Why religion shouldn't be called a mental illness

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5 reasons atheists shouldn’t call religion a mental illness

Chris Stedman

A few days ago, in a post on faith healing, American Atheists president Dave Silverman wrote: “We must recognize religion as brainwashing. We must recognize the (hyper) religious as mentally damaged.”

He’s not the first to equate religion with mental illness or “mental damage.” Bill Maher has called religion “a neurological disorder.” Sam Harris wrote in The End of Faith, “it is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.” Facebook groups claiming religion is a “mental disorder” or “mental disease” boast hundreds of members, and a list of “7 reasons why religion is a form of mental illness” has been shared on a number of atheist blogs.

It seems clear to me that religion isn’t a form of mental illness, and that calling it one reflects a shallow understanding of both mental illness and religion—or, worse still, a knowing attempt to use mental illness as an insult.

While this discussion is worthy of lengthy consideration, I consulted with two atheist activists and compiled five reasons atheists should avoid this problematic parallel:

1. Even if well-intended, the equation fails

I hope that most atheists who claim religion is a mental illness don’t intend it as an insult, and instead have a confused understanding of mental illness or religion. Either way, the truth is that religion isn’t a form of mental illness.

“Religion and mental illness are different psychological processes,” said atheist and mental health advocate Miri Mogilevsky in a recent email exchange. “[Religious beliefs may] stem from cognitive processes that are essentially adaptive, such as looking for patterns and feeling like a part of something larger than oneself.”

In The Belief Instinct, Jesse Bering also argues that religious belief is adaptive. Mental illnesses, on the other hand, clearly reflect maladaptive processes.

“People who cannot leave the house without having a panic attack or who feel a compulsion to wash their hands hundreds of times a day are experiencing symptoms that interfere with their ability to go about their lives,” Mogilevsky said. “Except in extreme cases, religion does not operate this way.”

Simply put: You may find religious beliefs irrational, but that doesn’t mean they’re a manifestation of mental illness.

2. Mental illness is not an insult

Surely not all atheists who claim religion is a mental illness do so to insult believers, but some do. This should go without saying, but it’s vital: Mental illness should never be wielded as an insult, particularly because people with mental illness face widespread stigma.

“Equating religion with mental illness is harmful for a number of reasons,” said Mogilevsky, who will soon launch a secular mental health support group. “When done to make fun of or put down religion, it also puts down people struggling with [mental illness].”

Calling religion a form of mental illness as a way to insult believers is not only crude and wrong—it also contributes to a culture that marginalizes people with mental illness and defines them solely by their illness. Atheists, agnostics, and Humanists should actively promote dignity for all people and strive to challenge dehumanization, rather than contribute to it.

3. Religion is often associated with wellbeing

Not only is religion not a form of mental illness—it’s actually associated with wellbeing in the U.S.

“Religion is many things—a famously indefinable concept—but for our purposes we can use the word to refer to supernatural belief systems and institutions built around them,” said David Yaden, a researcher at The University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center who works in collaboration with UPenn’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, in a recent email exchange. “If that is our definition, religion absolutely cannot be [categorized] as a mental illness.”

“In fact, empirical evidence sometimes points to the opposite conclusion,” Yaden said, citing the work of Dr. Ken Pargament. “When it comes to facilitating mental health, empirical data demonstrates that religious people have more positive emotion, more meaning in life, more life satisfaction, cope better with trauma, are more physically healthy, are more altruistic and socially connected, and are not diagnosed with mental illness more than other people.”

While there are a number of explanations for these correlations—such as the fact that nonreligious people often lack access to the kinds of resources that religious communities offer—it’s a bit ironic to call religion a mental illness when it is in fact often associated with wellbeing.

4. This parallel distracts us from trying to understand and learn from religion

“Calling religion a mental illness keeps us from asking serious questions about what actually does attract people to religion,” said Mogilevsky, who recently published a lengthy piece challenging atheists who call religion a mental illness. “[It’s] a convenient way to avoid thinking about what we could actually be doing to make the secular community more welcoming and inclusive, and what sorts of resources we are lacking that people can find in religious communities.”

Yaden, who recently began working as an assistant chaplain for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Rutgers, shares this concern.

