Given that no one has been able to demonstrate any objective evidence for a deity or anything supernatural, that definition is as accurate as I can find for theists who believe a deity exists, and can & does set aside the physical laws of the universe at will.
This necessarily includes all contemporary monotheisms of course, and a brief read of their religious tomes proves this to be the case.
The definition in the title is of course the primary dictionary definition of the word delusion.
Many theists have even gone so far on here as to claim there is no such thing as objective evidence, dismissing the methods of science and logic. Two examples would be Someone, and quip, though there are undoubtedly more.
I know Breezy claimed nothing could really be entirely objective as humans are inherently biased.
This struck me as one of those spurious apologist's claims that since we can't ever have 100% certainty about anything, then this justified denying any fact no matter how objectively well evidenced it was. One wonders why he's bothering to study anything in that case, but that aside it is a demonstrably absurd claim.
So if no one can demonstrate any OBJECTIVE evidence for an unshakeable belief, then by definition that is a delusion.
Subscription Note:
Choosing to subscribe to this topic will automatically register you for email notifications for comments and updates on this thread.
Email notifications will be sent out daily by default unless specified otherwise on your account which you can edit by going to your userpage here and clicking on the subscriptions tab.
Theist use logic and reason with everything, but when it comes to religion.
They also devote pages and pages of flimflam claims to denouncing scientific facts, but won't come anywhere near this thread, if only we could work out why.
I have no idea how you muster the patience to deal with Breezy, Quip, SFT, or C Out or any of these posts that go on for 10 pages. You just keep hanging in there and repeating yourself in different ways over and over and over. The OP can not stay on the same topic and they end up dragging you down through a rabbit hole of assertion after assertion after assertion and never get back to addressing the OP they have made.
Your patience at the keyboard is astounding and you wind down the rabbit hole with them and call them on the pseudo-intellectualism.
Calling any firmly held belief, without evidence for that belief, certainly sounds like delusion to me.
You know, years ago, I lived in this apartment complex that had a nice pool, tennis courts, a weight room, and more. Pine Creek Village. Anyway, as serious students, my room mate and I would lug all our books out to the pool side and spend our weekends studying. It was the only time we had as we both had full time jobs. Anyway, there was this guy always wandering around the pool with a heavy book in his hand. We nicknamed him "Page One." We gave him the name because he never read the book he was carrying. Occasionally he would sit down and open the book, but he was always busy looking around. We were sure that he had never read more than one page in any of the books he carried.
These guys tend to remind me of Page One. Not only have they not read the books but there just seems to be something not quite right with them. Something that enables them to simply gloss over valid facts and information that destroys their superfluous assertions. It's an absolute mystery to me how they do it, but unlike you, I just do not have the patience for it.
Breezy is pathetic, for all his self aggrandising verbiage, the way he skims passed any response or questions that exposes his bs is nauseating. I'd feel sorry for anyone that sad if he wasn't so odiously arrogant.
The way he sneers at others as if he is an intellectual giant, a polymath we should all defer to, is hilarious. He's a student who is denying a globally accepted scientific fact in a field he has zero credentials in. I recommend he sticks with psychology anyway, but as a patient. Anyway here is someone who is not a student, but actually had some knowledge in the field Breezy aspires to...
"Freud regarded God as an illusion, based on the infantile need for a powerful father figure; religion, necessary to help us restrain violent impulses earlier in the development of civilisation, can now be set aside in favour of reason and science."
Or this...
"In Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907), his earliest writing about religion, Freud suggests that religion and neurosis are similar products of the human mind: neurosis, with its compulsive behaviour, is "an individual religiosity", and religion, with its repetitive rituals, is a "universal obsessional neurosis."
He (Freud) also concluded that "all religious beliefs are "illusions and insusceptible of proof."
Much like breezy's ravings about evolution...
I never cared for Freud's regression technique; however, his defense mechanisms and object relations stuff is quite good. I know for a fact that when I was a Christian; the concept of God fulfilled the "father" position in my mind. (Being a young teen who grew up without a father and who left home at 16. If there was a reason Christianity got a grip on me, this was it.) And, there comes a time when we mature and no longer require magic dragons or imaginary father figures. At least some of us.
Sheldon,
I understand your frustration with John Breezy, but I have to call you out. Please, no ad hominem attacks here. Destroy his ideas if you will, but not the person.
Thanks,
Alembe.
Sometimes a good old 'ad hominem' is necessary, as necessary as a mental health day.......It allows one to return to the fray, refreshed and ready to pummel with the cudgel of logic and puncture with the rapier of reason. The equivalent of a good old fashioned strip down and decarb on your motor carriage.
There is a simple rule to not being offended by insults...don't read them. or if your eye is irresistibly drawn to them, ignore them.
I prefer to receive ad hominem attacks; they keep my beliefs safe.
@ Johnny
Thats a novel way to spell delusions!
Is that why you so often resort to ad hominem in place of substance, to try and provoke reciprocity so you can pretend this somehow vindicates beliefs you can demonstrate no objective evidence for?
This makes a bit more sense now.
I never resort to ad hominem unless someone has relentlessly done it to me first.
I've given him every chance as well. What's more I have addressed his absurd superstitious flimflam, and he never reciprocated. So I'm sorry but you're wrong here. My attack though ad hominem was also addressing his behaviour when posting. Which as he himself pointed out isn't necessarily fallacious. He's relentlessly dishonest for a start. I am also one of the few people who take the time to point out why his posts are dishonest.
For example the way he tries to arrogantly sneer at others as less qualified than he is, as if he doesn't understand the significance of where he has chosen to deny the scientific fact of evolution.
If his ad hominem attacks were only aimed at me I might have regarded it as frustration, but they're not. See his appallingly disrespectful attack on Cyber just recently.
He has set the tone and I respond in kind. When he stops being arrogant condescending and dishonest, and addresses difficult questions instead of ignoring them or insulting the people who ask them I'll reciprocate.
Forum Guideline Number 2: No bullying.
Where does ad hominem end and bullying begin?
In the judgement of the Mods.......
Well I suggest you read some of the threads in the chronology they were posted. That post of mine was after he'd resorted to multiple ad hominem attacks on various posters in his thread attacking the scientific fact of evolution.
If he wants to claim intellectual superiority as a smokescreen insult rather than address salient facts , we're entitled to point out how pathetic and dishonest that is.
So when he claimed Cyber was being lazy and lending her brain out rather than using it, because she pointed out his denial of evolution was contradicted by scientific support for it, rather than address this fact which he dodges every time.
Is that bullying and ad hominem?
If Cyber thought so then he wasn't called on it. Cyber's frustration at what was a puerile insult was palpable to me.
Or Is this just about him being outnumbered? He chooses to espouse creationist propaganda in an atheist leaning chat room. What's more he does it in a dishonest way by acting as if his claims have scientific credibility we're all too ignorant to grasp, but fails to acknowledge whether he's shared his verbiage with any experts in the field of evolution outside of other creationists.
The Mods around here are extremely fair. And, frankly speaking, Breezy, for some reason, seems to deal with criticism (I want to say well but I really cant get there,) in his own way. He seems to get called out on the site more than anyone else and still he just keeps at it. If nothing else, he is determined, when it comes to clinging to an idea. My own deficiency is that I just can't keep a conversation going when dealing with this sort of personality. Sometimes I just have to walk away. That's why I find it so amazing that some of you will hang in there point by point with him. It just seems like an exercise in futility to me. But HEY! As long as everyone is enjoying what they are doing, isn't the site serving its function?
It's interesting to explore how beliefs can intersect with perceptions of objectivity. Platforms like omegle new could offer diverse perspectives on this topic.