TwiceHuman
20d ago
Delusions about the universe sending you messages are not that weird.
All it requires is for you to perceive meaning in coincidences, and then to anthropomorphize the universe. And you surely know that human beings love their anthropomorphization.
Just a little bit of anxiety, and people start noticing when digital clocks around them say 12:34 and other such patterns. From there, we have lucky numbers (like 7), magical numbers (like 3), and unlucky numbers (13 in the west, 4 in parts of Asia). And you probably know about the significance of 12 and 36 from your chinese novels. Add a little bit of weirdness and you get angel numbers and sacred geometry and such. The word "omen" is fairly well known, even to sane people, and an omen is a coincidence that one regards as a sort of message about the future. The distance from these normal human quirks and to "This traffic sign is speaking to me" is not very far.
Being religious is not a sign of insanity, since sanity isn't defined as the degree to which one is logical. Even if rationalists on the internet tell you otherwise, human beings are not logical, and this is not actually a flaw.
Human beings see meaning in noise. When we lack information, we "fill in the gaps", and this makes us able to perceive things even with limited information, but it also makes us hallucinate when we go too long without sleep, and to see faces where they do not exist (pareidolia). The "overactive agent detector" is built into our perception, it likely aids with sympathy, and results in strange things like "Mono no aware". I think 'minor positive' is putting it too lightly, but I also don't subscribe to the belief that only truth has utility and that all bias is wrong (and darwinism doesn't select as if it's true, either).
Wikipedias definition of rationality refers to normality/typicality, it differs from the rationalist definition, which refers to an inhuman level of objectivity only seen in modern western cultures and in certain outliers. I'd say "health of the human mind" is a better definition, of course implying that rationalist communities aren't any more healthy than the average farmer. Insanity can occur in highly logical people, with little negative effect on their productivity (e.g. Terry Davis made his own operation system despite being a Skizophrenic), so they are not opposites.
The reason such a person shouldn't be diagnosed is because physical health isn't mental health. The two can relate, but they don't necessarily. Also, the system of diagnosis is crude, so it's a poor authority outside of clearly defined boxes.
"Religious conviction" cannot be cured because it's not a disease. It's the mind functioning exactly how it's meant to. You may assume the mind ought to prioritize truth, but that's not how the mind works and neither is it how it's meant to work. The sense of self which is capable of reasoning identifies as the entire being, but it's actually just a small part of the brain, and the majority of the brain uses associative reasoning rather than logic. Rational people notice the conflict between their higher order thinking and their animalistic nature, and consider this a mistake to be corrected, after which they self-tyrannize, calling this process improvement, maturation or learning.
Religious people have better mental health on average (I can dig up the source if you want, it was one of Emil Kirkegaard's articles). And I meant that rationalists want to reduces biases, and turn human beings into something that they're not, and that they naively assume that this is an improvement, because they naively assume that truth seeking is superior. You probably know that depressed people tend to have more accurate worldviews, and I'd consider this an argument against the value of truth seeking, but I don't expect you to agree. This is likely because it's an axiom of yours, and one cannot argue against an axiom, and neither can one defend an axiom. Moreover, even if I say "truth seeking is not optimal", and this were true, then you could say "since the statement is true, truth is still optimal". So despite my belief being something like "disillusionment is bad for your health and there's many hidden costs to what you're doing to yourself", the position I end up having to defend is "truth is not truth", which I obviously won't.
I can give arguments like "Sharks lack intelligence and have lived for around 450 million years without issue, while humans, who have been somewhat truth seeking for about 200 years, are on the path of self-destruction", making irrationality more meta-rational. I could also point out issues with the assumptions of rationalists, for instance, they think "more knowledge is better in itself", but what's actually true is that relative knowledge offers an advantage over another person. They incorrectly conclude "X is good for me, so X is good in general", and then they make "X is good" part of the concensus, and then everyone seeks more X. But despite the increase in X, the system as a whole does not seem to benefit any (Easterlin paradox is one example of this)
But I have made 100s of such observations, and I don't feel writing all of them, and neither do I think you'd want to read them. I can't counter all of rationalism in just a few pages of text, I can only point at a few flaws and hope you teach yourself how to discover the rest of the flaws I've seen by reverse engineering the process which I used to find these few examples.
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