Alternate History: No Christian Fundamentalism

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Bengt

But thinking you hear voices and actually having auditory hallucinations are both possible illnesses, right? And probably require different treatments.

Of course. And delusion too is a possible symptom of illness. The thing is that

1. Religious people can hold strongly to beliefs in the face of evidence that the practitioner considers superior, without having any illness. This is not delusion, which would be a symptom of illness. It is faith.
2. Hearing the voices of "people" not actually there
   1. if it were a result of illness, would be hallucination, not delusion, and
   2. is not characteristic of religious people in the way that believing things is.

Flyndaran, just where he is trying to demonstrate that you don't need an expert to recognise that religious people are deluded, makes three significant technical errors in a single sentence, thus neatly making a claim that is evidence of its own falsity.



In any case, we are way off the topic of an alternative history in which the Christian Fundamentalism of the late 19th Century to present did not develop, and our current discussion is entirely irrelevant to Roleplaying in General. That is not good.