Second, if you find a problem with the reasoning of facts of something I’ve said, please feel free to correct me. I love to get the facts straight.

Third, why don’t you require comparable gentleness and mellowness of the atheists and others who post here. The snark flows like acid from many who post here.

Fourth, I’m going to stop posting here, my search for reasonable and bigotry free blog atheists is taking longer than I really want to devote to it.

Five, I’m kind of an intense kind of guy. It’s just how I am.

July 30, 2007 at 6:52 am

Man, that bites! At least the exorcism I went to had some dramatic flair. I’m afraid that the Buddhist version of an exorcism would put me to sleep…

That is a different matter from the behavioral “sciences”. There are researchers in the behavioral sciences who do real science, they are generally the ones who are ignored by the media and whose books don’t get on the best seller lists. They don’t come out with entirely speculative grand-unified theories (that have risen and fallen over and over again). Perhaps if the social scientists stopped chasing that rainbow and concentrated on practical solutions instead of propping up their shaky schools more progress could be made. There is absolutely no reason to not point out the deficiencies of these activities. If people engaged in this kind of stuff want to claim that what they are doing is science, they open themselves up as legitimate targets of inquiry. The claims and status of science is based on its reliability in face of rigorous testing, it cheapens science to let junk use its name when its practices are little better than creationists.

As to my personal beliefs. I make a clear distinction between those things which can be known and those which cannot. Those which can be known are often best treated by science, though I would also say that for many things, especially political questions, are better treated by history. The facts of history are usually more fact than the speculations of the behavioral scientists, certainly more than the stories about social life in the stone age.

Where things can’t be known by science, personal experience and a person’s evaluation of that is as good a guide as is usually available. The pretense that some kind of pseudo-science can address these areas, when they really can’t, doesn’t change that. However, a personal experience is personal and the person who holds convictions based on that has no right to impose those on the unwilling. That’s the difference. Every one should be free to believe what they do unless they act to infringe on other peoples’ rights.

Logos, you’re the one who asked the question. It’s not my fault if the answer requires more than will sustain your mellow. Some things in life are hard. Often those are important things. Dawkins and Harris make big claims about their publications, I’m not going to let up on them just because they are popular.

It is however, possible to predict with accuracy a small but significant amount greater than chance the behavior of people, especially those who exhibit signs and symptoms of serious mental disorders. In other words it’s easier to predict what a really crazy person will do than a slightly crazy or basically sane person will do.
So even though it is not a very exacting field, at least in the specialty of psychopathology, psychology has been able to retain some usefulness. The advent of better psychotropic drugs in the last twenty or thirty years has also been of benefit in real-world ways.

As you point out, the providing of psychotherapeutic services for the general public is a very different story, and a very sad one. Nation wide, for the most part people with mental illnesses are far more often left to languish on their own compared to thirty or forty years ago. It’s ironic since we are now far better at helping them if only we could get public funding for them.

But here’s what I’m getting at. I get confused when you sometimes follow two seemingly contradictory ideas, and please forgive me if I misunderstand you:

You point out the looseness and lack of reliability of the behavioral sciences but you also invoke them and rely heavily on them when you characterize incidents such as the one in Phoenix as an example of mental illness. You basically say that mental health services are not based on good science but we really need to provide such services more generously to the public.

Another confusing pairing of ideas that to me at least seem contradictory is when you remain stridently agnostic about the existence of God, stating (correctly, IMO) that science is of no use for a yes or a no to that question, yet you straight out say that you don’t believe in a devil, and that people who think they’re possessed are mentally ill. Mental illness is a term defined by the science of psychopathology. So are you saying that when it comes to the “good” god, we cannot know and science has no place to say yea or nay, but when it comes to the “bad” god we do know and we need the science of psychopathology to come to the rescue?

Please do not take this as an attempt to “catch” you. Certainly not. I genuinely find your ideas interesting when you’re not on your well-worn soapbox about Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Randi and who cares who else, people who have some ideas I like and some I don’t like. Not every atheist on the internet is a “blog atheist” as you call them.