Types of Delusion
There are a number of different kinds of delusion:
- See or hearing things that are not there, or experiencing them strongly transformed, e.g. seeing people with red glowing coals for eyes.
- Believing or claiming to believe things false to fact about the present, e.g. that the earth is flat, or that there is an invisible man in the sky who will torture you in eternity if you don’t kill enough homosexuals.
- Believing or claiming to believe things happened in history that did not. e.g. that George Washington freed the slaves, or that the earth stopped spinning at the command of Joshua.
It is not a delusion to believe something controversial for which there is evidence on both sides. You can be wrong, of course, but that does not imply anything faulty with your thinking ability. Delusion requires ignoring evidence for/against the aberrant/usual view. There is no evidence to support any religion whatsoever. People who indulge in religion are thus delusional. I think we should stop pretending religious delusion is innocuous.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)