cantleave: i see your point. But i think (based on nothing but demography) that most people who have become radicalized to the point where they pose a threat are the same people who could also do without their religion.
Ripping a persons faith away, a heavy responsibility?
by Seraphim23 207 Replies latest jw friends
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Xanthippe
Read that through a few times, so you're saying the people who claim believers are too fragile to have their ideas criticised are making a value judgement that the believers are mentally ill?
No-one on this thread has said believers are too fragile to have their ideas criticised. Some of us have said to interlace it with compassion instead of insults would be more helpful.
No-one here is connecting believers with mental illness, where on earth did you get that from?
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bohm
Xanthippe:
Read that through a few times, so you're saying the people who claim believers are too fragile to have their ideas criticised are making a value judgement that the believers are mentally ill?
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No-one here is connecting believers with mental illness, where on earth did you get that from?
Well, actually you came up with the idea of connecting believers with mental illness, so if you dont like it, you would do both of us a favor by not putting it into my sentences. In fact, i wrote:
If you think he is mentally unstable and need to believe in false ideas to get through the day, i suppose the best course of action is to leave him alone. Personally, I would thank a person who prevented me from living my life on a lie.
I dont think i can put it more clearly than that. You can perhaps try to point out which of the three sentences is causing you troubles?
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Phizzy
With regard to the thread title, I think this is true, whether we make the judgement that the person is too fragile ,or not, it is a very heavy responsibility.
I have elderly JW relatives, in their last days of life, who have given all that life to the JW/WT scam. To rip away their faith, and cause them to lose their lifelong friends, their support network, and more importantly their hope, I judge to be too dangerous to their health and happiness to do.
Younger, more robust JW's, who have time to rebuild their lives are a different matter.
A general effort made to spread true knowledge, which may in its wake attack the faith of some, is something I try to do, even then, I go careful with said elderly relatives.
But for example, a youngish JW I was talking to a week or so ago said that young people were not becoming JW's because of things like being taught Evolution at school, so I said, "Yes, but they are only taught it because it is true", which evoked a deer in the headlights look, and the conversation moved on.
I hope it made him think though.
A person's faith will probably just slowly fade away as more and more things show it to be not so much false, as unnecessary.
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Witness My Fury
Slightly OT but still related i think, I've been listening to Oliver Sacks presentations as well as other programs on the radio about the mind, especially about unusual behaviours like visions, hallucinations including auditory hallucinations.
A small percentage of people who are otherwise normal and not considered mentally ill have ongoing visual and / or auditory hallucinations. I then thought about some of the voice hearing believers who used to frequent this site and really do appear to believe Christ is talking to them and absolutely refuse to accept it as anything internal to their brains.
Well they aint alone. They may not be mentally ill, but it absolutely is internal and becoming more and more understood. Apparently a lot more people than thought hear voices but often never tell anyone as they dont want to be thought mentally ill. These days though the stigma is reducing and the fact that otherwise normal people can have hallucinations is becoming increasingly accepted.
It's just a shame that they continue to delude themselves as to the source of the hallucination.
Apparently it is reasonably common for people in grief to hallucinate about the person who has died and "see" them or even hear them talk to them. No wonder there are so many damn ghost stories....
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cofty
Ideas of deities of spirits, that take us back to the days of ignorance and fables should be robustly cristicised and ridiculed without mercy. - cantleave
Sometimes it's hard to see why people joined a ruthless, cruel cult.....and then again - xanhippe
That's a very bizzare reply. Are you saying that superstitious beliefs should not be ridiculed?
Cantleave is advocating ridiculing ideas not the people who hold them. What's wrong with that?
As the journalist Johan Hari said, "I respect you as a person too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs"
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cofty
double post
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Ucantnome
With some Witnesses I know I chews not to challenge their belief because I fear they will lose too much, sort of win the battle lose the war, but sometimes I give them food for thought.
