I’m an atheist and think overt religious beliefs are ridiculous, for rational reasons.
However, religious beliefs are so common and dominant that it would never be labelled a mental illness because it clearly isn’t. It would be like claiming that after you turn off the lights, every once in a while, you want to hustle up the stairs a bit more quickly because you get a weir feeling, is a mental illness, even if you rationally know you’re safe.
It’s a natural state that probably has (or comes from) an evolutionary advantage. It’s just something we rationally should be able to get ourselves past.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
I’m an atheist and think overt religious beliefs are ridiculous, for rational reasons.
However, religious beliefs are so common and dominant that it would never be labelled a mental illness because it clearly isn’t. It would be like claiming that after you turn off the lights, every once in a while, you want to hustle up the stairs a bit more quickly because you get a weir feeling, is a mental illness, even if you rationally know you’re safe.
It’s a natural state that probably has (or comes from) an evolutionary advantage. It’s just something we rationally should be able to get ourselves past.
But a mental illness? Not even close.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
I figured it wasn’t an original thought, but this is a great quote that drives the point home.