(May 9, 2015 at 2:55 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:(May 9, 2015 at 2:01 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: Before 1973, the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness. In 1973, they no longer classified homosexuality as a mental illness. Nothing changed about homosexuality itself. What changed were societal attitudes toward homosexuality.
What makes something a mental illness is its level of social acceptability.
Religion in not considered to be a mental illness because it is socially acceptable. Otherwise, it would be a mental illness.
Bullshit. This is a hasty generalization. Simply because some mental illness diagnoses may be the product of cultural prejudices does not justify the conclusion that they all are, nor its corollary that religion would be classified as a mental illness if it weren't socially acceptable. People believe all sorts of weird things, from alien abduction to contrails, without that belief rising to the category of mental illness.
Whether a particular mental process, or set of processes, are labeled "mental illness" or not is a function of attitude towards those thought processes. It is not like finding a virus and saying, aha, there is the problem! It is that some thoughts, or sets of thoughts, are judged to be sufficiently different from what is judged to be good that they are given that particular label. It is a value judgement about a state of affairs, not an objective analysis of the state of affairs.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
