Actually you are not stating it. You are describing delusion which is rather different from 'mental illness'. Being deluded is not enough to get yourself classified as mentally ill. It has to interfere with your ability to fit in with society, to work, etc.
Religious belief...a mental illness?
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That is debatable. There certainly have been scientists who have done studies and used their results to support racism. Now non-racist scientists will, generally, argue that the test were biased in some way, or data was poorly interpreted or collected, or correlation was not distinguished from cause, etc. But these kinds of criticisms are criticisms within science and happen on a wide range of issues.
agreed. by cataloguing such, we are in a sense reifying abstractions--and likewise, forgetting the abstraction bit. true, abstraction is implicit in language, and perhaps even thought; but were we to think abstraction (thought, language) differently, the result could be less platonic:
consider abstraction as a raft. one builds a raft to cross the river, then discards it. sure, one may (well, will) need the raft again, but perhaps it is better to build the rafts as we need them, rather than carrying them upon our backs when we traverse land.
yeah, a little too metaphorical perhaps. but this is the religion subforum, so i think some liberties ought be allowed...
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but what specifically do you intend by "religious belief"? and were we to consensually acknowledge something as delusional, what changes might it effect?
we all must entertain delusions just to get ourselves through the day. do you believe that your life has some value? do you believe that others' lives have some value? do you perceive value in what you do? if yes to any or all of these, can you show me what this value is? probably not.
suppose you responded "no" to all of these questions: mightn't it make "getting through the day" a bit rougher?
Or there was no peer review.
If ones' peers are biased, there's every opportunity for a consensus on what the evidence does or does not indicate ... particularly the further one is moving away from hard science
Peer review these days refers to all the scientists sharing your field. They can't all be biased.
Agreed. The people within the scientific community publish their findings allowing peer review to inspect and certify those published finding. Frauds and hoaxes are exposed publicly.
and how does that solve the issues surrounding soft science?
soft science,
any of the specialized fields or disciplines, as psychology, sociology, anthropology, or political science, that interpret human behavior, institutions, society, etc., on the basis of scientific investigations for which it may be difficult to establish strictly measurable criteria.
People with any credibility within the scientific community publish their findings, no matter how narrow specific limits happen to be. Similar to presenting their finding to a grand jury.
If you are really granting me that 'or' then my point is made. The Bell Curve got scientists pro and con. Earlier science was certainly peer reviewed and nevertheless was used to support racism. I am not saying that racism is correct - in case my posts might be taken this way. I am saying that scientific research and testing has been used to support racism. I don't think there is any way around this. One can say they did not consider enough issues or any of the points I made earlier, but these distortions are a part of scientific research. And, of course, one must prove these distortions or unsatifactory protocols were there.
I doubt all scientists in a field review all research. And of course they can all be biased. At a certain point in history all scientists would have been biased against the possibility that something could both be a particle and a wave at the same time, as one example amongst many. An issue like racism and intelligence has certainly had majority biases.
yes
and?
if the findings are heavily shaped by the language they appear in, as in the case with the softer the science, all you areeffectively saying is that the ideas are widely distributed, .... in a similar fashion to mass media
:shrug:
Scientists use a reference so everyone is on the same page, a dictionary or medical encyclopedia. Archeology is a part of anthropology providing the facts through the fossil record. This fact gathering by archeology is making anthropology a credible field of scientific study. The findings of lab and field research goes through peer review so honesty is maintained. So when you speak of soft science, it isn't nearly as soft as you make it seem.
Introducing a real scientific discovery into the discussion.
Ancient Human Ancestor 'Ida' Discovered
excerpt,
A discovery of a 47-million-year-old fossil primate that is said to be a human ancestor was announced and unveiled today at a press conference in New York City.
Known as "Ida," the nearly complete transitional fossil is 20 times older than most fossils that provide evidence for human evolution.
It shows characteristics from the very primitive non-human evolutionary line (prosimians, such as lemurs), but is more related to the human evolutionary line (anthropoids, such as monkeys, apes and humans), said Norwegian paleontologist Jørn Hurum of University of Oslo Natural History Museum. However, she is not really an anthropoid either, he said.
The fossil, called Darwinius masillae and said to be a female, provides the most complete understanding of the paleobiology of any primate so far discovered from the Eocene Epoch, Hurum said. An analysis of the fossil mammal is detailed today in the journal PLoS ONE.
"This is the first link to all humans ... truly a fossil that links world heritage," Hurum said.
Any skilled paleontologists working in the field of anthropology can scrutinze the published findings about Ida's fossilized skeletal remains while doing their own examination of the evidence, and then in turn publish his or her own conclusions, pro or con. This practice is known as peer review. After awhile a consensus forms of acceptance or dismissal within the scientific community
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Can we take a second to compare that to the way religion works.
A person who has read a 2000 year old book tells other people about the 2000 year old book and convinces some people that what is in the 2000 year old book is true without any evidence besides the 2000 year old book.
I don't think any religious people can criticize the scientific method when that's their own method for learning.
A person who has read a 2000 year old book tells other people about the 2000 year old book and convinces some people that what is in the 2000 year old book is true without any evidence besides the 2000 year old book.
I don't think any religious people can criticize the scientific method when that's their own method for learning.
It is a very small percentage of religious people whose sole method of learning their religion is as you described. It should also be noted that many people 'learn' evolution and a variety of other scientific theories by reading in books they do not understand very well, and at best only for a short time. (as always, I feel I need to point out I believe in the theory of evolution to avoid the tangents people make when they assume I do not.)
Some examples of why I think one day there is a possibility that religious belief will be classed as a mental illness:
Exorcisms:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aqSJgvSTyA&feature=fvw
Christians:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO6R1zVCw1M&feature=related
Exorcisms:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aqSJgvSTyA&feature=fvw
Christians:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO6R1zVCw1M&feature=related
Doreen why is it that people born in Afganistan generally believe in Islam, and people born in America generally believe in Christianity?
It's because in one country they are told one story from an old book, and in another country they are told a different story from an old book. That's the greatest factor in a person's religious belief. What story someone came along and told them. Whether it be their parents telling them, or their school telling them, they are just passing on what they've read out of some old book.
Sure some religious people look for historical evidence and other evidence, but from my experience that's the minority, not the majority like you say.
and there's a fine example.
If you have a considerable absence of "doable" practices on display (like in archeology for instance),the aperture for (mis) representation widens. This is what separates, say, metal smelting from ideas of how the world was 10 000 years ago, despite both of them being able to take recourse to the gamut of scientific investigation.
This explains why historiography is much like journalism, whereas that science that presents something "doable" stands somewhat outside of it.
well (assuming that the constants that are used to date it are constant) that's fine
But what doable practices would be jeopardized if it was determined to be a hoax (just hypothetically speaking)?