[erklik]

It helps reinforce my overall belief, that people smart in some aspects of life, might be very un-smart/crazy/bigoted/ignorant etc in other parts of life.

I mean, look at the website, 7/10 of the "Recently Updated" are about religion, while most are about Islam. A religion that he categorically denies and thinks is false, yet is seemingly obsessed with? Strange stuff to me.

[sim7c00]

everyone is the same, just a different flavor :). (in otger words> i agree :D).

am a muslim, but totally enjoy his videos. we all carry our weird conditions with us as a burden, its ok. he does so much nice and good outside of that :)

[krelian]

It's been a few years since I last watched his stuff. He always had that crazy genius vibe, similar to Terry Davis but but not as unhinged and much more friendly and wholesome. I'm fascinated how these individuals that are clearly immensely gifted with rational thought are also religious fanatics. How do they rationalize it? I can understand believing in a supreme being but it also being the one described in bible seems difficult to rationalize.

[AngriestLettuce]

If you're a schizo, it's probably pretty easy to rationalize: you've heard your god talk to you and tell you these things. It's easy to go "You're obviously crazy, this can't have happened!" from the outside looking in, but it's far harder to reject your own experiences out of hand as obviously false.

Doubly so because the types of experiences you get tend to be very hard to disprove. It's usually not something like "There's a yellow demonic entity running around deep in the valley by the mountain" where it's something that can be checked and explained, like actually just a moose who got tangled up in a yellow wintercoat or something, and is running around irritated trying to get it off. Rather it tends to be more "God is speaking to me through my mind, and only does so to special people" or "These people are trying to make me be as miserable as I was before I found God by making me reject him, they must be servants of Satan".

Really, if anything, I would say gifted people are probably way more likely to become religious fanatics if they have these experience. We do not have a good explanation for these things (you're sick in the head, something something dopamine does not work too well for otherwise perfectly functional and rational people), and the explanations that we do have must more or less be taken on faith. You need to trust that the person explaining these things to you is both more capable of judging the situation than you are, and has your best interests in mind. For most gifted people, the chance of both of these being true in any particular situation is abyssmally small.

This applies even more so in mental healthcare, where we're practically at the same stage of technological advancement as we were when trepanation and bloodletting were state of the art in physical medicine. We have a long way to go before we can truly make the "You're crazy!" explanation stick for those who are used to living in a world that is inevitably wrong about most things, whether subtly or overtly. Really, if you're used to being the smartest guy in the room, what choice do you have? What choice do you have but to trust yourself? Yes, you might be delusional and wrong, but you know the world at large is delusional and wrong on countless subjects as well. Why trust them more than you trust yourself, when just about every single experience you've had in life has fed into your belief that you are fundamentally better at judging reality than most people are?