Religion is a Delusion/Mental Illness

[Cephus]

I'm going to butt in here with the practical reason why you shouldn't call religious belief a mental illness: The majority of people (at least in the USA) have religious beliefs. They have more voting power than we do. If you call them insane, you will just piss them off. That's important because if we want to be accepted, if we want atheists to be viable candidates for public office, we can't be making blanket statements like this - even if it's true.

How far would blacks have gotten in the civil rights movement if they dissed all non-blacks? How far would the homosexuals have gotten if they dissed all straights?

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That is, of course, the argument from consequences, a logical fallacy.  Either religion is a mental illness or it is not.  The goal is to find the reality, not to worry about the potential consequences.

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I would like to see the demographics of religion in the US and other countries. I think that secularism is on the rise everywhere.

It is indeed. Polls in the US indicate a slow but sure increase in secularism and a corresponding drop in Christianity. That's good news. Christians still rule in this country, though and we need to act accordingly. Failure to do so would be denying reality  - the same thing we accuse Christians of doing.

It's not that slow, secularism and an attendant rise in moderate and liberal religiosity are on a dramatic rise in the past 15-20 years.  Just from memory, the "nones" have risen from about 3% to more than 20% in that time.  32% of people under 30 are irreligious and this is growing.  The majority of hard-core theists are elderly and will die off in the short term, further increasing the non-religious numbers.  I never thought I'd see this kind of thing, but for such a fundamental social change, this is utterly amazing.  Within 20-30 years, it's entirely conceivable that the majority of Americans will be either irreligious or minimally religious.

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I am not calling them insane.

But the reality is that they are mentally unstable to a particular degree, especially since they are believing in something with no evidence to substantiate it.  It takes a particular degree of absence from reality to cling to a belief system that has a clear association with fiction.

It all depends on how you define insanity.  I don't tend to call them insane but they certainly are  deluded and irrational, more so as you go up the religious ladder.  The more religious one tends to be, the more unstable and irrational they tend to be and the less we ought to trust their judgement.