Give me at least 5 good reasons...

Meh, you kinda took over the "is society a cult?" thread.

 

Why do you think mental illness is a ridiculous analogy for religion?

It consumes lives, hinders progress, distorts reality, and causes the afflicted to make bad decisions sometimes to the point of destruction and death!

Are you fucking kidding me! It's one of the most popular methods used on drug addicts, it's called addiction swapping. There's a good reason drug addiction is replaceable with religion, because it's an addictive mental illness that easily accommodates addictive personality disorders.

 

So does alcohol, emotion, literature, boredom... pretty much everything that makes humans different from animals should be regarded as a mental disorder by this definition, in fact! Still, plenty of people will tell you that they're sane, it's just everyone else that's nuts.

The truth is that you're committing the "reductio ad Hitlerum" fallacy - that is, implying (or in fact insisting on) a causal relationship between two things that coincide. Of course, if you had any actual evidence of a causal relationship, you'd be fine. But you haven't.

And of course, you are undeniably being selective in your analysis. Religion has been responsible for wonderful architecture, great literature and art, the unification of disparate humans towards a single aim...

And then there is a qualitative study which compared how happy people were (based on their self-assessment and the assessments of others) to various aspects of their lives - age, geographical location, affluence, class, etc. The only significant link they found was that those with a religious or spiritual conviction were happier on average.

And I'm sure you'll tell me that "ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID LOLOLOL????? MOST IDIOTS ARE HAPPY LOL SO ARE MOST LUNATICS AND MOST DRUG ADDICTS" or some other stupid shit, and I'll have to point out that so are a lot of sane, smart and unaddicted people. So, you know, just thought I'd nip that one in the bud.

So? You're basically making another fallacy (unless you plan to argue that none of what I'm about to say could possibly be inferred from the above, which I'm sure you will), or at least attempting to mislead here: you're trying to imply that religion is bad because many ex-drug addicts are religious. You do not say anything about the millions of religious people who aren't ex drug addicts. You don't do this because it does not suit your desire to present religion as bad.

Regardless of whether this "addiction swapping" you describe is in any way destructive (which I'd like to see you prove), your inference that there is some similarity between drug addicts and religious people is thus far unfounded. Most people who are religious are not "addicted" by any definition, and show few if any similarities in their behaviour to drug addicts that would not be present in, say, someone who likes video games; someone might play video games a lot or a little, but that doesn't make them an addict.

You're generally making a rather pathetic attempt to confuse a preference or interest with an addiction, and to portray all addiction as negative and destructive. Your argument will only persuade the weak-willed, the easily led, and the closed-minded, which by a happy coincidence is more or less the demographic you would probably imagine are attracted to religion.

x

 

Actually, another point: you're describing mental illness as if it's biological. No-one gets addicted to mental illness, neither is it pathologically anything like a disease. Sort your analogies out, please.

 

Your so preoccupied with obscuring my point I think you've gone and confused yourself. Plus it was never an an analogy, you called it that!

 

I guess I assumed you wouldn't be so utterly batshit as to actually mean it literally. I'll try not to make that mistake in future.

 

haha revenge...