It’s not group psychosis or mental illness, true, but it is divorced from reality. Sadly, the human mind is capable generating demonstrably, obviously erroneous beliefs without suffering from significantly abnormal psychology.
Religion is a set of extremely successful myths, which have survived mainly by convincing people that you can’t be a good person without them, which frequently involves disparaging people of other beliefs as bad/evil.
In other words, a really shitty worldview.
But they’re not persistent delusions. Delusions are, by definition, NOT cultural in origin. This is something that gets pretty well drilled into you when you study abnormal psychology. There’s a difference between someone’s brain malfunctioning and them simply being possessed of outdated cultural beliefs or traditions. It’s why religious beliefs aren’t considered mental illness, but still believing in Santa Claus when you’re an adult would be.
that’s just them special casing it so that they can avoid calling it a mental illness.
It’s a persistent delusion fed to you by your parents, your parents feeding you it doesn’t change that it’s a delusion.
If someone raised their children to believe the tooth fairy was real and that everyone was going to lie and say that it wasn’t and that you have to believe anyway, that’d be a delusion, but religion is special because…? the only difference is that more people are doing it.
The only reason for the cultural exclusion is because they don’t want to define religion as a delusion, not because it isn’t one. It meets EVERY single other criteria.
religious beliefs aren’t considered mental illness
You’re right — it’s actually brain damage and cognitive impairment.
