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Lightgigantic said:
I think there is something extremely facetious about saying the best possible explanation for the constant testimony of most people that ever lived on the face of the planet throughout history that there is some sort of divine being, is that most people are insane --- it seems like these persons are trying very hard to avoid the subject of god.
If you had stuck with "delusion", your argument would fare better. The escalation to insanity opens a vital vulnerability. Delusion ranges from merely being misled or deceived all the way to psychosis, a fairly broad range. "Insane", however, is a different question.
One of the criteria for judging whether or not certain behaviors constitute mental illness is whether or not the action interferes with one's ability to engage in normal social relationships. An example of this would be the sexualization of children. There are plenty of guys I know whose heads are turned by a stunning teenager. If we want to be even more creepy about it, at the Subpop twentieth anniversary show a couple weeks ago, there was this girl who was all of eleven or twelve, but you could tell at first glance that she was going to be a heartbreaker, the obsession of countless teenage late-night masturbatory fantasies. At the Ringo Starr show, I saw a girl who was probably nine who will grow up to make men drool. There are plenty of contexts in which to hold such notions distasteful.
Hell, walking into the Ringo show, there were these two girls behind us chattering about something and one of them said, in regard to whatever the hell they were talking about, "I'm not even thirteen yet!" I had seen them both and without the braces, I would have guessed fifteen and not twelve.
That's why every once in a while, if you pay attention, you'll see some guy you know watching a young girl pass and hear him mutter under his breath, "That ain't right."
Some would indict the twelve year-old for looking like that, but in the end, they're commenting on their own attention. And they're correct: it ain't right.
But this is a far cry from the predatory minds we fret about. Most of these ogling bastards aren't dangerous, and don't suffer behavioral complexes when they realize the hot ass they're watching is so ridiculously underage. They aren't the ones trolling for children, or who have trouble getting it up with a woman their own age. Some might disapprove of the fact that they notice at all, but the fact of their attention does not constitute a mental health issue.
Similarly, there are plenty of religious people who are perfectly sane. Their delusions do not cause any significant disruption to normal social relationships. There are two sides to that point, of course, insofar as what is statistically normal in the United States includes religious delusions. But the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of religious believers are, in fact, deluded.
That the lasting moral systems have certain religious derivations should not be surprising. After all, to use the Christian experience as an example, the European heritage into the Americas has seen two millennia of social conditioning around religious moral assignations.
We might consider, for instance, that the Catholic Church at one point made Aristotelian logic canonical law. The functional reason for this is that by Aristotle's arrangement of things, there was a place for everything, and everything belonged in its place, and nothing ever changed. It was an excellent logical foundation for securing and justifying the sociopolitical authority that led to such atrocities as the Inquisitions. From this perspective, we see that logical structures made abstract and for the glory of god actually pervert morality.
Looking to the Bible, we might note that God "hates" certain behaviors, and in the context of the times, that hatred makes sense. When your tribe is wandering lost in the desert for years on end, you shouldn't be wasting seed or having reckless sex. Nor should you be tattooing or ritually flagellating yourself. But the subjectiveness of God's outlook on a behavior is generally insufficient. There are plenty of objective reasons for certain moral standards we find in religion. Stealing from your neighbor, or banging his wife, causes disruption within the community, and when those communities were small enough, such tremors could destroy a people. In a more cosmopolitan "global community" of billions, there are plenty of worries more important than whether Mr. Smith is dabbling 'twixt Mr. Jones' wife's thighs.
Perhaps we should go back to night and day determining the difference between self-defense and murder? Maybe we should cut off women's hands if they interfere too greatly in a fight between men? How about poisoning our wives if we are unsatisfied with them?
I would ask you to consider why prohibitions against incest continue today, while Western society has long since stopped lopping off women's hands for interfering in fights, or poisoning them for not being good enough. The reason is that certain moral standards hold up under objective scrutiny. To borrow a line, you don't get with your relatives because you get babies with nine heads and stuff like that.
I would suggest that your examination of morality, religion, and history is perhaps a bit superficial.
So interestingly enough, the notion of no matter how much money, power etc you are all equal, that actually came from religion (Jesus in the west).
Principles of social equality drawn from the Bible are extrapolated. After all, if slavery was good enough for Jesus, it should be good enough for the Athenians, as well. History suggests strongly that slavery collapsed not because of any traditional religious cause, but rather a slow revolution beginning with the Renaissance and still taking place today.
In the Christian context, we are all equal in the eyes of God. In rendering unto Caesar, however, Western civilization has endured millennia of iniquity by the will of religious authorities who would call themselves Christian.
So historically the highest moral substance has always come from religion. To write all that off as a massive delusion comes across as trying really hard to ignore a jumbo jet that has crashed into one’s dining room
Unless, of course, there is no evidence of a jumbo jet having crashed into one's dining room.
Few, if any, doubt the influence of religion on moral structures. And whether that influence is, on balance, positive or negative is an argument for the ages. But the religious adoption of philosophical truths has also brought some of the greatest moral inconsistencies in human history. Even today, in twenty-first century America, for instance, there are plenty of church leaders who would presume the authority to judge their fellow man; they haven't faith enough to leave the objects of their hatred to God.
