Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
This thread is a discussion about nonexistent gods. It is not an attack on belief in any specific god or even necessarily an attack on false belief. Rather, I am curious about the widespread phenomenon of false religious belief, specifically belief in false deities.
One thing that can be said for certain about false gods is that they exist--in human imagination, not reality. Humans have invented thousands of them throughout history. But we all have false beliefs about real people, and sometimes our beliefs about real people are so off the mark that those people can be said not to exist. False gods, it seems, are akin to imaginary playmates in children--made up beings that play a central role in the life of the child, if only for a brief amount of time. None of us are strangers to false beliefs. We are immersed in them, and we go through life constantly revising our opinions of reality, scarcely aware of the amount of misinformation that guides us. But false gods are often relatively unchanging fixtures in the lives of believers. They represent imaginary constructs that the believer comes to see as the bedrock of his or her existence.
So false gods are real to the people who believe in them. Most of us reject the existence of the vast majority of false gods, but it is clear that much of the human race is devoted to them. The most popular complex of religious belief--Christianity--only covers about a third of the human race. Islam is second in popularity, but it appears to be the most rapidly growing religion. Hinduism, perhaps the oldest of the religious traditions, is in third place, with roughly a billion adherents. It follows that the majority of the human race has seriously false beliefs about God or gods.
1) Given that most people in the world believe in false gods, would you regard the human race as delusional? Is this aspect of our behavior a kind of mental illness? Is belief in false gods healthy?
2) Are there any benefits to belief in false gods? Should people stop believing in them? If you had the power to stop people from believing in false gods, would you exercise it?
3) How does one distinguish a false (nonexistent) god from one that really exists?
One thing that can be said for certain about false gods is that they exist--in human imagination, not reality. Humans have invented thousands of them throughout history. But we all have false beliefs about real people, and sometimes our beliefs about real people are so off the mark that those people can be said not to exist. False gods, it seems, are akin to imaginary playmates in children--made up beings that play a central role in the life of the child, if only for a brief amount of time. None of us are strangers to false beliefs. We are immersed in them, and we go through life constantly revising our opinions of reality, scarcely aware of the amount of misinformation that guides us. But false gods are often relatively unchanging fixtures in the lives of believers. They represent imaginary constructs that the believer comes to see as the bedrock of his or her existence.
So false gods are real to the people who believe in them. Most of us reject the existence of the vast majority of false gods, but it is clear that much of the human race is devoted to them. The most popular complex of religious belief--Christianity--only covers about a third of the human race. Islam is second in popularity, but it appears to be the most rapidly growing religion. Hinduism, perhaps the oldest of the religious traditions, is in third place, with roughly a billion adherents. It follows that the majority of the human race has seriously false beliefs about God or gods.
1) Given that most people in the world believe in false gods, would you regard the human race as delusional? Is this aspect of our behavior a kind of mental illness? Is belief in false gods healthy?
2) Are there any benefits to belief in false gods? Should people stop believing in them? If you had the power to stop people from believing in false gods, would you exercise it?
3) How does one distinguish a false (nonexistent) god from one that really exists?
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