I have seen the future.

Are you implying that there's something inherently wrong with insane people?

From:

Yes, just like there's something inherently wrong with being stupid, and stupidity and insanity combine to form the vast, vast majority of religion.

From:

How do you define insanity? According to some ideal? If so, who's ideal? Or statistically? If so, who's really to say that the statistical norm isn't mentally fucked up in its own right?

From:

Flippantly, according to an ideal: Mine.

More seriously, the precise definition is a problem, but there is very little doubt that, say, Fred Phelps, or our friend up there who believed that magic charms would make him invisible, or my neighbour who talks to himself constantly and screams at invisible people who keep coming into his apartment after midnight if he hasn't taken his medication, are insane. Where is the exact line? Good question, but there's no arguing that they're on the far side of it.

How's this: When you start believing in things that have no evidence for them, and you start crediting those beliefs *over* the real world when the two conflict, you're insane.

(And don't start in on the "But what is real? Isn't it all perception?" sophistry. That kind of solipsistic idiocy serves only to remove all capability for any kind of rational result, and so is useless in a discussion of practical results. I'm an engineer, not a first-year arts student, so I'm uninterested in dwelling on whether or not the building really exists, only that it certainly appears to be keeping the rain out and holding all those people 3 stories off the ground.)

From:

My jury is currently out when it comes to how best to define insanity. Functional defintions are wierd, if only because there exists the possibility that the greater portion of a society is neurotic in such a way that a person who isn't neurotic would have difficulty functioning within it.
Your proposed definition sounds like a good starting point.
I am neither an engineer nor a first-year arts student; I'm a philosopher. Isn't that impressive? I thought you'd be impressed; I know I am.

From:

What's your definition of evidence?

From:

Evidence is what you can show to an impartial observer to support your conclusion.

(And before you ask, "impartial" is defined along the lines of "does not already share your conclusion")

From:

So anything that could convince someone else then?

That sounds like a weird definition, as say non-christians have been convinced by "evidence" as you define it in the validity of the bible.

From:

There is no evidence for the validity of the Bible that cannot also be used to prove the divinity of Jack Ryan and that Denver was the site of a thermonuclear terrorist attack.

(It's a really great example, actually, as to why you can't use "These places were real, and some of these events really happened!" to prove the validity of the bits for which there is no proof - because a lot of The Sum Of All Fears is real history with real people, places, and events.)

In the end, though, accepting the divinity of Christ is accepting, on faith, something for which there is no evidence. This is not inherently insanity.

When you start taking your acceptance of the divinity of Christ as "evidence" to prove that the real world is not, in fact, real, then you're insane. For example, believing that the world is 6000 years old, believing that evolution does not occur, that homosexuality is unnatural, that you have to wash your hands 10 times or bad things willl happen, that homosexuality is learned, that abstinence education produces fewer babies and slows the spread of STDs over proper sex ed, talking to people who live in your walls, killing people because your dog tells you that they're demons, etc - all of those are cases of taking that for which there is no evidence and giving it credence over the facts, and *that* is a sign of insanity.

From:

Not under the definition of evidence you just gave above.

And some of those being insanity sound a bit too strong to me, because if you accept that say thinking the world is 6000 years old is insane in and of itself, everyone is insane, because I have trouble believing that there's anyone who doesn't have at least one untrue belief like that.

From:

Yes, under the definition of evidence I gave above. You can *tell* people about Christ's divinity. You can give them the book that says "Christ is divine." You can show, with evidence, that some of the events in the book really did happen. What you cannot do is present *evidence* of Christ's divinity, and you cannot provide *evidence* of some of the more outlandish claims.

In the same way, I can *tell you* about bacteria - but when I can show the course of an infection, and bring in a microscope and blow them up to be big enough to actually see, that's evidence.

> I have trouble believing that there's anyone who doesn't have at least one
> untrue belief like that.

Really? What's yours? What do *you* insist is true despite *all* evidence being to the direct opposite?

(For bonus points: don't you think that's a little crazy?)

From:

From what you wrote earlier:>>Evidence is what you can show to an impartial observer to support your conclusion.

(And before you ask, "impartial" is defined along the lines of "does not already share your conclusion")<<

Which means anything that I can show an impartial oberver that can convince them of something must be evidence towards that things. Since impartial observers have been converted to christianity before, there must be evidence for it (under your definition of evidence).

I'm suspecting you actualy are not defining your own meaning correctly here, but I'm not quite sure what your meaning is.

>>Really? What's yours? What do *you* insist is true despite *all* evidence being to the direct opposite?

(For bonus points: don't you think that's a little crazy?)<<

Well, for one thing, the evidence against many of the beliefs you believe makes someone insane requires either faith of an elete minority (ie scientists), or actualy being one of those elete yourself, and in a few narrow fields no less. So it's quite reasonable for this evidence to not be accepted from people brought up to distrust that elete.

And what do I believe that I know isn't true? Of course there isn't anything. But there have been things I did believe like that, and now know is not true. Such as say viruses being completely inactive outside of a host cell.

From:

pumblechook.livejournal.com

Have you taken an introductory psychology course, darlin?

From: