At what point does faith become insanity?

[emjay]

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.

Oops, sorry, I think I was misleading there. I don't think there's a group called "True Believers," though of course they all think they're true believers. I assumed you meant you were just enthusiastic about your beliefs -- so no issue there. 

Ah, right    No harm done though.

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.

I think this is the point I want to emphasize. Being really really wrong is not the same as being insane. Anybody who's raised that way, who has heard it from birth, is reasonable to believe it -- whether they're reasonable to KEEP believing it or not is of course a different issue.

Yeah, that seems fair enough. I consider myself to have been deluded when I was a smoker as well, given all the beliefs and fears that maintained it, but not insane. As a general rule I'd say it usually takes looking at it from the outside-in, ie from a position of total freedom from whatever mindset it is, to truly recognise how deluded it was. It's much harder from within, while under its influence, and especially if it's let's say 'normalised' within a group you are part of. Such that the more insular that group is, and the more let's say 'co-dependence', there is, the harder it is to escape its influence. I was relatively lucky in my case regarding religion, because it was ultimately cognitive dissonance that released me from that mindset, and once out it was easy to see it for what it was, just the same as when I later quit smoking.