“Secular society still has a lot to learn from how effective religion can be at fostering mental health,” said Yaden. “And as a society based on secular values, we need to be very careful with what we choose to pathologize. True liberty and freedom include the right to believe what one will without the fear of being labeled ‘ill.’”

Indeed. Atheists would do well to remember this, as this false diagnosis also gets turned back around at us.

5. Atheists and theists share in the challenges of being human

There is a great deal of suffering in the world, and atheists and theists share in it. Rather than making unfair cheap shots—especially at the expense of a marginalized group of people that includes some atheists—we should express compassion for people who have experiences that differ from our own and seek to understand them. And, importantly, we have more in common than it may seem.

“Claiming that religion is a mental illness obscures the fact that we all—yes, atheists too—regularly engage in irrational thinking,” said Mogilevsky. “If thinking irrationally is a mental illness, then we are all mentally ill, and the term loses its meaning. As a survivor of mental illness myself, I think we should save that term for situations in which people are truly suffering and having trouble going about their lives.”

5 reasons atheists shouldn't call religion a mental illness | Faitheist

 

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The best part of the article is the comments section. The following is a strongly worded, rather lengthy comment in response to the above article. Good read.

Bruce Long Feb 24, 2014 at 12:25 pm

Sorry, but you simply have not succeeded at arguing the first point. The clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia and various other psychoses involves a number of salient factors and symptoms that if demonstrated to hold indicate psychopathology. These include delusions of reference (being referred to by or referring to people or conscious beings that do not exist), auditory and visual hallucinations (including the belief in witnessing miracles and heaing the voices of a god or gods in some way), and general paranoia: including being concerned about being watched or believing one is being watched often. Especially if a person believes they are always being watched. All of these symptoms are present in faithist commitments to unreal and fictional divine beings believed in as real. Adult persons that refer to and take themselves to be the objects of attention of non-existent persons – no matter what the nature of the putative person – are ill.

Adults that hold the paranoid belief that they are part of some worldwide historical conspiracy by supernatural beings to dominate their lives and the lives of everyone else – and to bring about an end to history: are ill.

Adults that speak into space and believe that they are referring to some real individual or individuals (supernatural persons in this case) are ill, especially when they claim that those persons are as real as you or I, but simply in a different way. The same goes for those that claim to be receiving some kind of divine inspiration or internal voice from one of these being or a spirit of some kind. In any other circumstances – all other conditions held constant – such would all be symptoms of psychosis and a paranoid delusion at best.

There is no excuse available for faithism or religionism on the basis of cultural norms. Many times in history mankind has made the most progress by overthrowing the greatest and most widely and dearly held assumptions which turned out to be broadly unhealthy. The black plague was caused because people were convinced that cats were creatures somehow influenced by some kind devil personality. We do not think that if many people truly believed in batman or the flying spaghetti monster as real beings – that they could refer to and be heard by and listen to internally – that they would be trustworthy rational beings whose cognitive faculties could be properly relied upon. That the fictional characters are different makes no difference.

And yes – there are many faithists – and numbers do not make any difference to the fact of the appropriate diagnosis. It does not follow from something being a cultural norm that it is healthy or beneficial to individuals or to society.

The argument that religion and faithism does some good is vastly flawed. Acid and disease will do some good if applied under the right circumstances the right way (vaccination). There is plenty of evidence that the benefits of faith in terms of any confidence and peace of mind are equally available to the sceptic and non-believer who chooses to approach the facts with the right attitude. The claim that people need faith in religious icons and supernatural entities is habitually based propaganda (and there re many other motivations, but none of them truly about benefitting individuals or societies).

It is arguable that every peaceful moment that any religionist has ever experienced could have been secured in a non-religious manner (except for those that thrill to the euphoria of illusion and deception of themselves and others for personal gain, perhaps). More importantly, arguably for every meditative moment, there has been a human sacrifice, a torture, a political sabotage, a hate crime motivated by needless discursive and doctrinal divisions, or someone that has tried to control the outcomes and minds of others with cheap narratives that are epistemically limited. The empathetic scientist (science in the broad sense including the special and to some extent the social) that works hard to figure out what is really going on rather than – well – making shit up – is doing their fellow man the real service.

