from rationalresponders.com:

"a man haunted by the great spector in the sky and his impending wrath."

Maybe it was just that he couldn't stand the Wall of Sound?

I think it meant to say "spectre"

Well, either one could drive you nuts.

It was an interesting read.

It is difficult to say where religion ends and insanity begins. Working with a number of mental out patients I was struck by the number of people there that had religious fixations of one variety or another.

A good friend who worked at a local mental hospital told me that most of her severely ill patients had religious fixations and often had religious explanations for what was happening to them.

Some doctors and councelors will feed the patients' dellusions in order to get more cooperation in treatment but that often back fires doing more damage than good regarding treatment outcome.

Regarding the man who cut off his arm and micro waved it so it couldn't be reattached was following a bibicle injunction. "If thy hand offends thee, cut it off. For it is better to enter paradise lame than to enter damnation whole", or words to that effect.

There is dangerous shit in that book. There is dangerous stuff in many books but the bible has an air of and claim to high authority that other books do not have.

Love the Rational Response Squad. Hate their website. Their white on black background is hard to read and makes me dizzy. Does anyone else feel the same way?

Though I'm what Christopher Hitchens calls an "anti-theist" I have to call foul on the Rational Responders article. I was going to elaborate myself, but I see someone said it better than I would. Here it is from their comments section:

Submitted by Luigi No

Theism is not a mental disorder. It is something that is derived by how we're hardwired. Human beings are pattern-seeking individuals, and as such, we sometimes, when searching for a pattern, have a hit ("Those are MOONS circuling Jupiter!" ), and sometimes have a miss ("This phenomena was caused by a GOD!" ). That's just in our nature. A person who holds a religious belief is not mentally ill.

The yokel who cut his hand off may very well be mentally ill, but that act is not necessarily derived from religion, or even necessarily expedited by it; It is just as well possible that he would've done that had he been an atheist.

Does religion expedite violence in people in such a way that it would not do with the same people were they atheists? Arguably. But I think I better example would be the Crusades, the Inquisition, witchhunts, jihads, fatwas, circumcision, etc. because these people who commit those acts are not mentally ill, and this is why religion's power is so disturbing: It is disturbing precisely because it can get people who are not mentally ill to do things that would otherwise seem to be the domain of the mentally ill. That religion provides a prism for illogical behavior that secular ideas cannot is a valid criticism of it. But one is traipsing onto the realm of pseudoscience when one argues, without citing peer-reviewed scientific evidence, that it can objectively be labeled a sign of mental illness. Doing this is little different than when homophobes refer to homosexuals as mentally ill, or when anti-atheist theists claim that atheists are immoral.

But if these acts were born out of mental illness, then you would expect a drastic drop in mentall illness demographically if theism decreased and atheism increased. I'm skeptical that this would be the case, but it makes an interesting question. Do countries with higher levels of atheism than the U.S., like Sweden, for example, have a lower per capita rate of mental illness? Well, we know from the 2005 study "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies" published the Journal of Religion and Society (http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html) that there appears to be a positive correlation (though not necessarily causation) between religiosity and higher rates of abortion, teenage pregnancy and murder, but I know of no information offhand that establishes the same correlation for mental illness.

Can you supply such information, Kelly? If not, then I'd say that no, I still do not think that theism is a mental disorder. It's just an unfortunate by-product of what makes us uniquely human.

Can you supply such information, Kelly? If not, then I'd say that no, I still do not think that theism is a mental disorder. It's just an unfortunate by-product of what makes us uniquely human

I know many theists who are pro-choice, tolerant, etc etc

On the other hand, I have met many atheists from Europe who rant and rave about how homosexuels are weirdos who go against nature, blah blah blah, and other Europeans who are egotistical capitlists..

In the end, while I'll never understand how some people can believe in a superior being, I find that there are many deists and whose view of life mirrors my own a lot more than many egotistical atheists, and I end up wondering which aspect of one's world view is more important?

Luigi supplied as good response. I think more should be added to it. The kind of things we loosely label as 'insane' (Luigi's examples are fine: Crusades, the Inquisition, witchhunts, jihads, fatwas,...) are so commonplace that it doesn't really make sense to describe the behavior as that of mentally ill people - unfortunately, these things seem to be an aspect of human nature - triggered in these cases by religion. But nationalism, tribalism, and racism are also triggers for similar behavior.

Labeling theism as "mental illness" is also detrimental to the atheism – people will immediately think other sane people they know - who are 'good', 'decent' people, if you like - and conclude, if atheists think theism is mental illness, it must be atheists who are insane.