These are the ways of animals who cannot control their emotions long-enough to think clearly and honestly between banging on bones in front of a monolith.

If the average member of society is ever to progress beyond being a bunch of easily-misled rubes herded into tribal cult ideological pens, something needs to change where decent, intelligent people are lionized over minimally-useful celebrities and charlatans.

(The United States was founded by primarily anti-intellectual merchants and landowners who scoffed at the Old World's stodginess and intellectual pursuits.)

That's an odd thing to put in your list. Phobias aren't something people choose to believe in. They're specifically an irrational, subconscious pattern of behaviour. That isn't a belief.

Are we to see experiences as rational explanation of a phenomena? Sure, I see and feel a rock, and I verify its existence rationally. I smell food and verify its existence rationally. What about people experiencing a divine being communicating to them, then?

No, we must disregard this as hallucination or a psychological problem. Only what we (and by we I mean the "educated western world") in our pre-determined frame of rationality deem rational can ever be rational, and all that falls outside must naturally be considered irrational irrespective of its potential rationality in relation to other experiences we might call rational.

Really (I think), something being rational is a state of mind, a common understanding with our peers. In a church most would agree that their belief is rational, not out of ignorance (though here you might disagree), but out of shared acceptance of a different frame of rationality, essentially accepting other experiences as being able to feed to rationality than those you might accept.

I guess the point I'm trying to make (and I might be way off) is that when you say that religiosity espouses irrationalist beliefs, they're irrational to you, within your frame of rationalism. To someone else you're the ignorant one who's fighting tooth and nail.

Edit: To those down voting I would love to engage further in conversation about this!

In the context of discussions about the rationality of religious belief, we are primarily talking about epistemic/theoretical rationality, although non-epistemic rationality does sometimes come up (for example, Pascal's wager).

Some people think epistemic rationality can be reduced to instrumental rationality, but the philosopher Thomas Kelly wrote what is (to me at least) a pretty convincing refutation of that viewpoint: https://www.princeton.edu/~tkelly/papers/epistemicasinstrume...

We should also avoid thinking in terms of a false dichotomy. Most voluntary exchanges and relationships in the world are win-win-win, in that both counterparties are gaining and the externality is positive. In such a context, self-maximizing through profit seeking is the choice that maximizes the benefit to others.

What we want to discourage is a much more narrow cone of behavior. Corruption. Negative externalities. Things that aren't win-win-win.

And economic liberalism is the belief system that it works for the greater good.

Perhaps also anarchism, due to its focus on having the minimum amount of hierarchy possible.

"What about people experiencing a divine being communicating to them, then?"

But we have studied this and the answers tell us what the most realistic thing actually is and thats why we see 'divine being communicating to them' as a mental illness.

You can expierence this challanging thought yourself by taking LSD. Realizing that you are actually know everything for a few hours and than getting back to your 'normal reality' is exhausting.

But i still don't believe we are all caught on the earth and we need LSD to shackle those bounds. I know how many people are on the planet, how many people i have seen die and leave our planet in the normal rational way. I have never ever seen anything which makes me believe otherwise and LSD showed me even more how fragile my own reality is.

You might want to look in a medical book on different topics you refered to to see what you believe. Nonetheless its just more realistic that human a had a similiar brain issue than all other similiar independend cases before than that this person is now talking directly to god and we areound us are all dumb shits not being able to recognise it.

My default sentence for this is simple: I'm a good person, and i don't like the idea very much that there is a god who allows cancer in kids and rape from religious people and murder etc. and either this god is a massive asshole, clearly not relevant enought to woreshop or doesn't exist anyway.

Taken further, is it not then irrational to think that the earth arose out of absolute nothingness, to become the perfectly aligned world we know? Is this realistic? Is this probable? (Not saying the alternative is necessarily more probable, just asking)

As to your default sentence you might want to look into the discipline of Harmatiology (the doctrine of sin), for you do not understand the commonly held view of Christians on this point.

Of course there is always an unkown right? We don't know it all.

But as i said somewhere else: math for example is universal, you can come up with the same rules independently were you are.

This doesn't happen with religion/believe.

There is no experiment in the world, which shows any universal truth to believing in one specific god or more specific gods or religion.

Nothing spiritual was proven ever in my lifetime. None.

So i dream. I like to come up with things, ideas, stories, places etc. but that doesn't motivate me to believe in it so hard that it affects my normal life.