--- Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
The delusional, by definition, treat their delusions as "facts". When you offer this as evidence for the claim that peasant beliefs were not psychopathological, I take you to be claiming that "delusional" is an empty concept because there is no way of independently establishing that e.g. paranoid beliefs about Jews are, in fact, paranoid.
--
I think if you followed that line of thinking, you would wind up concluding that the great mass of humanity is psychopathic (since most people believe in the supernatural, that is, god or gods), and that 99.9999% of people living in premodern socities are nuts. I don't think that Haitian voodoo practitioners or the Pope or Taliban mullahs, for instance, are crazy, or that the priests in attendance at the Oracle of Delphi or midieval peasants were loons. For that matter, I don't think pogromshchiki or participants in Krystallnacht or the US lynchings of blacks were crazy either, though their belief systems were quite wrong (both factually and morally).
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