and that Christians have been using abortifactants since there were Christians.

Whether or not your fear response is more active than others, the media and their controlling interests are utilizing these unconscious responses and others to shape the way large groups of people think... they shape their culture. Maybe a lot of them believe in what they are trying to dishonestly impart onto our society, but, by and large, the goal of manipulating large groups of people is to make money. Your delusions are helping someone make money. That is one way to objectively determine if you are being manipulated by a group... if you hand over your money to them.

The diagnosis for mankind is that everyone is equally delusional.

Compare, for a moment, an early flat-earth Christians versus a modern atheist. Really, a flat earth Christian has a BETTER explanation than most atheists for the way the sun moves. You can see that the sun moves around the earth. It was obvious to everyone. Unless someone teaches you otherwise, you would assume that the sun goes around the earth. If you ask an atheist to prove how they know the earth goes around the sun, they are going to have a very hard time if they aren't sitting next to a computer or have a smart phone.

Nearly everyone who believes that the earth goes around the sun does not have the knowledge to prove it on their own. They can only repeat bits of pieces of what their culture has imparted on them. Mostly, they are taking it on faith. Just like we all took on faith that Pluto was a planet. Scientific method is lost on most people. Proving anything, at all, is lost on most people. It is a sad state of affairs, since we have access to modern tool, modern methodologies, and modern ways of thinking, but people are still practically in the stone age. Even worse, stone age people would have a better chance of surviving if you dropped them off in the middle of nowhere and forced them to live at a subsistence level. Most people would die.

Is it because they are stupid?

No. It is because their culture has determined how they perceived the world around them and taught them which information was important to learn and which was not. This is the reason that a 13 year old girl can know more details about the career of Lady Gaga than she knows about math, even though she has spent more time learning math. Her culture has determined that the career of Lady Gaga is more important information and she is more motivated to learn about it. And that is certainly delusional.

I think, at this point, for the purpose of diagnosis, you must determine which delusions are unhealthy and detrimental to society, and which delusions are not.

That is what we do as a society, right? We tell some people that their fairy god whatever is okay to believe in, but not others. Wiccans and fundamentalists get laughed at (rightfully so, in my opinion) and yet the God from near the vicinity of Kolob who commanded Joseph Smith to marry and consummate marriages with multiple women is perfectly acceptable... or not, since we got Warren Jeffs sent up for following god's will.

At what point were we able to differentiate Warren Jeffs' delusion from the delusions of the leaders of the mainstream church?