Religious vs disability accommodations

[Razzle]

One primary difference: Mental disorders are recognized as actual disabilities and people are trying to cure it. Religious indoctrination is not recognized as a disability nor acknowledged as wilful-ignorance.

I'm not arguing that religions are disabilities (although I might come down on the side that it should be classed as one, but that would need a whole separate discussion and actually doesn't need to be appealed to in order to make the case I'm making here, so I'd rather not get into it), I'm accepting for the sake of argument that religious belief is not a form of disability. Instead I'm arguing that just as race and sexual orientation are not disabilities, but have certain factors in common with disability (e.g. historical and current day persecution, discrimination and hate crimes), that cause them to be treated the same as disability is by certain laws (e.g. hate crime laws), beliefs caused by religious indoctrination and beliefs caused by mental disabilities have the relevant factors in common that they ought to be treated the same way by reasonable accommodation law, while remaining classed in separate categories. I cannot think of any relevant differences between the two kinds of false beliefs.

As I believe Jeff has stated himself in response to Pascale's Wager, belief is not a conscious choice, whether it's religious belief, ordinary belief or mental illness-induced belief. You can't just flick a switch in your mind and decide to believe in God now just because it would be convenient in some way - any self-deception would have to be unconscious - and there's no reason to think that people who do believe in God ever made a conscious choice to get caught in the mind prison they find themselves in, and can simply decide to stop believing it. I know that when I believed in the Christian God, I desperately didn't want to, although I couldn't admit that, because it was all depressing and terrifying. Although on a neurological level, what's happening is very different to what's happening in PTSD (which is also very different to what's happening in OCD, which is also very different to what's happening in psychosis) - the effect is the same: a pattern of avoiding stimuli which cannot physically harm you but which cause fear, which is not your choice or your fault.