Reply #51: AMEN! I agree with when you said:

[prostock69]

"I am tempted to ask if they have sought help from a psychiatrist." Religion causes a form of mental illness. I have vast experience with mental illness growing up with a mother who has Schizophrenia. Trying to reason with anyone who is ingrained in their "faith" is exactly like trying to reason with my mother when she is having an "episode". There is no way to "reason" with her because she is not thinking "rationally". And that is the same problem I have with religious people: they don't understand that their religious beliefs are "irrational." No matter what evidence you show them, no matter if you prove that what they "believe" is nonsense and wrong, they cannot open their minds to the possibility that they are wrong. Their minds have been damaged with constant indoctrination of their religion, also called brainwashing. You can't pull someone out of religion. It has to be on their own terms. Usually this happens when the rational part of the brain comes back to life, as it did with me.

As the great Sigmund Freud said: "Religion is the universal obessional neurosis of mankind; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father....(It is) a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity." AND "The God-Creator is openly called Father. Psychoanalysis concludes that the really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child....The emotional strength of this memory-image and the lasting nature of his need for protection are the two supports for the religious man's belief in God." AND "Like other neuroses or additions, religion can be overcome, but only by facing up to the truth: People will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the center of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. We may call this 'education to reality.' It is something, at any rate, to know that one is thrown upon one's own resources. One learns then to make a proper use of them."

"A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever." Karen Armstrong.