At what point does faith become insanity?

[emjay]

In my own case I look back on it as a time of stubborn delusion. I still remember the frustrated eye-rolls of atheist acquaintances at school, one in particular, as whatever they said washed right over me and didn't make a dent. I sometimes wish to this day that I could meet that guy again and say 'you were right, and I was an idiot'.

May I ask about your time of delusion? I wonder if in your True Believer days you were a member of a True Believer group. Were you raised that way? Or maybe recruited? 

No, it looks like I got the wrong end of the stick there, my mistake; I didn't know there was a specific group called "True Believers", I just thought he was talking generally as in 'I was a true/strong believer once', and just recounting my experiences of the same. I was whatever denomination my parents were when I was growing up, which was Baptist and/or Pentecostal, with a helluva lot of tele-evangelism thrown in (they changed churches a lot), I don't really know the difference. So not recruited, just raised that way.

I'm asking because this goes to what I was saying earlier about beliefs being a social thing. If you believe what the other members of your society believe, then I don't think we can say you're insane, even if the beliefs look crazy to us now. 

America is probably unusual in that we have two very different societies existing in the same space. So if some significant percentage of the students in your school are fundies, but you also have respectable people who roll their eyes at fundie beliefs, then there is bound to be frustration. I'd imagine it's also easier to switch from one group to another, because it means leaving one existing group for another. It's not like you have to move to another country or something. 

I recall beliefs I had and things I said when I was really young that seem wildly wrong to me now. Life teaches you things. But I wouldn't say I was insane for those beliefs, because they were in fact well-accepted in the place where I was.

In my case I don't think I was 'insane' during that period, just delusional. A delusion to me just means a set of beliefs, stubbornly held, and largely resistent to reason/outside influence, primarily through massive amounts of confirmation bias. The same thing can happen in a mafia game, but I wouldn't (necessarily) call it insane.

In my school, in Britain, theists were a minority. I don't remember any of my friends or classmates being theists, so I was the odd one out in that regard. So from my classmates perspectives, I guess I arguably could've appeared pretty insane, but from a different relative baseline, that of a Britain where my parents beliefs were/are pretty common/standard, if technically in the minority, less so. I can't really speak for America, never having lived there, with religion being so ubiquitous in one way or another, such that the only way to get anything done or be heard seems to be to join or start a religion/church. That's a very different baseline for comparison.