Anosognosia and Religious Certainty

How the epidemic deficit has become our normal existence—the benefit of belief

Anosognosia is a neurological deficit in self-awareness, a condition in which a person with a disability is unaware or in denial of its existence. This disability we are addressing today is belief—regarded as personal achievement or a high mental destination, where “I believe” has become the pinnacle of religious thought. But what is belief other than a set of imaginations that have been carefully honed to pacify existence? There’s no substance to it at all.

Scientific beliefs are corroborated, falsified, tested and reviewed, then applied to produce a result or technology (we have satellites in orbit with these ideas) that actually produces something.

Religious beliefs are simply compared imaginations with other hopefuls for the mere sake of believing. And today, religious belief of any kind (even strictly opposing views) are respected for the simple fact they believe something, or anything at all. Certainly any belief is more worthy than unbelief—at least they have a chance, right?

Yet, belief is nothing more than a set of ideas that may sound really neat (or morbid) but is simply wishful thinking—assigning it some strange importance that will outwit nature does not make it real. But, we’re sticking to it against all reason, turning the mere idea into defensive pride, renaming it faith (which is the arrival at what?) all the while these fascinations do nothing to transcend humanity from this long monotheistic stall.

“Anosognosia is a lack of ability to perceive the realities of one’s own situation. It’s a person’s inability to accept that they have a condition that matches up with their symptoms“ (1) These religious beliefs occur despite significant lack of evidence or the predicted outcomes.

“Go to, thy faith hath dug you a hole”.

Author: jimoeba

Alternatives to big box religions and dogmas

39 thoughts on “Anosognosia and Religious Certainty”

  4. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why religion is held to an entirely different standard. My youngest son is a geologist with an interest in paleontology. If he came along claiming he discovered a new dinosaur with three heads without actual fossil proof, he’d be laughed out of the next conference. But when people claim that there is a bearded, all powerful wizard living in the sky called who arranged to have his own son killed and then brought him back to life again to save us from, well, from something – no one seems sure what exactly we were saved from because nothing seemed to really have changed at all – well, that’s just fine and dandy then and we should all believe it too?

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  5. Most of us take scientific facts on authority just like religious belief. And to the theist, their belief works- they see their prayers answered, gods will done everywhere and all. So it is all a matter of perspective

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    1. The difference is when you quit believing you see faith never worked. If you quit believing a satellite is using general relativity to orbit the earth, it still is orbiting the earth. Religious truth only works when beliefs can explain your way out of the deficits.

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  6. Mother & Father. Birth place. Family. Perception. Perspective.

    Those 6 factors/conditions alone, in the FIRST quarter of life, determine SO MUCH about a person’s LAST three quarters of their entire life! If a person never curiously experiences anything or anyone beyond a 1-mile or 500-mile radius of “home,” then that person can NEVER fully know their own region, or their own continent, and certainly not their own massively large, diverse planet, let alone where their planet exists and is subject, a planet even subservient to forces so well beyond (minuscule?) to the forces of our Solar System, Milky Way galaxy, and the many, MILLIONS of constellations of galaxies we are part of!

    Whether we are taught and “believe” we are this self-titled category or that family-titled designation, we are STILL also and always will be just as much part of our region, our continent, our entire planet, our Solar System, our Milky Way, our Constellation among billions of Constellations in the immeasurable, still incomprehensible Cosmos. To say otherwise, to arrogantly proclaim otherwise… is to say that one’s suntan is from MY OWN Sun, or swimming in the Gulf of Mexico is my own sea water, or breathing in oxygen is my own air in front of my nostrils/mouth!

    None of those facts of birth, life, existence, and surviving have ANYTHING to do with anyone’s “beliefs” 500-miles away, or 5,000-miles away, or on the other side of Earth or on a different planet in a system and galaxy 5-million light years away! What you believe, your family believes, your continent on this one EXTREMELY tiny blue rock of planet—completely at the mercy of billions of changing forces—during your flash of existence over perhaps 70 – 90 years… will never be significant enough to phase our entire planet simultaneously as a whole, let alone our measly tiny solar system in an average galaxy among trillions of other galaxies. To ever think so is TRULY delusional and living tragically very UNrealistically. Hahahahaha! 😆

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    1. Well spoken sir. As I told Isabella, I wonder if belief was ever so prevalent before the idea of it, or the perceived importance of it rose from the mind game of the near east? We went from practices to beliefs, and I believe overcoming belief mode is the greatest challenge of a hundred generations. These beliefs will pass, like as You said, just a blip of insignificant time in the cosmos.

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      1. I really like John Z’s comment about Solipsism vs. Delusion below (or above; whichever). I’ll have to go read his blog-link on it. I imagine that after reading it 2-3 times (for better comprehension 😄) I’d like to see if Orthodoxy, or to say it another way: Peer-assimilation, could be incorporated with his contrasting states of minds. 🤔

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    1. Well if my hypothesis is even remotely correct it would mean I am not normal…anymore. Was belief ever so prevalent before the idea of it? That is a question I’d like to investigate.

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    1. I’d think believing beliefs are real would raise more than my eyebrow, but nearly everyone is infected, so it’s normal. How to know delusion when it’s all around and everywhere?

