rache,
The failure to learn from history or the deliberate refusal to recognise observable trends might rather be viewed as symptoms of mental illness.
Is adherence to the utopian ideal of multiculturalism and diversity, without any historical or observable evidence to substantiate the delusion, also a symptom of mental illness?
In fact, the hard evidence refutes the delusion.
Where is the line between mental illness and mere stupidity?

Dear Proxy,

"Religion has actually convinced people
that there's an invisible man - living in the
sky - who watches everything you do, every
minute of every day. And the invisible man
has a special list of ten things he does not want
you to do. And if you do any of these ten things,
he has a special place, full of fire and smoke
and burning and torture and anguish, where he will
send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and
scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time...
But He loves you!"

(George Carlin).

Now tell us again about the
line between mental illness and stupidity again?

Foxy,
<<special place, full of fire and smoke
and burning and torture and anguish, where he will
send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and
scream and cry forever>>

Here is Mohammed on hell and women (from an Islamic web-site):
“I looked into Paradise and I saw that the majority of its people were the poor.
And I looked into Hell and I saw that the majority of its people are women.”
http://www.islam-qa.com/en/ref/21457

Clearly then, from what you are suggesting, Mohammed was mentally ill because nobody who achieved what he did could be called stupid.

Are you also then saying that followers of Islam are mentally ill or that they are merely stupid?

Now that is offensive and probably racist (if Islam was a race!).
Or is it just an unintended consequence of your inability to think rationally?

Dear Proxy,

It was actually your ability to reason
that was being questioned here.

You're the one that is on about the evils
of Islam over and over and over again.
Yet you can't seem to see the faults in
your own beliefs. I was merely trying to
shine the light for you - in the hope
that something would register in your brain.
Obviously I was wasting my time.

You know you're right because you've read
the "truth" in your holy book and you know
in advance, that nothing will budge you from
your belief. The truth of your holy book
is an axiom, not the end product of a process
of reasoning. To you the book is true,
and if the evidence seems to contradict it,
it is the evidence that must be thrown out,
not your holy book.

Frankly, I could care less what you think.
It's only when you come onto my thread and
rave on against another religion -
that I feel it necessary to respond

The difference between mental illness and stupidity in this context is that only a stupid person would keep making the same historical mistakes over and over again and expect a different result.

A mentally ill person wouldn't recognise their own irrational actions as being mistakes at all and would probably end up blaming somebody else for their own failures.

Religion itself probably falls somewhere between these two while intolerance could go either way.

Foxy,

it also comes down to "some invisible guy who had sex with his own mother to father himself and prays to himself because he can't remember why he forsook himself" and that we're all doomed because "some rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat a piece of fruit from a magical tree."

What is really interesting is the way we can envisage the future only in terms of what we know, and - as Proxy demonstrates so admirably - mostly in terms of what worries us.

Thinking back to my youth, about the only thing that I was able to visualize that actually came to pass was the "watch communicator", the device that you carried around with you and that you could use to talk to your friends.

Even then my vision was based on "walkie-talkie" principles. The idea that the telephone - which was at the time made of black bakelite, with brown twisty cables, and connected to a line that you shared with a neighbour - would ever fit into your top pocket, was literally inconceivable.

Ok, space travel has come to pass in pretty much the way we could comprehend back then. But colonizing other planets before civilization collapses upon itself seems as unlikely as ever.

We have knitted ourselves into a zone where introversion rules. Can anyone seriously imagine that today's - or tomorrow's - Australian Government would ever give the go-ahead to another Sydney Opera House? Or that the US space program that took mankind to the moon, would ever get through Congress, if proposed today?

The "environmental impact statements" alone would today strangle it at birth.

In the words of the Irishman leaning on the farm gate "If that's where you want to go, I wouldn't start from here."

No, the future is literally unimaginable, given our present intolerance, paranoia, and fetishist worship of "Health and Safety".

Which is a Good Thing.

Because there will always be a section of the human race that thinks along a different set of lines, and is not confined to what is known, but instead goes ahead and discovers what is not known.

Bless 'em.