Religion as a mental illness

[AFTT47]

Good point. You can diagnose a physical cause of a delusion and that will be objective. And in the vast majority of people, religion (or any other non-rational belief) has no physical cause as a result of a physiological malfunction but of the general limitations of our species.

But you ought to be able to say that a belief in anything that we cannot demonstrate to be real is, by definition, a delusion.  It doesn't matter whether you're talking to a giant invisible rabbit or a god, we have no reason to think that these things exist, thus they represent a mental aberration.  But the people who believe in Harvey get put away or drugged up, the people who talk to gods do not.  It's hypocritical.

We can objectively say that believing in something without evidence is not logical and perhaps even not rational. I don't believe we can say it is a mental aberration because that implies a malfunction and the evidence points to their being none. The sad fact is that while the human brain has a capacity for logic, it is a secondary function. Emotion is primary. So the brain is functioning normally. It just isn't very good at processing information when there is a lot of emotional attachment.