A word about accusations of mental illness [View All]

[Orrex]

As an atheist who has many times been accused of arrogant stubbornness, stubborn blindness, blind stupidity, and stupid egocentrism (to name a few), all because I don't embrace theism, I can see how it might be upsetting to be accused, obliquely or otherwise, of embracing a mental imbalance. I am aware that some are offended by having their cherished beliefs described in those terms or likened to symptoms thereof.

Years ago I knew a woman who had, by the time of our meeting, dated a man for close to seven years. We'll call her Lisa and him Donald. They became seriously involved while she was in middle school, even though he was thirteen years her senior. Her parents hated her involvement with him, but she refused to stop seeing him. Her friends thought the whole thing was strange, but they were likewise unable to intervene. Once in the course of their involvement, Donald raped Lisa, but somehow they reconciled and their love affair continued. During the rape, the song The Search is Over was playing, and she was unable to listen to it without pain from that point on.

Then, when she was nineteen, Lisa discovered--catastrophically--that Donald didn't exist. She suffered from full-blown schizophrenia along the lines of A Beautiful Mind, and her delusion had fabricated the entirety of her relationship with Donald, even going so far as to sign him in and out for visits to her dorm.

After learning that Donald was a fiction, she was still desperate to continue the relationship, and her illness persisted at least until she and I lost touch, when she was 21. It was truly a sad story, and the last time I saw her she looked positively ghastly, having been thoroughly traumatized by her illness and the realization of it.

But the whole time, both before and after her discovery, Lisa could recount her conversations with Donald and what they'd done together and how he affected her life. To those who knew her, Donald was a "real" as any other friend-of-a-friend whom we hadn't met. Aside from the age difference, there was nothing extraordinary in her experience or her account of it.


So I put forth the question explicitly and in all sincerity: how does the belief in a deity, whose existence can't be objectively verified, differ from a pathological delusion in which one ascribes reality to a mundane person whose existence likewise can't be verified? If anything, the former seems a more pronounced condition, because the extremity of the subject is so profound.

Every test of introspection that Lisa was able to perform confirmed to her that Donald was real, to the point that she eventually stopped questioning it. What tests does the theist perform that Lisa did not?

If, prior to Lisa's discovery, someone had told her that Donald didn't exist, she would have thought that the person was crazy, or at the very least she'd have been put off by the apparently ridiculous assertion. How does a theist's angry or dismissive response to questions of God's existence differ?


Again, I ask these in all sincerity. If anyone is offended by the mere asking of the questions, then I apologize, but that leaves us at square one.

Thanks in advance for your input.

edited to remove an unintended barb