Real World Philospohy

[Fyron]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
brain hurts. burp.

how do i know i'm not just hearing a crazy voice? well, crazy voices don't make sense.

That is not true. The majority of people with (less severe cases of) schitzophrenia hear perfectly normal sounding voices that make good sense.

[Cyrien]

My nephew has in the past taken medications that caused him to hear voices. ADHD and Bipolar. One of the medicines they first tried had this side affect.

His paternal grandmother thought it was the voice of the devil and decided to take matters into her own hands. He no longer see's her but he did change medications for the ADHD and bipolar and it stopped.

From what he has told me the voices made a great deal of sense and it often involved instructions on what to do. He says he argued with the voices and is quite happy to have them gone.

PS: My mother is a councilor to help deal with a variety of issues and I can inform you that most voices people here are quite sensible and take on some quality of the persons personality taken to an extreme. Babbling or nonsensical voices are quite rare.

[Loser]

A couple of the early symptoms of adult schizophrenia are delusions of incredible insight and personal empowerment. They take a lot of different forms, but all lead to very 'inconsistent' behavior, which is dangerous.

Insight always makes sense, that's what it's about. Even more dangerous is that personal empowerment and impossible insight feel really, really good. People take street drugs and prescription anti-depressants just to get a fraction of this experience.

If you had to chose between believing you were gifted and super-capable and believing that you were unstable and no longer able to care for yourself, which would you choose? Which would you want to be true?

Personally, I'd wait until the evidence against me was undeniable. I couldn't just give up. We would regard that as strength in many other situations, which just makes it more dangerous.

[Fyron]

Originally posted by General Woundwort:
1) Lots of assertions here, little proof. What is the evidence that primitive man "invented" religion?

Invented, created, concocted, came up with, thought up, dreamed up, use whatever term you want. Good evidence is the fact that noone begins their life with any set religious views; everyone has to be spoon fed them to have them. So, the first people must not have had religious views, and they developed over time. Organized religions developed as a means to control people, just like organized governments. The fact that Judaism developed amidst a polytheistic culture, and later Christianity developed from it, with Islam sort of branching off somewhere afterwars, is good evidence that religions evolve. It is a pretty safe assertation that they all had to evolve from somewhere... and "the word of God" is not a good point, as EVERY non-animistic religion (with some form of deity...) can say that (not God, but whatever deity(ies) they worship).

There is a wealth of study and evidence out there about the evolution of religion, starting from the primitive to the modern. I am sure google will turn up some useful links. I just do not have hte time at present to wade through them all... Just make sure to use the site:.edu tag in your searches (assuming I remembered that correctly... check the advanced search formatting help page) so that you can restrict sites to being on .edu domains, thus eliminating the bulk of garbage sites (garbage for any sort of intellectual purposes...). Of course, there are garbage sites on .edu domains, but at least you start off on better footing with university-owned web space... and they tend to have much better documentation.

2) What is so absurd about one religon being true and all the others false? The Christian doctrine of human depravity (the idea that human nature has become corrupt and therefore hostile to the idea of God) is a rational explanation for the diversity of religions, from a monotheistic POV.

That requires assuming that Christianity is correct... the fact is that pretty much all religions have the exact same claims of divine revelation and all that stuff, and so all have the truth. But how can you pick which one has the real truth? Quite simply, you can not. Any arguments you could come up with to justify your choice apply equally to many other religions as well.

3) Truth is not determined by numbers of claimants, but whether a truth claim corresponds to reality.

Exactly. That sentence or two was not part of my argument, just an absurd answer to any possible absurd claims along the lines of "but everyone around me believes this..." and such. Though, I can see where your apparent confusion on my post came from...

4) The West has a decidedly atheistic bent nowadays. If your neighbor went around denying that you exist, would you be really that enthused to talk to him?

Sure I would! That would be one interesting conversation. The west has a decidedly atheistic bent nowadays because atheism is the next step in religious evolution...

[Loser]

I have heard people make interesting claims about the growth of atheism, it is not as big as you think. Check out these numbers from the CIA World Factbook.

U.S.A.

Religions: Protestant 56%, Roman Catholic 28%, Jewish 2%, other 4%, none 10% (1989)

U.K.

Anglican and Roman Catholic 40 million, Muslim 1.5 million, Presbyterian 800,000, Methodist 760,000, Sikh 500,000, Hindu 500,000, Jewish 350,000

(Total 60,094,648)

Germany

Protestant 34%, Roman Catholic 34%, Muslim 3.7%, unaffiliated or other 28.3%

[Atrocities]

Debating about religion is highly over rated IMHO. But believe what you want, tis the only true freedom any of us truly have.

[ November 08, 2003, 00:59: Message edited by: Atrocities ]

[Andrés]

Argentina:
nominally Roman Catholic 92% (less than 20% practicing), Protestant 2%, Jewish 2%, other 4%

Curious, according to that page there are no atheists in my country, or they must be included in the "other".
It's interesting to see in numbers what I see that most people is Catholic but only step into a church for weddings.
It's also curious that the practicing % is not mentioned in the countries you quoted. Does that mean that all people mentioned actively practice their religions?
Would it be too wild to extrapolate this "less than 20% practicing" ratio to other religions and other countries.

[ November 08, 2003, 02:45: Message edited by: Andres ]