Faithists and religionists just are sharing in a complex elaborate sophisticated constructed delusion from which they cannot be swayed by any measure of reason and which remains fixed in the face of a complete lack of evidence and in the face of material demonstrations of its vacuity. For some reason because of its grandness of scope (although science is now rapidly revealing that religious affectation embodies a limited imagination) the delusion is accepted. But this is just silly and inconsistent. Grandiose delusions where the individual is empowered by some god proxy in some manner by fiat are delusions that are conventionally pathological and clinically so. The willful dissimulation that is involved in forgetting it is the one that cannot prove the non-existence of something that is behaving questionably is not some pragmatic maneuver for survival: this is the sign of a mind weakened by pathology adopted and induced, and perhaps just acquired.

Faithists most certainly are ill, and convinced faithism is an illness of delusions of reference and grandiose relevance, paranoia, the need to control others, and narcissistic imperatives including the belief of affirmation by the powerful deities (or attracting the displeasure of the same – it does not matter). Like many mentally ill persons faithists are practiced at pretending they are well and have the advantage of corporate agreement and safety in numbers to embolden them. They deserve our help and support, but can be harmful and threatening when challenged. Personally I have borne the brunt of the ire of disaffected faithists on many occasions, and they are not pretty when having a religonised psychotic episode. Most marked is their propensity to passive aggression and clandestine (social) or childish (interpersonal) manifestations of disaffectedness and aggression or aversion in response to criticism: doctrine and dogma are usually called into service, or the demonizing of the opponent as a servant of evil (constructive criticism or appeals to reason are often mislabeled as accusatory or an attack).

However, if we truly care about them, then we will not continue to pedal the religion as medicine mythos that is put forward by Jamesian Pragmatists and those that benefit from weakening the cognitive capacity or their human fellows by intellectual sabotage, and that have rely upon this for a living and as a way of exerting personal power over others. Such is the approach of the controlling narcissist that cannot accept criticism and the psychopath that will endorse any narrative to secure their ends despite the cost to children. They have been around since at least Socrates time, and it will be pleasing and refreshing to see them gone forever, replaced by peaceful, productive, reasonably satisfied, and rational selves that do not enlist god characters as proxies and justifications for their attitudes and meanness.

Faiths are a ready made tool for abuse by such individuals. What better way to control the outcomes and behaviour of another but to convince them that they should obey some all powerful omniscent moral agent, and then craft the moral content to suit oneself. Persons who cannot stand forth and make rational judgements unaided by the support of gangs of other people all affirming their beliefs with no regard for evidence, demonstration, reasoned assessment, or scientific appraisal and discourse: such people are limited in their ability to achieve their own agency (although no person is an island and everyone needs help – this is far beyond that) and seek control of others in preference to changing their minds with cognitive application and emotional intelligence.

Religion is the systematized manifestation and embodiment of dissimulative, narcissistic, controlling, paranoid, delusive (and complexly and grandiosely so) and hallucinatory illness. It is time for us to be rid of it at last, and to be truly free and free to liberate our minds.

We certainly can understand and learn fro religion, but it’s content and edicts have little to teach us. It’s vast errors are far more informative. Secular society does not need to invent a religion like alternative to religion. This is a mistake. If a definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting different results, then we need religion or religious like structures like we need alchemy or cancer.

All people share the challenges of being human. That is simply tautological. It is that religion is in any way a good way of going about it that is an idea that is well past its use-by date. Yaden and other religionist apologists are just wrong. There are some things in the spectrum of human experience and habit that we are simply better without.

Tit for tat efforts at pathologising more basic and simple approaches to peace and personal satisfaction that do not involves the imposition and adoption of grandiose delusions fail. They fail because they assume – petitio principii – that which they are trying to argue: that religion is necessary for happiness and health. They fail because the yearnings that lead people to faith in frail narratives because of lack and the human condition have other cures: and every rational freethinking person knows it. They do not want to face radical and elegant alternative solutions that retain fellowship but mitigate group think and anti-intellectualism when the mind others, and nature are – even for the religionist – our only real greatest source of inspiration. To be dissatisfied and disaffected with the sufficiency of that is pathological on standard terms.

See more at: 5 reasons atheists shouldn't call religion a mental illness | Faitheist

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Hard to think of it any other way after reading some peoples' posts here...

 

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The comment was very well articulated.