Atheism liberated me from pointless thinking,and made my life enjoyable.

[Esquilax]

So you believe that all theists are mentally ill?

I think you're indoctrinated, which might be considered a form of mental illness I suppose. I don't have particularly strong feelings on the matter one way or another, but that also wasn't the point I was making: you were going on about spirituality and relationships with god, and I pointed out that in a different context, the same logic you were using would identify mental illness in the claimant.

The conclusion wasn't "theists are all mentally ill," it was "the justifications you are using to support your claim are indistinguishable from those that would mark a person as mentally ill in any other context. Therefore, they are not reasonable justifications."

Presidents, doctors, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, etc - all productive members of society, not patients in a mental facility or unable to cope in a normal society.

I don't think you know very much about mental illness, if this is the picture you actually hold of it, and not a strawman you've concocted. Mental disorders exist on a continuum, not all of them are debilitating.

For example, I am mentally ill. I have a severe phobia of bodies of water and being submerged, in addition to a laundry list of other symptoms and causes that won't be discussed here. Am I in a mental facility, or unable to cope with normal society? No, neither of those things. I just had to go through therapy to reduce my reaction to certain stimuli.

On the flipside, you believe that a magic man is watching your every move. If you called that magic man James instead of God, people would think you had something wrong with you. You are still a productive member of society, but the content of this belief you hold isn't so far removed from a delusional state as you'd like to think.

If a person is hopelessly living in a world of drugs and alcohol, and then turns around his life and credits it to his experience with God, that's not evidence of God?

No, that's evidence of the inspirational power of ideas. If a person is in the exact situation you describe and turns his life around due to his experience with Henry the flying space dildo, does that mean such a being must exist too?

Are the experiences of other religions evidence for their gods too, or is it only the purported results of your religion that carry any weight with you?

If I hear person after person telling me about God has changed their lives, I guess I can't believe them unless I do an experiment in a controlled environment.

Since when has proclaimed causation based on no evidence at all ever been rational? What you're doing is mistaking the effect as evidence of its own cause, and that's circular reasoning: what causes X event? God does. Has X event happened to thousands of people? I guess god must be real!

But you haven't justified the answer you've given to the first question, so how on earth would the rest follow, sight unseen?

Even though I'm the one experiencing God, I really can't believe myself.

Keep telling yourself that everything you experience must necessarily true, and then go ahead and dose yourself up with hallucinogens, and we'll see how accurate that belief really is.

I had a very vivid fever dream in childhood that stuck with me, where the physical dimensions of my bedroom shifted in multiple contradicting ways simultaneously: my closet was both right next to me and miles away at the same time. Did that literally happen, just because I experienced it? Or can we both just acknowledge that sometimes our brains flip out and do weird stuff that doesn't align with reality?

You can refuse to believe because you see no evidence, but you're going too far in trying to discredit the testimonies, off hand, of rational, functioning, honest people about their own experiences.

Testimony is a notoriously fickle and unreliable thing. Additionally, you're playing a little equivocation game here, because the testimony you're talking about isn't quite as consistent or overarching as you want us to believe, is it? How many denominations of christianity are there? And how many individual slight variations on what god wants are there, even within those main branches? How many theists later became atheists?

You're trying to fake a broad, singular trend, using crisscrossing and conflicting, constantly varying accounts to do so. It's ludicrous.