Psychosis - another reason to be anti-theist

[Angrboda]

I've been thinking a lot about my religious beliefs today. I feel I need to go one of two ways: deeper into my Hindu faith (I've felt there's a certain superficiality to my Hinduism), or I could go the other direction and embrace atheism. Unfortunately I'm stuck, and one of the reasons that I am stuck is because of psychotic delusions which have religious overtones. Since I've been taking anti-psychotic medication for 1-1/2 years, the delusions are less intense, but they still seem "true" to me, even though they're not as strong as they used to be. Unfortunately for me, my religious beliefs and my delusions are entangled, making coming to a clear decision about which way to go very difficult. However, looking back on my past, it has been the psychosis itself which has been the main "harm factor" in my life (to address the OP). Yes, my psychosis does have an effect on my religious beliefs, but it's not that my religious beliefs cloaked my psychosis, and the psychosis has always been a problem in and of itself. I don't know if things would have been different in a fundamentalist sect with these delusions, but I doubt it. We talk about religious people being 'deluded', but that's just a figure of speech. Real psychotic delusions are a different beast. They tend to be fixed around specific themes, and I doubt that a truly ill person would not stand out from the rest as being what they are, mentally ill. So I think in a very few cases, religion might cloak mental illness, but not many. If anything, an anti-medicine religious stance is more likely to be problematic for the mentally ill religious person, but that's the case whether the illness is mental or physical. So, no, I don't think religion likely contributes a great deal to the problems that a psychotic individual faces in the majority of circumstances. But that's based on my own experience, and another person's experience might differ.