1. The former statement only admits to CERTAIN religions, NOT ALL religions. The latter makes a statement about how atheological apologists refer to ALL religions.

2. Gavagai NEVER conceded that irrationality and dangerousness constitutes a mental disorder. In fact, Gavagai and I (well, mostly me actually) discussed this earlier in this thread.

Reverend, wasn't this same question already asked and addressed earlier?

Whether the latter statement refers to "these people" or all religions can be easily verified by going back to Gavagai's text to examine the context in which this was said. I can't be bothered though; as I've already told Gavagai, I'm just generally lazy when it comes to research, and reason #2 below still stands.

What conclusions Gavagai and I arrived at is completely irrelevant to whether it's a contradiction. Reason #2 alone not only proves that he did not contradict himself, but also reminds us that it's the atheist's burden to prove to Gavagai that irrationality and dangerousness constitutes a mental disorder. In fact, I'm not convinced as well (please see my earlier posts for why).

P.S. Even though it's completely irrelevant, I'll tell you that not every conversation needs to be a debate, let alone arrive at a "conclusion." We actually did come to a conclusion though (well, at least for myself; I presented my case for atheists and NOT theists, and I'm not going to spend any more time to argue my case, so it's up to atheist whether to accept my case) - a framework/angle in which atheists should approach theists with regarding religion being a mental disorder.

pm9347   Isaac Newton himself described certain aspects of the Bible fictional

gavagai list

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Boethius, Duns Scotus, Pascal, Ockham, Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, Kant, Hegel, Bayes, Kierkegaard, Jacobi, Husserl, Brentano, Frege, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, James, Godel, Cantor, Planck, Santayana, Kripke, Polkinghorne, and hundreds more.  As for contemporary philosophers

Socrates hard to tell, he was accused at his trial of being an atheist to suggest he was a definite theist would-be pushing it, as it is unclear what Gods if any this man believed in

Plato again unclear he believed the stories of the gods were probably myths

Aristotle  believed in a god that was neither caring for us or for our worship  

Most of the rest were born after Christianity was founded and philosophers such as Galileo Galilei were threatened with torture and execution for promoting any ideas that were against biblical teaching  unsurprisingly many of the latter philosophers believed in God the Christian god or else

What these philosophers would have written in a free society where radical and controversial ideas wouldn't result in the philosopher getting burned at the stake for heresy we shall never know, and to believe they were all happy devout theists would be unwise at best

Christianity and the Bible as we kown it today were founded by a Roman emperor called Constantine, usual kind of Roman emperor covered in blood and he was happily murdering and torturing anybody that he perceived as a possible future threat including his own brother-in-law, whilst declaring the ideals of Christianity, he was obviously inspired by God (go on cut their throats) , subsequently Christianity itself was involved in murdering and torturing, anybody that didn't convert to god's love Christianity gave us such inspirational ideals as the inquisitions the dark ages the list is almost endless and it still continues with its love today, we can thank Christianity for backstreet abortions in many countries, the declaration from the Catholic Church that condom should not be used in AIDS riddled countries again the list is almost endless

To see the world through a Christians gods perspective is truly a horrific perspective,

original context

Indeed I cannot see how irrational and dangerous behavior cannot be perceived as a distressing mental disorder, I am a persistent Devil am I not

Although I see your point

I'm quite happy with Gavagai definition at the moment

Pm93,

I'm glad you found those sources useful. Anybody who has taken even an introductory course in Greek philosophy knows that Socrates' enemies accused him of being an "atheist" merely to gain a political advantage over him; it was the surest way to ruin Socrates' credibility, since atheism was frowned upon in his time. (The same thing happened to many early Christians when they were persecuted by the Romans.) The fact is, Socrates did believe in God. He accepted monotheism instead of the polytheism that was popular in his day. It is an uncontroversial fact that he believed in God. The same goes for Plato, who explicitly argued for God's existence with great care. Aristotle also believed in God, but not a God that is always concerned with human affairs. This is why in my original post I made sure to specify that these people accepted a theism of "some sort". They believed (or do believe) in a God. That's all. (As it turns out, most of them were Christians. Some, not.)

