When is a Religious Belief Delusional?

[Angrboda]

Just for the sake of clarification, one of the purposes of clinical diagnosis is to identify treatments that are likely to reduce a person's symptoms. The reasoning being that people with similar clusters of symptoms correlates well with beneficial response to specific treatments. This is further contextualized by the specific cluster of symptoms. For example, you might not expect a person suffering hallucinations who has been grouped with people having borderline personality disorder to necessarily respond appropriately to the same treatments which address hallucinations in a person with schizophrenia. This assumes that there is a common basis for similar groupings of symptoms, and seems largely correct. With that in mind, it seems unlikely that people with religious beliefs are likely to respond to treatments aimed at other groups, or even at all. In addition is the question of quality of life, which motivates much treatment. It's not clear that treatment for religious belief would result in an improvement in quality of life, so that rationale, too, seems precluded. For these reasons, while it may serve as a useful model or basis of analogizing, I don't think the clinical concept of delusion would be appropriate. Perhaps someday it will be. But given our current understanding of things, it seems an inappropriate conflation of whatever behaviors the religious are engaging in, and which may be maladaptive, and the clinical concept of delusion.

I'm not going to go into it at this time, but as I suggested in the other thread, I think there may be good reason for separating out religious behavior from that of simple human error. Regardless of what you feel about analogizing it to delusion, I think it's clear that there is more going on than applies to people in non-specific reasoning and belief.