Do you truly believe that a sane and rational person can be lured into a cult? Or must it only be those who are vulnerable, experienced trauma or have some level of a mental issue, etc?
I think a person would have to at least be extremely suceptable to manipulation. Joining a widespread religion is one thing but to blindly follow the words of a small group, or even one person saying only they have the answer and you must follow, would take a pretty small or damaged mind. On the other hand their are those who desperately want to believe in or be a part of something that could be coaxed but that too would be someone who's very succeptable and have difficulty thinking for themselves
Am I the only rational and sane person left?
What would be even more rational and sane of you would be to recognize the following: that most religious people are not creationists and do accept the scientific explanations for things; that your statement, "Religion does nothing but harm," is exaggerated and factually inaccurate; that it is fanaticism that causes violence, not belief in God; and that there are as many reasons for believing in God as there are people who believe in him/her, including personal experience, which any rational person must agree can only be legitimately interpreted by the experiencer, due to the hard problem of consciousness. I'll tell you what I think is harmful, ridiculous, childish, immature, irrational, illogical, etc, etc: people of any faith-- or lack thereof-- who insist that their way of viewing the world is the only true and valid one and should be adopted by everyone. There are a lot of religious people who are guilty of this, and there are lot of atheists who are, too. If you hang around here long enough, you will find out that atheists can be and often are just as mean, rude, hateful, closed-minded, literal and fanatical as some of the religious people are, and are responsible for just as much of the animosity between the two groups. The idea that there is a "one size fits all" answer to life, the universe and everything is foolish. The world doesn't work that way. There are many valid ways of looking at the same thing, and people choose to view the world through one lens or another. I'm not saying everyone is 100% right; what I'm saying is that there is a grain of truth in the basis of most, if not all, worldviews, religious and secular ones alike, and that we all have much more in common with each other than we realize when we are busy focusing on the differences and the literal meanings of things instead of on loving and respecting each other. Please take what I've said into consideration. Freedom from religion does not mean eradicating religion, any more than freedom OF religion means forcing everyone to become religious. Both terms actually mean the same thing, and that is: freedom for people of all beliefs to live in peace and harmony with each other. I'm sure that anyone who is rational and sane would agree that forcing people to do anything is not a good idea if we are trying to build a peaceful and enlightened world.
Why are people who claim to be rational/practical thinkers always boring?
Especially compared to people who tend to think with superstition. I know those people are suppose to be uneducated and stupid and those who have ration are "smart and educated" but they are so painfully boring! Everyone that I have met is set on proving their point that no one asked for with facts and science. I would rather listen to a crazy person any day. Why are a lot of people who claim to be rational on a large majority beyond boring????????????
How does a rational person live among whimsical and emotionally unstable people while retaining one's sanity?
I agree with other answers here, but I'd also suggest reading Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. He was in a concentration camp during World War II and couldn't do anything about his situation. He observed what helped him and others to survive the experience and to heal and continue to love other humans after that horror. It really comes down to an unshakeable belief in yourself and your personal integrity. You may not be able to change your situation, but you can change your attitude toward your situation. It's not helpful to judge it as bad because every moment has something to teach us, and once you judge a situation as bad, everything conspires to agree with your judgment; It's a self-perpetuating state of mind. In other words, someone in a concentration camp wailing about their situation was expending valuable energy in an activity that's not going to further their survival, and was likely to attract negative attention from the guards. Individuals who survived longer conserved their energy but also clung to a personal reason to live which was significant to them alone.Use that rational function to understand what makes people seem whimsical or insane. Understanding where people are coming from and how it differs from your own stance will help you keep your own personality intact.
What makes a crazy person... crazy?
There is insanity. If there is an objective reality (and it's impractical to assume otherwise), then that reality is what the majority of people can collect data on. These include thing like What objects exist, what events occur, and how cause and effect are related. There are two kinds of insanity; One in which, seeing the same stimuli, a person will arrive at an irrational conclusion through abnormal reasoning and processing. In another, the person is shown the same stimuli, but percieves either different or additional stimuli, then rationally processes these false stimuli, and arrives at a fals conclusion about the state of things. Essentially, you cannot prove that one person is crazy and others not, empirically, But under the assumption that the generally percieved/understood world is an objective reality, some people will be crazy either because of warped reasoning or warped perception.
Thinking rationally, can you win an argument with one that thinks emotionally?
An appeal to emotions can be, and is most effectively, constructed coldly and rationally.When forming any argument, first consider who your audience is. What do they value? What do they wish was true, and what do they believe is actually the case? What makes them feel empathy, and what makes them harden and exclude ideas or people from their worlds?Understand these things, then consider what you are trying to prove. What do the people you are aiming to persuade genuinely feel about the subject in question? Why might they feel they way? Was their heart hardened previously?If so, making them reconsider the subject in question from a novel perspective, one they have forgotten or dismissed, may help to soften them. Showing them a perspective they have genuinely never seen will help even more, as it will demonstrate that their judgment was formed based upon limited information, and encourage a recalculation.If you can discern why they believe things they condemn occur, you can also snipe at those ideas, not by discrediting them, but by demonstrating the human reasons that those unfortunate or lamentable circumstances exist; you can make the people you are arguing with feel a situation from the perspective of the person they condemn if you pull back far enough to make their choices seem reasonable. Bonus points if it can seem inevitable, given the nature of mankind.Now, the ultimate way to win any emotional appeal is not to simply elicit empathy, but to understand what the people you are trying to persuade prioritize, and to convince them through their feelings that the person or action you are trying to defend stemmed from the same, admirable sentiments they value themselves. If you can convince someone that, if they were in the other person’s shoes, they would have done the same, you have won, and elicited as much emotional sympathy as you are going to gain from that person.That may not be enough to persuade someone on their own. I, personally, like combining appeals to emotion with hard facts when I really care about a subject. But not taking advantage of people’s emotions while making an argument is irrational.
Is there any way to prove your sanity?
I'm not going crazy in a sane world. I'm going sane in a crazy world.