But none of them believed merely because they thought they would be tortured or punished otherwise. This is evidenced by the fact that almost all of them deeply integrated theism with their philosophical and scientific work. Nearly all of them also defended theism or the coherence of theism. Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, and the others were sincere men of God. When atheists suggest conspiracy theories, such as "so-and-so just pretended to believe in God, because otherwise so-and-so would be tortured" ask the atheists for textual evidence in support of such a theory. Where did "so and so" indicate that he never really believed in God? Atheists won't provide such evidence.

And they can't provide such evidence. Because there is none. To the contrary, we have truckloads of textual evidence demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt that people like Galileo and Newton loved God, were extremely interested in matters theological, and routinely discussed God in their philosophical and scientific work. So the atheist who offers these conspiracy theories is really offering armchair speculations that are contrary to fact. Many of them simply don't like the idea that really smart and rational people often believe in God. Many atheists pretend to extol the virtues of rationalism. What's ironic is that many of them don't actually read the rationalists. So it shocks them when they find out that nearly all the rationalists were theists of some sort, especially the core members of rationalism (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz). 

 It's also a popularized myth that the Church alone persecuted Galileo for merely theological reasons. This is only a part of what happened.  As scholars have suggested, it was also largely groups of competing aristotelian scientists that hated Galileo for abandoning the geocentric model. It's simplistic to view it as "science vs. religion"; it was largely science vs. science. And Galileo himself would agree, since he thought science and the divine reality don't conflict.

Needless to say, hundreds of the brightest philosophers alive today are thoroughgoing theists. Last I checked, nobody is outside being burnt at the stake for not believing in God. So what conspiracy theory would the atheist adopt in this case to dismiss the evidence? One wonders.

Of course, it's important to realize that just because so many brilliant philosophers believe in God, that doesn't necessarily mean God exists. Even if everybody on the planet believed that God exists, it might be that God doesn't exist. I provided those resources merely for your own research. If you'd like more, feel free to PM me. (It might take me a while to respond, though, because I don't check it everyday.)

To me, this looks like the No True Scotsman fallacy in disguise. They said they were Theists, but they weren't TRUE Theists. It has been pointed out that they were Theists.  

Deist Cpt_pineapple and thank you for pointing out that I wasn't 100% clear in my post

let me clarify

Aristotle was a Deist not a Theists this is without question

Socrates one cannot be completely certain, he was accused of being an atheist at his trial, a charge which he did not deny, Socrates claimed that the concept of goodness, instead of being determined by what the gods wanted, actually precedes it. which leads me to believe he may have been a Deist

As for the philosophers of post Roman Catholic times I am uncertain and I would need to research each one individually but it would be a brave man indeed that suggested he knew the most intimate thoughts of these philosophers in those troubling times

Reading Isaac Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John, leads me to believe he may have been a Deist at best

Deist/theists this can be perceived as only a small technical point but I am by nature quite anally retentive in such matters

Thanks, Sodium. I would gladly have a discussion like this with you. How about through PM?

As far as the post you linked to, I'll have to set aside some time to review it in detail. From a cursory reading, though, it seems like the author is just trying to argue for noncognitivism about religous discourse. This is an old view which was strongly advocated by Antony Flew, one of the world's greatest atheist philosophers. (I should note that Flew is actually no longer an atheist; he has recently rejected atheism, and now believes that a deistic God exists.) In any case, the rough idea is that bits of religious language literally have no truth-value: they're cognitively meaningless. The statement "God does not exist" is neither true nor false. It's like asserting "gooble widgetee foink": meaningless nonsense. Views like this oftentimes turn on some pretty controversial issues from the philosophy of language.

For one thing, they tend to presuppose a referential theory of meaning. According to referentialism, utterances (or bits of text) are meaningful in virtue referring to nonlinguistic entities. (These entities can be either mental or extramental objects.) If an utterance doesn't refer to anything, it's meaningless. Theories like this are highly problematic. I've been fortunate enough to receive formal training in graduate seminars in contemporary philosophy of language, and I can tell you that it's rare nowadays to find philosophers who still endorse naive referentialism. But I won't go into the problems with referentialism here, since it may be the case that the author of the post doesn't presuppose such a theory. As I say, I'll have to look at it more carefully. Perhaps sometime tomorrow I'll post a response.

