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It's not a mental illness to have faith in something. Faith is a normal part of being human. Even atheists have faith: Faith in their own belief that there are

It's not a mental illness to have faith in something. Faith is a normal part of being human. Even atheists have faith: Faith in their own belief that there are no gods or other supernatural beings. They don't have empirical evidence that there are no higher beings, just as religious types don't have empirical evidence that such beings exist. On a smaller scale, one can have faith in one's own abilities or those of the people around them. Once again, not a mental illness. Now, I'll concede that religion is a manmade concept, usually a way for those who seek power over others to achieve it. But faith and religion are two completely different things. There are those who believe in a higher power (God? Gods? Spirits? Aliens? Cthulhu?) who are anti-religion, just as there are those who have no true faith in a higher power but use religion to further an agenda (militant extremists and terrorists come to mind, both foreign and domestic). To put it another way, religion is an institution, faith is human nature. You have faith in the words you wrote; does that make you mentally ill? No, of course not, you just come off as having a huge chip on your shoulder and a predisposition for painting everyone in a billions-strong group with the same brush. But that's a typical human flaw, not a documented mental illness.

ldehaan 10y ago
i really liked your reply :) while I agree I think faith is a bit more than just human nature, I think it's a mechanism developed over centuries to deal with the unknown while our minds continued to expand to understand the unknown. I think of it as a bug, maybe a little hack that was put in to deal with situations that defy explanation. it helps us come up with explanations, it has a function to deal with unexplained events without loosing our mental model of the world. faith is like a shim, there is a piece of a mental model that doesn't exist and doesn't fit with your platform, so faith exists as a way into shim that difference into your code base. religion is code that takes advantage of the shim. however religion is a virus and it takes over your other mental faculties, weakening them. introducing functions that make no sense, but will continue to run until your mind finds a place for them. there are several ways to take advantage of the faith bug but you can see patterns for different types of systems that use faith hooks to make calls to your reason centers and overrides their output. the more these calls override the reason centers the less they are used. now the point at which the faith bug is the most susceptible to being utilized is during the brains formative years, and this tactic is used incredibly frequently. so I see and agree with your point that religion is an institution and faith is a function of humanity, but faith is a bug that can be patched and I also would argue that faith is too broad a term for the reasoning functionality of the brain. faith is a good word to use when we lack the proper terms, but personal and religious faith are a small subset of the entire faith function and I think it needs to be broken up into its requisite parts. and maybe the overall function that applies to religion in context to faith is world-model_update(previous_model, new_viewpoint, contextual_conviction/external_conviction) and It seems to me that there is early injection malware in religious code and buffer overflow tricks when you can't get the early injection code to work. thanks for the reply :)

ldehaan 10y ago

i really liked your reply :) while I agree I think faith is a bit more than just human nature, I think it's a mechanism developed over centuries to deal with the unknown while our minds continued to expand to understand the unknown. I think of it as a bug, maybe a little hack that was put in to deal with situations that defy explanation. it helps us come up with explanations, it has a function to deal with unexplained events without loosing our mental model of the world. faith is like a shim, there is a piece of a mental model that doesn't exist and doesn't fit with your platform, so faith exists as a way into shim that difference into your code base. religion is code that takes advantage of the shim. however religion is a virus and it takes over your other mental faculties, weakening them. introducing functions that make no sense, but will continue to run until your mind finds a place for them. there are several ways to take advantage of the faith bug but you can see patterns for different types of systems that use faith hooks to make calls to your reason centers and overrides their output. the more these calls override the reason centers the less they are used. now the point at which the faith bug is the most susceptible to being utilized is during the brains formative years, and this tactic is used incredibly frequently. so I see and agree with your point that religion is an institution and faith is a function of humanity, but faith is a bug that can be patched and I also would argue that faith is too broad a term for the reasoning functionality of the brain. faith is a good word to use when we lack the proper terms, but personal and religious faith are a small subset of the entire faith function and I think it needs to be broken up into its requisite parts. and maybe the overall function that applies to religion in context to faith is world-model_update(previous_model, new_viewpoint, contextual_conviction/external_conviction) and It seems to me that there is early injection malware in religious code and buffer overflow tricks when you can't get the early injection code to work. thanks for the reply :)