Religious delusion, doctrinal bigotry, pragmatism, and epistemology

Let's talk about epistemic rationality. Epistemic rationality is something which no self respecting philosopher or psychology researcher should ignore (even if they have proclivities towards paraconsistent non classical and non-monotonic logics, or logics that reject the true-false binary and what logicians call the law of excluded middle.) For psychologists, epistemic rationality is a basic necessary condition for a cognitive agent to be classified as mentally healthy. It means that the agent operates in a rational, socially appropriate, and sensible manner in whatever context they inhabit. From the information processing psychological perspective, epistemic rationality means that the cognitive agent effectively and appropriately acquires, processes, and, most importantly, uses, information available in any given situation.

Let's take a leaf out of the book of a popular evolutionary psychologist: Gad Saad. Saad likes to use comparative psychology by referring to animal cognition and psychopathology. Animals can have psychopathology? Yes indeed. Take the case of the brain parasite toxoplasma gondii. When it infects the brains of mice, the animals develop a sexual attraction to cat urine. Not good for the mouse, but good for the parasite, which then infects the brain of the cat which eats the mouse. Incidentally, the same parasite is well known to cause increased libido in human women that it infects. Also good for the evolved and adapted parasite.

Let's now also take a leaf out of the scientific book of a relatively new paradigm in evolutionary and molecular bioscience: epigenetics. Epigenetics is about the influences on the genotype and phenotype of a species that are not, or not solely, dependent upon the information in the genotype, or in DNA. More technical examples include the switching on and off of certain genes in utero, and the inheritance/transmission of certain features via cytoplasmic RNA transcription processes. Epigenetics was controversial for some time for circumventing the central dogma of molecular biology: that information only ever transmitted from the genotype to the phenotype, or from the genes and DNA to the body or form of the organism (the soma).

The Aryan Occult religion of the Nazis was especially bizarre

A simpler example of epigenetics involves environmental epigenetic transmission. Imagine a mother fox sustains brain damage from being struck by a vehicle. She builds her den badly due to minor brain damage. Her young are then affected by the cold due to the badly constructed den, and some of the females sustain brain damage. They in turn badly construct dens for their young, and the same process repeats itself.

The epistemic rationality - the ability to deploy information appropriately in knowing and acting based upon knowledge - is diminished and degraded in the foxes, and in the rodent and human hosts of toxoplasma gondii. Both the brain pathogen and the foxes' brain damage is epigenetically transmitted.

It's a debated issue (although much of the debate is suppressed or kept quiet) but the status of belief in personal relationships with gods with unusual, and highly specific, personified and psychological characteristics (disliking pork and unbelief, for example) is, for the most part, publicly ratified as epistemically rational in the DSM-5, and mental health profession. However, this ratification is clearly motivated by pragmatic considerations, some of which are themselves clearly irrational. How so? There are many reasons, but lets focus on just one: informational coherence.

It's one thing to consider that the universe and the world might be the result, somehow, of some pre-exiting Aristotelian prime mover. There are so many different conceptions of gods and deities that they have probably never all been catalogued. There are many varieties of transcendental idealisms and other idealisms according to which some kind of conscious awareness is intrinsic to, or underpins, existence and the universe: Kantian, Peircian, and Berkeleyan, just to name some of the best known examples. John D Barrow and Frank Tipler's anthropic cosmological principle asserts that the universe has come to be self aware. The participatory cosmology of Wheeler has a similar, but less reflexive, thrust: that reality is somehow created by observers in the universe. Some people deify evolution itself.

These transcendental idealist type cosmologies and philosophies, and most pantheist and panpsychist doctrines, are a far cry - in almost every important intellectual and epistemic respect - from most religious monotheisms and polytheisms. Most traditional religious cult theisms involve a specific personified deity or god which has a large set of usually very human like characteristics and personality traits. The followers of theist mega cults are not epistemically rational in their beliefs precisely because of this fact. They are clinically delusional. This is made more apparent when one realises that in Western first world nations, science education offering superior epistemic tools has been freely and widely available for well over a century now (admittedly - not a long time in the context of the whole of human history, and certainly not a long time in terms of evolutionary history.)

It's one thing to say that the universe might somehow have been initiated by some cosmic creative force, or that it may have come to know, or just know of, itself in some sense. It's a completely different thing altogether to assert that the universe was created by a god being that closely resembles a human father who hates pork and prohibits sex out of wedlock. It's even less rational to assert that this alleged rather moody and picky (not to mention, prurient) being is in communication with humans, and with individual humans personally. Declaring that you have a personal intimate relationship with such a being: this is simply a manifestation of a clear psychopathology.

These are not epistemically rational beliefs, and people that have them are technically clinically ill, if the mental health profession is honest about it. Like the brain damage of our foxes, these beliefs are also transmitted like an infection via epigenetic channels.

Despite desperate pragmatic attempts at denial for - in most cases - economic ends: cultural trends and majority normative cultural and social expectations to not constitute contextual or social foils against the pathological status of such beliefs. A billion alcoholics are a billion sick alcoholics, even if their addiction allows them to cope in some moments. A billion deliriously happy cocaine, crack, or heroin addicts are still a billion sick people who will hurt themselves and others. A billion delusional cultists with imaginary imperial, and intimate personal, friends are still a billion mentally ill and clinically deluded people.

These are not the kind of people to elect to be heads of the free world, nor to any position of influence or authority.