Billions of people claim to have had a God experience. Can they all be wrong or insane? The unfortunate claims of this thread avoid the legitimate need of many for religious assurances of the right to exist. Again, the thread mistakes religious dupery for religious sanity. It’s yet another thread about look at all the bad things religion has done without accrediting religion for the good it has done. The imaginary friend argument pales before the facts of actual God experience. It is at best a mistaking of a child’s sense of wonder for an adolescent mockery of what minds can do and of what minds need.
No redefinition required. I’ve had God experiences. So have many others. Those who have had no such experiences would of course claim they do not exist. In any event, claiming that these experiences suggests insanity is in itself an insane assertion.
One’s personal belief about religion do not define or even describe what religion is. There’s no depth to kneejerk denials. There is nothing here that would describe the psychology behind religious needs.
Belief and psychology are one thing but actual experiences something else entirely
So what exactly were the ones that you had and why do you attribute them to God
Simply because they were from God. Yet many here would deny me my experiences based on their own adolescent denial of anything divine. So how does one explain experience other than to note that it exists? No explanation I could provide would persuade the doubter who has had no such experience, whose mind is closed to the subject from the get-go. I will not be held up before the mockery of disbelievers who claim that a God experience indicates insanity. I have no reason to believe black holes exist in the universe, but the possibility of such existing proves many theories to be correct.
If my mind was closed to your experiences then I would not be asking you to explain them. Your refusal to do so leaves me none the wiser
And you apparently think that black holes do not exist despite confirmation of gravitational waves earlier this year demonstrating they do
And so you have provided no evidence at all for something you think does exist whilst also denying evidence for something that does exist
If in future I ask you to provide evidence for what you think exists it would be nice if you did so rather than engage in amateur psychology
Because psychiatry is also a system of religion and belief in god(s). The psychiatric god(s), the psychiatric religion, and the psychiatric belief in the psychiatric god(s) are like other god(s), religions and beliefs in god(s).
The fact that the psychiatric system is a system of religion and belief in god(s) too would become too obvious, if it tried to obviously consider belief in god(s) mental illness. The following question would immediately come in almost everyone’s mind: “What and who can be god(s)”? And the answer would also come into almost everyone’s mind: “Everything and everyone”. Freud, Adler, Jung - as merely three but most famous of many other possible examples - would soon be debunked as psychiatric gods too.
And what about deists and pantheists? What about believing in nature? If you believe in nature, then you believe in god (namely: as nature). And what about psychiatry? If you believe in psychiatry, then you believe in god (namely: as psychiatry).
It is an strategic advantage for the psychiatric system too to just want humans to believe that belief in god does only mean belief in a man with a long white beard.
[tab]These days, many western humans still believe in the following “gods”, although they are also merely humans, thus no gods:
Also many ILP members believe in this four humans of the past as “gods”, although one of them is currently not as much in fashion as the other three are still.
They should finally leave them alone and, because they are strong believers, look for new “gods”.[/tab]
So the short answer to your question is: Both systems are too similar - both are based on the belief in god(s).
Supposedly most mental illnesses stems from fear, anxiety, and despair, ironically that is not limited to mental illness as religion seems to stem from that also.
I’ll be the first one to say here that there are great profound mysteries or paradoxes of the universe that given the limitations of human consciousness and applied ingenuity we’ll never know about. Science isn’t perfect by any stretch of the word however I must insist that ascribing the universe, reality, and all life itself to god or gods is just absurd.
I’m comfortable leaving many things to the unknown concerning our universe but at the same time I’m not comfortable saying god did it to everything. I find such religious posturing to be irrational.
With that being all said, I’m not a militant atheist as I pride myself on understanding especially with others where I think people should believe in whatever they want to in that I understand the human need for religion even when I don’t share that need myself.
That’s an interesting conclusion you add here Amorphos that an individual imaginary friend isn’t shared by others.
One of the most interesting subjects I like reading about is what I like to refer to as collective hysteria, delusion, or psychosis. I really do think that religion fits into that categorization. How about a collectivised imaginary friend?
Of course everybody and all human beings are caught up in that one form or another beyond religion.
I do believe in black holes. I also believe in God, but at ILP such a conviction and any evidences given of a God experience are pearls before swine. There is no real realization of the places a mind can go here; there is only mockery and ridicule of persons whose minds have been expanded to depths beyond left brain, analytic logic. In these depths lies a universe of wonder and beauty.
