re: #321 Cato the Elder

I could not disagree more.

Once you start “diagnosing” people’s beliefs, the door is open for them to do the same to you.

Richard Dawkins believes I’m a mental defective for believing in God. I believe he is a turd sandwich. Neither belief should be subject to psychoanalysis unless it harms someone else.

It is a common misconception to believe that Richard Dawkins characterized the belief in God as a mental illness. He has made this clear on several occasion. The book “Good Delusion” is not a treatise portraying religion as a mental illness whatsoever and instead a delusion from his point of view. Many of us, believers and unbelievers have been accused of being delusional in our beliefs from time to time.

To clear this up I will refer to a Q and A with several panelists including Richard Dawkins:

God, Science and Sanity %P% Q&A %P% ABC TV

DAN ANDERSON: Professor McGorry, in your experience do you think that belief in a transcendent being or in the transcendent in general is part of normal, healthy human psychology or is it a symptom of mental illness?

PATRICK MCGORRY: That’s obviously a trick question, right?

TONY JONES: Do your best, Phillip.

PATRICK MCGORRY: Well, look, you know, I’ve looked after a lot of people over the last 20 or 30 years who have had very significant psychiatric disorders and, you know, it’s quite common for religious themes to actually manifest within the context of their symptoms so, you know, religion and mental health do co-exist in that way but clearly, also, spirituality is an important part of positive mental health. So I think there’s two sides to this coin and, you know, I think the question - we could talk about that for hours, really.

TONY JONES: Let’s go back to Richard Dawkins. I mean, you refer to belief in God as “the God delusion”. I’m wondering whether you think that spirituality may have a positive psychological benefit, as the questioner implies?

RICHARD DAWKINS: No, I don’t think it has a positive psychological benefit. As to whether religious belief is a mental illness, I don’t think it’s fair to call it a mental illness because so many people actually do it. On the other hand I think you could say that if you met one person, just one person, who claimed to believe some of the things that religious people as a whole claim to believe, you would think they were suffering from (indistinct). I mean it’s just because so many of them believe it that we treat it as normal. But if you actually met somebody who said he believed that water could turn into wine, a man could walk on water, that a man could raise somebody else from the dead, you’d say, “Well, put him away.” But because so many people believe it, you take it seriously.