461. The 'DEITY DELUSION' - Six Years Before Dawkins' Book

The 'DEITY DELUSION' - Six Years Before Dawkins' Book

In the year 2000, I had started a msn-group called the Nonconformists' And Freethinkers' Haven, which like all other msn-groups does not exist anymore.  Microsoft stopped running the groups.

I make no claim to be original, and considering religion as a mental illness is certainly not such an extremely novel idea.   Probably quite a few other people had the same thought too.   

But when I used the expression 'deity delusion' in the following text published in the group in April of 2000, this was 6 years before Dawkins' book 'God Delusion'.        

This is a part of a page about aspects of nonconformity, it is the last version, that I had saved, all spelling mistakes are unaltered:
 

-----

believing and the deity delusion

There are many long discussions of atheists trying to prove to christians and other religious people how their belief is unlogical and irrational. They even seem to enjoy telling those religious people how stupid they are. But all they really do is waste a lot of arguments on people who are far beyond the reach of any rational argument.

I do not agree with the assumption stating all christians being less intelligent than atheists. Their problem is of a completely different origin: They have a mental disorder which I suggest to call the 'deity delusion'. As you all certainly know there are those people who have the delusion of being someone like Napoleon or a chicken or that their neighbour - who really is just a friendly fellow - is trying to kill them. They are convinced beyond any doubt that their absurde ideas are real. But once you put yourself temporarily into their frame of mind and assume leniently their conviction as if being founded on reality and truth, all their subsequent behaviour could be regarded as stringent, rational and adaquate. It is just one or a few absurde axioms followed by a set and system of behaviour that is more or less logical and intelligent when examined separetely from the underlying conviction. Hardly any sane person would discuss with a imaginating Napoleon the real Napoleon's war strategy. If anyone would try to argue about him not being Napoleon the next day he might have shifted into considering himself as Nelson instead. His basic delusion would thus not stop.

Now consider the special case that the absurde conviction is the belief in the existence of a deity of whatever kind and you have got the model of him, that devote believer in any god, allah or whomever. And as much as it is futile to argue with a "Napoleon" it is futile to argue with those religious people about any content of their faith.

Now if there is a whole asylum full of these cases of deity delution reinforcing themselves mutually in their delusion and there you have got a religion!

But our afflicted congregation is very lucky - they do not have a psychosis, but only a neurosis aquired or formed during early childhood by the brainwashing process of religious education. Therefore some of them have the luck to get cured, either by their own thinking (spontanious remission) or by being exposed to the right arguments. So here are a few of us filling pages like this...

The bad thing is the same as with any other mental disorder too: Hardly any one can be cured while he is not intrinsically motivated by subjectively suffering from his ailment. Thus though I pity those christians for their condition I have stopped taking any initiative to argue with them instead I am regarding this as a futile effort.

But one could even look at the deity delusion as one special case of a collective delusions which seem to be quite frequent. Just try to compare the deity delusion with any other collective delusion in history. One good example are the nazis. Their conviction - I think we could even call it a believe - that some groups of persons are inferior to the extent of serving as a justification for their extermination is beyond doubt a horrible delution. By being reinforced mutually between the members of the population this delution grew and developped into a powerful collective delusion. Only a minority was not afflicted and this minority was exposed to heavy pressure and threat.

I am not comparing the consequences of two different delutions on their respective victims, but when you look at the patterns of both delutions then you can hardly deny their similarity. I even think that the easy spreading of the nazi collective delution was facilitated a lot by the prevalence of the deity collective delution in pre-nazi germany and in the heads of the majority of the population. Once one delusion has found its way into someone's thinking it is not very difficult to enlargen it by integrating a few more absurde assumptions into it. There was not much resistance against the nazis from neither of the two big churches but a lot of those who did resist were atheistic socialists and communists....