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      1. Wrote this a few years ago, seems applicable here:

        Solipsism, the idea that nothing outside your mind is real, contends that since your present experience is generated in your brain (based on inputs from your senses) and given your brain can generate the same experiences without the input from the senses (a dream or hallucination) then there is no guarantee that what you’re experiencing right now is real. That’s to say your reality could all be-self generated, meaning nothing but your mind actually exists. If we turn solipsism inside out we get delusion: an experience which a person believes is real but is in fact self-generated. Now thankfully for the purposes of brevity both solipsism and delusion can be ruled out using the same process: examine the experience and see if anything in it can not be from your own mind. A self-generated delusion (a pot plant talking to you, for example) cannot contain information you don’t already have because you are generating it. Reality on the other hand does contain things you don’t know, meaning it can’t be self-generated, and this pretty much puts a bullet between the eyes of solipsism.

        Cracking!

        Now here’s how this applies to both professional and bidding apologists alike. A theist can go a long way in establishing some plausibility for their god by asking the same question of their particular belief: can my god be a self-generated delusion or, perhaps, a solipsistic error? The answer the theist is looking for is of course, No, but to arrive at that answer the theist has to determine whether their religion has revealed anything to us (at any time) that we don’t already know.

        The question to everyone then is: has any mythology ever achieved this?

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        1. That is an interesting thought project. I’ll get back to you on this because i have something a little too lengthy for comment at the moment. You may link that post por favor. I’d like to see it.

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    2. It is also a term used for mental illness. They can’t understand that they have a problem so they won’t take their medicine or accept help in any way. The brain can do some crazy stuff.

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      2. Thanks to Jim, I now have a(nother) word to describe my wife. She found out that one of the medications that her psychologist prescribed is an anti-psychotic…. and almost went psychotic, insisting, “I’m not crazy!!” 😳

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  9. I often wonder if the Christians really believe their religion. At least the high ranking ones. There is so much fabrication, so much lying, that it makes me wonder. Take the Catholic church’s concern at the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They might even have destroyed or hidden some of them. Or take the extensive amount of editing and destruction of documents and historical works by Christians. And don’t let them tell you otherwise, it is known and obvious. For example, in Tacitus history’ of the Roman Empire, the years 28, 29, and 30 were deleted, though the parts right before and after that have survived. An entire section of a writing by Plutarch cuts off just before he talks about the Jewish cult of Yahweh and compares it to the worship of Dionysus. What had them so shaken up by the writings of Porphyry that they destroyed them all(one of the first decrees to destroy books by Christians)? Porphyry knew that the Book of Daniel was not as old as the setting, but written sometime in 167 BCE based on internal evidence. It is inaccurate about the past, but has some accurate allusions to events of the Maccabean revolt, up until that year, after which it makes predictions that were very wrong. Jerome knew that lives of saints and martyrs were forged and exaggerated, but encouraged it. Eusebius encouraged lying for Jesus. Lactantius took pagan poets far out of context to “prove” that they predicted Jesus. Look at the entire industry of Christian forgery. The Epistles of Paul even mention letters purporting to be from Paul that are forged(most of the canonical epistles are forgeries anyway). Christians freely interpolated all the scriptural texts that they accepted.

    I think the truth was that some of them at least knew that there was no historical Jesus(nothing like the gospel picture anyway). But they needed to shore up church organization behind one doctrine, and a historicized savior figure was better for marketing than another mystery cult otherworldly savior, an allegorical figure, or the memory of some radical sectarian leader(like Eisenmen’s theory). Those pews need to be filled, and tithes need to be paid.

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      2. I wonder why Christians would destroy documentation of those years. They seemed to have done it to multiple sources. Justus of Tiberias wrote in the first century and covered that span of time, but not one mention of Jesus. So did Seneca, not one mention of Christians. So did Philo and Josephus. Christian writers had no problem acknowledging those writers failing to mention Jesus, except in the case of Josephus where they interpolated some lines. Maybe what Tacitus wrote wasn’t just embarrassing due to lack of mention of Jesus, but had something so incompatible with the gospel narratives that it had to be suppressed. I would really like to know what it was.

        It is possible that there was a historical Jesus, but not one that Christians would want. Maybe the early Christians were Messianic Jews and rebels against Rome and the Jewish temple. There is some indication of that in even in the gospels and Acts(apparently early Christians were zealots for the Torah). Someone came along later and changed what was left of the sect(Paul or his party). “Pay your taxes, obey the government, and wait for the mystical Christ to save you” is a lot less dangerous than “if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one” as far as the Roman state was concerned. I think that this option might be more painful for Christians than mythicism. In this case, if they could meet Jesus, he would see them as nothing but heretics and probably “gentile dogs” that blaspheme the Torah. He definitely would not be their savior then. But a case could be made for a celestial Christ(as in mythicist ideas) being a savior. Mithras did not need to come down here in the flesh to save his followers, so I am sure Christians now could think the same way(some early ones did).

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  11. please forgive me for posting something rather off topic. just watched this movie recently, i thought of you. visually stunning, and i think you’ll resonate with it. give it at least 10min, it really is worth it. religion, spirituality, awakening…in a nutshell. and let me know your thoughts! 😊 cheers

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  12. Ok I watched it. So what? Haha. Just kidding. Almost the entire film is concepts very familiar to me from my personal, unguided journey these past few years, though the names and terms are not. Since I was a young man I truly believed that the mysteries surrounding this existence was right under our noses if we only knew how to look (or how not to) It is too bad for humanity that the major religions have capitalized and claimed ownership of the experience, dispensing it through fear and to enrich their own economies. I believe a honest religion would prepare its adherents to own the experience for themselves and cut them loose. Many have misinterpreted it based on their cultural and historical ideas of god, then thought “I AM” was exclusive to them making them special messengers who’d met the source.
    I have some work to do. Our competitive, noisy economy and culture leaves little time for stillness. Thank you for that share. I’ll probably listen to it again tomorrow.

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