Fundamentalist religious beliefs are not mental disorders [View All]

[Az]

They may present all sorts of social problems. They may be the source of hatred and violence for some. They may be at the heart of centuries old conflicts. But they are within the boundaries of normal mental behaviour of human beings.

We can be upset and fret about the rise of fundamentalists. We can percieve the threat the represent to free and open society. But declaring such beliefs to be the result of neurological disfunction completely undermines our cause.

Throughout history religious belief has risen and fallen. There have been tremendous crimes against humanity committed in religions name (as well as many socio/political dogmatic systems as well). It is not the result of deficient brains that this results from.

The human mind learns by copying and learning from that which goes on around it and from parents and teachers. Belief systems gain entry in this way to minds primarily via parents. A belief system that cannot find a foot hold in a healthy mind is not going to be very effective at propogating and thus will quickly die out.

Religious beliefs (be they based on truth or delusion) require this method of propogation to survive. Some become very very good at propogating. Because of how they gain a hold on a believers mind they form the foundation of how they view the world around them. Thus they exist in the person's mind as the defining manner in which to judge all new information.

Just because a person with a strong religious conviction does not accept the reasoned explanations of someone that disagrees with them does not mean they are insane. The words of a skeptic do not counteract a life time of reinforcement of a belief. There is an entire social structure behind most people's beliefs. No matter how much sense and reason you think you have crammed into a statement it is not going to override their sense of truth concerning their beliefs. Its simply not how minds work.

We can differ with people of belief. We can state quite openly that we think they are wrong. We can question their tactics. We can challenge their ideas. But when we resort to calling them insane or delusional we have abandoned the very thing we claim they do not grasp. When we call people names we have abandoned reason.

I personally am very concerned about the course the religious right would set us on. I believe it leads to social upheaval and a personal direct threat to myself and others that lack belief in god such as I do. But it serves me in no way to simply dismiss the religious right as a group of loonies. They happen to be a group of individuals that are very very organized and are very determined to get their way in this nation. And unless we really address the problems they are creating and give up on soothing ourselves by dismissing them as nutz they are simply going to overwhelm us as we sit here pointing fingers at them.

In dismissing people simply because of their beliefs we fail to realise we are also scaring away people of belief that are sympathetic to our causes. There are countless individuals that consider themself fundamentalists that also happen to understand the necessity of seperation of church and state. We can fuss and argue with them about our beliefs. But if we lump them together with the religious right as a bunch of loones we are going to lose them. They will either go silent or move to the right.

Calling people names does us no good. If we are going to fight something then fight it honestly. Fight the things that matter. We don't need to sooth our egoes by proclaiming the enemy to be stupid or mentally deficient. We need to win by doing the right thing.