Friendly Atheism

[brewer]

Rationalizations can be made for any behavior/belief. It does not make the behavior/belief rational. 

And Boru makes an excellent point.

I think its fair to distinguish between first-person and third-person rationality, but both are still observer-dependant. We can agree that psychotic behavior is rational for the one with the psychotic disorder. But what are the criteria for classifying something as rational from a third-person perspective? Many psychotic behaviors are categorized as such based on statistical analysis; they are abnormal because they are infrequent, deviating from the average, not necessarily because they are inherently abnormal or irrational (Barlow & Durand, 2015).

Even third-person observers are bound to differ on their classification. For you, someone being afraid of butterflies may appear irrational; it poses no threat. But from my perspective, it is reasonable given its underlying infrastructure; we understand why phobias happen. In other words, phobias are rational not because of the butterfly, but because of how the person's brain is processing it. It makes sense why they are responding that way.

If you're going to classify beliefs and behaviors as objectively rational/irrational, you need to give an objective way to measure and classify it.

Reference: Barlow, D. H., & Durand, V. M. (2015). Abnormal psychology: An integrative approach (7th ed.). Stanford: Cengage Learning.

Why do you keep trying to change the goal post away from rational religious belief? We are not talking about what is considered medically irrational/delusional. Unless you want to discuss why some of the christian beliefs could fit the medical criteria. 

Phobias by definition are irrational fears. Just because we think (have a hypothesis for) the neuropsychology of the brain for phobias does not make phobias rational. You have no idea of what you're talking about.