RELIGIOUS FAITH COULD BE SYMPTOM OF MENTAL ILLNESS?

A mental illness is a medical condition that disrupts and damages a person’s thinking, feeling, mood, ability to relate to others and daily functioning
 
If religion is not a mental illness, it could nevertheless be a symptom of a mental illness.
 
A religion could be a symptom of your own mental illness or somebody else's.
 
Abraham was going to kill his son for God.
 
Moses slaughtered and had people stoned to death because he thought God wanted it.
 
Jesus said that it is okay to murder big sinners as long as you are better than them. He made a woman sweat in front of a mob who said they were going to stone her though he knew they legally were going to be stopped anyway.  He deliberately sought crucifixion.
 
Those religious heroes were clearly so insane that a diagnosis would have been done in seconds.
 
Christianity only recognises the work of doctors not because doctors get results but because God allegedly uses doctors to heal you. That makes them no different from the crank who urges you to keep away form doctors and trust in prayer. Both see doctors as useless in themselves. Both agree in principle that if God bans the healing work of doctors then God is right.
 
Religious people mostly if not always have delusions not beliefs.
 
If a religion is a symptom of mental illness, it is therefore a facilitator.
 
Social pressure and "because everybody does it" are major reasons why religion is so powerful.
 
Allowing social pressure to make you religious is in fact maladaptive.
 
Religious persons give all their love to invisible friends. They think these friends exist though they have no evidence. If you have a relationship with a non-existent friend that is a sign that hallucination of some kind is involved. Religion induces it. It is very extreme when the relationship is about giving all your love to God. Christ said that you and your neighbour do not come first for you must love God with all your heart.
 
Religious persons suffer from delusions - they think that no matter how terrible things get for them that some invisible friend will help with magic. They do this in spite of seeing people who are never helped. The evidence cannot shake their belief so it is a delusion.
 
The believer never learns. The believer trusts in prayer even if it never works. Excuses are made for its failure. They think, "Next time I will get my prayer answered." They might deny they are so confident that it will be answered exactly but actions speak louder.
 
Believers suffer from a tendency to accept absurd myths and the impossible as historically true. Christians believe in Adam and Eve despite the silly story about them in the Bible and the scientific proof that they are fiction. Fantasy and reality are mixed together. They cannot distinguish one from the other.
 
Believers suffer the paranoid belief that anybody who does not agree with their religious doctrines is sinful or in league wittingly or unwittingly with Satan.

Believers should know that the visions and mystical experiences that drive religion can be triggered by drugs.  The user of highly concentrated tetrahydrocannabinol THC will commonly receive wondrous perceptions that she or he is simply God trying to learn about herself/himself through relationships with others and interactions with the world.  Satan and God will be declared to be ultimately the same force, the same being.  It is insane to validate the person who reports that without drugs and ignore the person who does.   Religion does not want to know for it has something to hide.  It doubts its own sanity. It denies that the drugs experience is sane.  In doing so it declares itself delusional.
 
Believers condone the emotional abuse inflicted on them. They feel awful and evil for doing harmless things such as masturbating or forgetting to pray. They think that some sin that is not that bad will put them in Hell forever. They have their psyche scarred for life. They will often become emotional abusers themselves. By supporting a religion of emotional abuse and passive aggression they are guilty by association.
 
Believers tend to hate and harass and use violence against those who will not agree with their religious beliefs.

Believers play on how we tend to feel we are something living in a body.  Though it seems the Bible teaches that you are your and the expression soul just means alive St Paul advocated the notion that the body is a tent that we live in.  2 Corinthians 5:2.  In 2 Peter 1:14 the author writes that he will soon put his tent aside.  This opens the way to denigration of the body and the feeling that it does not matter for it is not the real you.  It leads to dissociative disorders.  It kills for many anorexics think their body is only an instrument they can shape and is not them.  The best way to help mental health is through the body and any teaching that encourages you to feel you are bigger than your body is a block.  Depth psychologists such as Jung were clear that mind and body are one and must be treated as one.

Believers say God is important for there is no morality unless there is a God.  They say you need to believe in God to understand why we must be moral.  They say that unbelievers if they can behave in a moral way have no reason why and that even then it is because God overrides their ignorance and gifts them with moral tendencies.  If believers are saying here is no difference between feeding a dog or torturing him to death if there is no God then they need psychiatric attention. The need to establish a difference is the first step.  Taking this first step is itself moral.  Then the next step is applying moral thinking to the difference.   Though the difference is seen as assessing and not being moral for an is does not imply an ought it is clear that it is still moral.  The error is in thinking that taking a step towards a moral issue is not itself moral.  It is.  Taking the step is even more important than having a moral system for you cannot have a moral system without it.  The idea that God needs to be believed in to be moral is clearly trying to diagnose everybody as psychopaths who need a faith "treatment" to manage or cure the disorder.

Liberals and lefties typically try to deny that murder is a sin by saying murderers are mentally ill.  Then they hypocritically exempt people like Moses and Muhammad and St Paul who murdered many.
 
If hypothetically religion does not do these things, it should lead to them. It should still be discarded on a point of principle.