so when someone pushed the idea further and speculated that christians were not only stupid but actually crazy, i had to respond.  christians have persecuted and looked down on outsiders throughout history--the crusades, anti-gay campaigns, etc.  i was overcome by the sense that these days, the pendulum might inevitably swinging.  christian paranoia of persecution may be coming true soon, as we have alienated the secular world to the point where christian bashing in intellectual circles is not only considered acceptable but even cool.  the difference between the persecution of christians in rome 2000 years ago and the possible persecution we as a church may face is simple--the ancient christians were not in power, they were of no harm to anybody, and they didn't deserve their fate.  modern christians are in some areas actually in a position of power, have caused harm and death in others, and surely deserve some payback.  we have blood on our hands.

so could i really blame them if some intellectual from the West argued that we were crazy?  take the recent wars waged by George Bush.  would any sane person argue that these wars that have resulted in countless injury and death be God's will?  and yet  mainstream evangelical churches and Christian magazines such as Christianity Today have indeed interpreted these events in such a manner and exhorted the faithful to pray for Bush and "democratic" America.  maybe we really are crazy.

at any rate, here are some excerpts from posts i wrote in response to the guy who said faith was some sort of mental disorder.


FAITH AS MENTAL DISORDER?

"Since you label christians with very strong beliefs as "freaks," i'd like to know if you can apply the principles of categorizing people as "freaks" to people with a very strong belief in anything. Like, if my friend has been "wired" from childhood to believe that communism is evil and liberal democracy is good, should i call him a freak since all my "logical" arguments against the goodness of democracy cannot dent his "faith" in his democratic government.

"I am a christian and i have experienced being dogmatic myself. I'd like to think that my journey from simply accepting doctines to critically evaluating my faith is a journey of maturing as a person--not a journey of being healed from a neurosis. If you will classify blind belief as a neurosis, then all of us are sick because even the most open-minded and/or skeptical of us will always believe in something in an absolute manner.

"I will not try to define faith here. I am still struggling with that. Like you, my experience has allowed me to outgrow simple definitions with shallow foundations. But whatever faith is, i'm pretty sure it is not a neurosis.

"Faith--even to the point of fanaticism--is not a result of mental disorder but of mental conditioning.  It is the way our mind gives order to the universe, the way we create categories (good and evil) and define the relationship between these categories (binary opposition).

"When you try to talk to religious people who do not respond to your "logical arguments," it is not because they are sick but because, as you said, they are "wired" differently from you. Being mentally conditioned or wired in a certain way is the fate of all people--even me, even you.

"Your mental conditioning, for example, tells you that arguing or thinking "logically" is the way to establish truth. Hence, you feel that religious people who do not respond to your logic are freaks. You feel they have blind faith. But even your belief in your logic is a faith of some sort. The validity of logic itself is a postulate, something you take for granted and believe absolutely to be true. There are religions and systems of thought that do not depend on logic. Are they less valid? Yes, from the logical point of view, but there are other points of view. Logic assumes that truth is something that can be arrived at rationally and abstractly. All other truths are delusions.

"My point here is that all of us have been mentally conditioned one way or another--by our parents, churches, universities, media, culture, etc. You cannot escape conditioning. No one can. You think people who think differently from you (not just in content but in actual process) are brainwashed, but the truth is that we all are brainwashed and you have just been brainwashed differently. In the same way that you cannot escape conditioning, you cannot escape faith. We all have faith in something. Even atheism is faith in non-faith.

"I guess i'm a skeptic. Definitions of faith that emphasize its aspect as something that cannot be proven is meaningless to me because i believe, in the first place, that nothing can be proven. In life, you just have to choose your postulates and build your theories from there. That is faith. No one escapes that.

"The only posible exception for me are people who commit suicide because of the nauseating sense that life is meaningless. But perhaps even that shows faith in the tyranny of meaning...

"I've been thinking some more about this issue and have realized that what bothers me personally about the whole mental disorder thing is not the issue of whether or not this opinion is truthful. Granted that it is an interesting point that can lead to fruitful discussions, i am worried more about its implications rather than its validity.

"If christians are sick freaks because we stubbornly cling to our beliefs even when some of us can't argue as well as the next man, then he is entitled to his views. His defense of this view has even led me to re-evaluate soem of my positions.

"But something about this bothers me.  what will happen if it becomes the dominant view in society? What if it becomes possible, for the sake of argument, to scientifically demonstrate that we christians are indeed crazy.

"What will stop the state from confining all of us to mental institutions? How different will this be from hitler's condemnation of jews as an inferior race and therefore are impurities that need to be eliminated?

"My atheist friends tell me that christians are so paranoid about "persecution." (So paranoid, in fact, that we don't notice it when we are the ones doing the persecuting, but that's another issue). In this case, however, do i not have a valid cause to be alarmed? Should i not be afraid to get labeled crazy when i am being perceived as illogical? Isn't calling us religious people freaks going too far?

In the end, maybe we deserve that because some of us also do that, too, to people who live differently from us."