That movie is like watching my own childhood.

Hopefully without the intellectual impairments all the main characters have?

Napoleon Dynamite, but that’s intentional.

They’re all over the place, but I suppose I encounter them most in the news and politics forums.

I like the relatively sane moderation compared to Reddit.

I dislike the heavy far-left/communist presence here. I’m a lefty myself, but a lot of people here are extremists in my opinion, little better than the far right.

Lemmy will never understand how amazing this movie is.

No, you’re wrong and I’m not going to debate this with you. Study some psychology before making false claims. Good-bye.

No, the reason religion is excluded is because delusions aren’t supposed to reflect cultural conditioning. Delusions are, by their very definition, an abnormal brain process. Cultural beliefs are not abnormal brain processes, no matter how irrational they are.

Please understand that this exception is accepted by the entire field of psychology. If you disagree with it, you have 200 years of psychological debate and study to contend with. Don’t pretend you’ve read enough to claim you have grounds to disagree with something the entire field of psychology considers a settled issue. No matter how much you wish religion is a mental illness, it’s not. Sadly, the irrationality of religion is fully explainable within the bounds of normal human psychology.

Damage to the prefrontal cortex resulting in cognitive inflexibility can result in a myriad of fixed beliefs—they’re not necessarily religious in nature.

And religious fundamentalism is a particular type of extreme religious belief; most people don’t hold to fundamentalism but are nonetheless religious, so the study doesn’t account for anywhere near all religiosity and certainly doesn’t refute the point that religious faith isn’t a form of mental illness.

I want to make something clear here: I’m an atheist and an antitheist, but I’m also a therapist and it really irks me when atheists try to conflate mental disorders with religion. It’s an example of atheists fueling their distaste for religion by giving in to amateurish ignorance about psychology. Learn what the fuck you’re talking about before trying to make claims that go against what all of the experts in a field of study agree upon. Honestly, atheists ought to know better.

But they’re not persistent delusions. Delusions are, by definition, NOT cultural in origin. This is something that gets pretty well drilled into you when you study abnormal psychology. There’s a difference between someone’s brain malfunctioning and them simply being possessed of outdated cultural beliefs or traditions. It’s why religious beliefs aren’t considered mental illness, but still believing in Santa Claus when you’re an adult would be.

It’s not group psychosis or mental illness, true, but it is divorced from reality. Sadly, the human mind is capable generating demonstrably, obviously erroneous beliefs without suffering from significantly abnormal psychology.

Religion is a set of extremely successful myths, which have survived mainly by convincing people that you can’t be a good person without them, which frequently involves disparaging people of other beliefs as bad/evil.

In other words, a really shitty worldview.

I care about my friends’ babies, but that’s mostly because I get to interact with them. The rest is mostly just politeness.

Such a tragedy that this didn’t/doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

A quiet book is pretty age-appropriate for a toddler.

Alzheimer’s, and the fact that my mother’s genes put me at terrible risk of developing it. The idea of my mind slowly fracturing while my body continues to live is utterly terrifying to me, and I have actively thought about buying a gun to take care of the problem should it ever appear. Problem is, I don’t even know that I’ll recognize it if it does.

I would argue the plumbing system beneath and behind you is more useful.

Someone did an analysis of what would happen if Superman actually punched you at full strength, and it turns out his fist would never connect with you, because you’d be vaporized by the wave of nuclear explosions erupting from his knuckles as they caused air molecules to fuse in nanoseconds.

I think this is it, actually. Having a lot of money can lead to spending it on frivolous things, but I don’t think that’s what we mean by corruption. It’s when you have so much money that you can use that money to influence people in power that it gets bad. Suddenly, when getting your way is merely a question of bribery and you have plenty of means to do it, people start thinking they have a right to pull the strings in the way they see fit.

It is not. You need to re-familiarize yourself with what monarchy actually is. Maybe spend a year in an actual monarchy/dictatorship country if you have so little appreciation for the democracy you currently enjoy?

Even if this does end in political violence or civil war, if you vote, at least you will have tried to avoid that fate by participating in our democracy as much as possible. Voting is just so easy to do, how can you justify not doing it as anything but laziness? It can’t hurt and takes almost no effort.

I encourage you to reconsider and vote for whatever you perceive to be the least of all evils. Voting is relatively easy and doesn’t require much effort. It’s literally the least you can do. Yes, may not matter in the end, but it can still inform certain statistics that can be used to support various messages and arguments down the line. If you don’t vote at all, you guarantee you have no impact. Don’t throw away the little power you have.