Most of you will be aware of Pascal's Wager, and indeed, of those of you who aren't aware of it by name, most of you will likely have heard it without knowing what it's called
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It seems to me that if an atheist were to really, honestly embrace worship of the christian god, something would have to sort of break in their head first. Thus the Stockholm Syndrome bit. I've written about that fairly extensively in the past, though for the life of me, I can't find it now...
That seems like an awfully harsh idea of what changing religious outlook means. You'd have just as much reason to freak out at people who went from born-again Christianity to atheism, in that case.
Presumably the story is that people who go psychotic are relatively likely to drastically change their religious outlook, and not that people who drastically change their religious outlooks are likely to be psychotic.
I suspect there's also a bit of chicken-and-egg going on here; religious folks of all stripes - at least all stripes who are into proselytizing - know that prime targets are people who are in times of crisis and personal weakness. The mentally ill are in that respect very tempting targets. At the same time, I'm sure that people in that sort of situation are uncommonly prone to changing things up in their own heads without much external prompting.
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It seems to me that if an atheist were to really, honestly embrace worship of the christian god, something would have to sort of break in their head first. Thus the Stockholm Syndrome bit. I've written about that fairly extensively in the past, though for the life of me, I can't find it now...
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Presumably the story is that people who go psychotic are relatively likely to drastically change their religious outlook, and not that people who drastically change their religious outlooks are likely to be psychotic.
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