Cheers,

Gavagai

Hi Rev,

A contradiction takes the form of the following schema: p and ~p. I don't see any sentences in the above quotation of mine that fit this schema. In your next post, please explain in specific terms why you think the sentences I used are nevertheless contradictory.

Cheers,

Gavagai

?

Rev,

A conjunction of statements like 

 (S1): Some particular instances of X are such-and-such,

and

(S2): X per se is not such-and-such

is not contradictory. 

If there is just a single person who believes in God and who does not have any mental disorders, it is false that theism is a mental disorder. (And this is a valid inference in first-order quantificational logic: (∃x)~(Fx) ⊃ ~(∀x)(Fx).) As it turns out, there are thousands of such people. Therefore, theism is not a mental disorder. To explain this away, many here have invented ad hoc hypotheses out of thin air, like "they must not really believe in God" or "well, they appear sane in other areas of life, but since they still have a particular belief that a higher form of intelligence exists, a God of some sort, they must nevertheless be mentally ill." Bizarre speculations like this stifle freethought and hinder sincere, rational discussion.

Gavaqai, we all suffer from all of the classically defined mental disorders it's just too what extent these are expressed, that defines whether we fit within the understanding of socially acceptable thus sane and rational, or outside the socially acceptable thus insane and irrational with variations in-between ie eccentric delusional and so on

Would you accept this as true Gavaqai ?

 I don't. Speak for yourself, Rev. 

Then perhaps you would be interested in this bumper sticker " I am perfectly sane. The voices in my head said so "

? have you ever believed that somebody was plotting against you without evidence

? have you ever deceive anybody

? shall I continue if you haven't become too paranoid, or will you concede the point

Hi Gavagai my apologies I thought you were joking when replying to my earlier post

"we all suffer from all of the classically defined mental disorders"

"I don't. Speak for yourself, Rev."

Only a madman would consider themselves perfectly sane and rational, I was obviously mistaken in believing this was a widespread and intuitive concept 

I didn't realize you were serious,

Do you consider yourself perfectly sane ? seriously

If we are to have a discussion involving the concept of a mental disorder, then we must establish an understanding of what constitutes a mental disorder 

"certain religious beliefs really express underlying mental disorders" "But I disagree that religious belief has this feature"

This will be a discussion about psychology, the key feature is of a psychological nature is it not ?

I agree with Gavagai that none of that is contradictory.  Actually, that is to put it too lightly.  It's confirmed by logic that it's not contradictory.  In layman's terms, certain religions != ALL religions.  Gavagai's latter statement refers to ALL religions.  It's a common IQ test question: If some Shnarkies are Bedzus, and all Bedzus are cold-blooded, are all Shnarkies cold-blooded?  (the answer is "no," by the way)

However, whether to believe in a religion is indicative of a mental disorder might require consulting psychology to establish what EXACTLY constitutes a mental disorder.  Once that is established, then I think we can determine whether religion really is a mental disorder.

P.S. Yo Gavagai, I took up on your offer a while back to PM you.  Still interested in PMing me back why you believe in your religion? 

Hi Sodium Pentothal
 
Not quite my line of thinking

let me demonstrate

Gavagai said
"certain religious beliefs really express underlying mental disorders" "But I disagree that religious belief has this feature"

First you would need to define which religious beliefs Gavagai meant specifically, and from that point determine what part of the religious ideology Gavagai was referring to specifically, I'm sure by now you would realize the conclusion of this

Secondly we would need to get a rough definition of mental disorders. to show how this affects reasoning, then demonstrate how ideology affects reasoning

Can you see my line of thinking now Sodium Pentothal ? It was not my intention to invoke Shnarkies in the contradiction that I perceived, cute as they are

I was attempting to agree a rough definition of what defines a mental disorder with Gavagai, but Gavagai seems unwilling or unable to comprehend the difference between the  psychology of reasoning (psychology) and the correct principles of reasoning (logic)

Which would make a future conversation pointless, until Gavagai has at-least a rough idea of what a mental disorder is, and how the principles and language of psychology work