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Religion isn’t a scapegoat, and it has nothing to do with IQ. Very smart people are roped into it, and that’s what I mean by it being a social cancer.
Very smart people are raised with stories that they take as reality – that supplant their ability to judge reality for what it is – and it at best colours how they interpret everything for the rest of their lives, and at worst amplifies and gives focus to mental conditions they already have.
Religion is a warped lens through which people are forced to see reality from such a young age, they are incapable of seeing actual reality, and in some cases it just amplifies the otherwise mild mental illness they’d likely have had already.
Without it, some people would already have been disturbed, but with it those people are given a purpose for their delusions.
But in this case this lady is obviously mentally ill why are you ignoring that?
I’m not ignoring that.
My point is that religion is uniquely capable of taking the delusions of the mentally ill and nurturing them into violence.
Even for the mentally stable, it often leads to fantasy. But when mental illness and religion coincide, people who would otherwise be relatively benign in their delusions very easily become convinced their delusions are divine and their violent instincts are justified by scripture. It happens so often, we need to begin acknowledging it.
i think religion is one of many things which can weaponise mental illness. i also think, in a world without religion, some people would still hear voices and feel compelled to do terrible or dangerous things as a result.
Of course there would still be people like that. What I’m saying is there are exponentially more people like that when they’ve been raised from birth to believe in nonsense that warps their sense of right and wrong.
Take the story of Chad and Lori Daybell. She was a normal, successful woman who wasn’t a psychopath. She fell in with a pastor who convinced her of extreme religious ideals, after which they murdered their own children in a misguided belief they’d be safer in heaven than on earth.
I can list examples like that until the cows come home. Normal people who have become convinced to commit atrocities after being drawn into religion to extremes. It’s a psychological virus that can infect anyone. Most large-scale wars have a religious basis. All the biggest genocides have been committed in the name of religion. The best and fastest way to control people and warp their reality is to make them believe in a god.
We’re better than this.
Your re-telling of Chad and Lori Daybell sounds too tidy to be true. It's like the first fifteen minutes of a horror movie with a completely happy, care-free life and then she bumps into a pastor and that chance encounter did her in.
Like sure, she poison pilled herself on religion partially but the whole "they were a normal couple" dream-scape section of the 48 hours special you're narrating here is the type of thing that constantly has me talking at the TV when those nuance-bereft junk piles are playing at my house.
She was obviously fucked up before she met the guy, just like a lot of cult followers are fucked up before they seek the guidance of their "guy".
Some people are fucked up from birth, some become fucked up later, and some are varying degrees of fucked up...but people are messy and it's not like they all used to be a happy go-lucky adventurer like you until they took one religion to the knee.
I think people get the relationship inverted. Many people become religious to fill whatever gap they had in the first place. Many people become cult-leaders because they were already sick in the head.
I abbreviated their story to keep my comment short, and linked the full thing for people who want to learn more.
In truth, the reason she was so susceptible to his offshoot of their religion was because she’d been raised believing in the mainstream religion, which he warped a bit in order to gain followers to his cult. She was primed for it because she couldn’t imagine a reality outside of the belief system in which she was raised, and his cult was only slightly outside that and built upon it.
Look up the story yourself, if you like. That’s why I linked it. My quick summary wasn’t ‘too tidy to be true’, and I can give you links to many, many more stories exactly like that one. Loads of normal people have committed atrocities – often against their own children – because their Christian faith told them to. A great many of them weren’t mentally ill until they became religious. Many committed those atrocities because they became convinced heaven was a better place for their children, that demons were real and trying to corrupt their kids, etc. Google it yourself; I’m not trying to filter knowledge here. These were normal people until they became religious.
Like I said, we should be talking about the damage these fables are doing. We should be talking about the damage done by indoctrinating children so they can’t discern reality from fantasy and right from wrong. We should be questioning our leaders when they say morality only exists in their stories, when the opposite is true. This shot is causing us irreparable damage as a society.
I'm thoroughly aware of the story which is why I find your summary of it lacking.
I don't like religion at all, but it's entirely clear to me that people's emotional and social needs created religion, and then our love of hierarchical structures created organized religion.
You could wipe religion off the Earth tomorrow and it'd be back by next Tuesday as long as you didn't wipe out all the people on the planet with it.
You're firing in a scatter shot manner at a general human sociological phenomenon and are pretty off target in this case especially, where it's pretty obvious the person had a mental illness.
You’re right, and I don’t disagree with you at all. Yes, we’ve had an emotional need for stories – more for connection with one another than for individual understanding, which cultural stories provide.
I’m saying there’s a difference between cultural stories and organised religion. The former is benign and can translate our questions into a semblance of meaning, and the latter which becomes dictatorial dogma that amplifies the worst of us, turning our basest instincts into abhorrent action.
I don’t think we disagree that much, you and I. I used to think organised religion wasn’t something I could get behind, but I thought to each their own.
The more I learned about it and the more I saw the bad influence it did to people I loved, the more I realised it’s nothing but a terrible influence in the world, holding us back as a people, and causing needless suffering and death.
Yeah, I don't think we're very far apart in thought either, there's just some specifics in this case that make organized religion especially not really the culprit in these cases and we disagree on the specifics.
I too hate religion and organized religion probably even more so, and I don't think "to each his own" as much as I'm simply resigned to the fact that it's a part of the human experience, and will probably be around as long as we are.
Religion is just a creation of man. I would argue that we have the relationship inverted and that we have religion partially because people heard voices and felt compelled to do terrible or dangerous things as a result.
i don't necessarily disagree with you; neither would Julian Jaynes. i'm just not going to blame organized religion for something (hearing compelling voices) that would exist with or without it.
Oh I think we're in complete agreement on that point.
Like yeah organized religion sucks it too (and how!), but I don't think it did this one...sorry fellas.