Well, I operate under the assumption that the premise that all of life is an illusion is invalid, just as I presume you do for secular matters that don't come into conflict with your religious faith. I assume you base your beliefs and reach conclusions on secular matters in a rational way, but you make an exception in assessing the credibility of the words in a particular book or two, based on nothing other than some feeling you have that is indistinguishable from fantasy, perhaps combined with the fact that some other people whom you consider generally credible have told you such and such is the truth, even though they have nothing on which to base that conclusion either.

Why do you make an exception to your otherwise rational approach to reaching conclusions when it comes to the one area of the claims of some religion?

By the way, if the conclusion you have reached* regarding what deity exists and all that it has done and wants from people, etc., is the same as that of your parents, do you consider that just coincidence? More generally, what do you make of the fact that most people in the world spend their lives with essentially the same religious beliefs as their parents?

What are your answers to my question regarding the Heaven's Gate "cult" members and their beliefs? About Berkowitz? About worship of the Pepsi bottle? What if I told you that I was sure (or nearly sure) that I was God and that I was the only God and that I was omnipotent and omniscient and that I created the universe? What if I told you that I'm regularly visited by ghosts and that I'm regularly abducted by aliens? Do you consider any of those beliefs to be irrational, and less rational than your own religious beliefs? If not, is there no belief in the supernatural that you would consider irrational or perhaps even a manifestation of insanity? Help me out in understanding what you are contending regarding the rationality of "spiritual" beliefs.

Have you read that Newsweek article to which I linked on this thread? I came across it just coincidentally after this conversation was already occurring (because AOL has a headline article today that links to it), but it's perfectly relevant to our conversation. I highly recommend it, and I'd like to know what you think of it. I think it would be helpful if you could read it prior to proceeding with our exchange, but that's just a request.

* "Reaching a conclusion" may not be the right phrase; it's possible it was just fed to you early on and you've never seriously challenged it, even if you've had some relatively mild doubts, but I don't presume to know your history vis a vis doubting/challenging the beliefs you adopted and have maintained.

 n/t

What line of reasoning prompted you to ask that question?

Oh, Jesus (pardon the expression). Are we off on another one of those rides in which you are defensively persistent regarding some obvious error you have made? I asked a question, thinking that you were possibly implying something, perhaps X. You jumped to the conclusion that I had jumped to the conclusion that you were implying X. You were wrong. Get over it.

what is your definition of sanity and what are the criteria by which you would judge someone sane vs. not? 

I don't have a precise definition nor diagnostic criteria, nor have I Googled it or even checked Dictionary.com. I've given you an example of an indication of some form of insanity (thinking the rock won't fall despite repeated observances that it does every time). And I'm calling religious faith a manifestation of some sort of selective/situational/topic-based insanity (whatever the professionals would call it). Firmly believing things for which there is no evidence or sound theory or any other rational basis for that belief, particularly when that belief is a major component of one's life experience, behavior, thoughts, emotions, etc.,  is what I'm calling a manifestation of some sort of insanity (again, whether or not my use of the term fits with clinical terminology). And if one wants to dispense with the term "insanity" and just say that religious faith is completely irrational, then one should either dispense with that term with regard to so-called "cults", too, or explain to me the basis for his distinction. You've provided your basis for this distinction -- prevalence of the belief within a/the population -- but I don't consider that point to be valid; it may be that, in practice, many people tend to factor popularity of a belief into their assessment of that belief's rationality, and it may also be that the only way we can conclude, for example, that someone is hallucinating is if he sees things that no one else is seeing, but the rationality of a belief is independent from it's prevalence.

On the issue of selective manifestation of insanity, if you had someone that was hearing voices which were telling them to kill people and that person indicated that they were feeling more and more compelled to listen to them would it then your contention that said person could be judged competent to stand trial on something like a tax evasion case, for example, since the voices weren't actually giving said person tax advice?

Perhaps. That would have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. My understanding is that at least one major criterion for assessing the validity of an insanity defense is whether or not the defendant was aware/understood that what he was doing was wrong. But I really don't know enough about the legal stuff to get much into it. If you're asking more generally if such a person should be considered responsible for that tax evasion, I'd first of all have to put aside the fact that we have no free will (not something I feel like debating again at the moment), but with that aside and just asking about responsibility as I would think of it on an everday level, again I'd have to determine that on a case-by-case basis, asking to what extent the area of insanity affected his thinking regarding his taxes.

Oh, come on. That's a mislabeling of a straw man argument, and you don't know where I'm going with it, so why spend time avoiding answering instead of just answering?

And as for Berkowitz, obviously there's no need to dodge the question per your point about whether or not he was sincere, because that's obviously not the key to the question. But for your satisfaction, let me add "assuming he was sincere in his claim that the dog told him to do it", which you can consider a hypothetical if you wish. Doesn't matter.

IMO, Obama won by a big enough margin that he does not owe his victory to the efforts of any one of the organizaions mentioned in that article.

Given this, are you not, therefore, actually arguing here that he owes his victory to the efforts of all of these organizations?