When is a Religious Belief Delusional?

[Mister Agenda]

It is perfectly reasonable, and probably socially advantageous, to believe what your parents and apparently everyone in your close community believe. It is not a delusion to fail to construct the apparatus of critical thinking that would lead you to modify or abandon your belief system...and because it is a system, it's difficult to let go of parts without the whole thing collapsing. I was not deluded before I became an atheist, I was mistaken.

Religion is a social construct that persists because it has evolved to do so. Like any other institution with competition, there are winners and losers, and those that persist the longest have been the most successful at retaining members despite arguments and evidence that ought to whittle away at them. The first layer of defense in protecting your flock from effective persuasion is to convince them that it is virtuous to reject evidence and arguments against the faith, no matter what they are. To the person who is the target of all this, it can certainly feel like they are receiving all kinds of evidence and reasons for retaining their faith in the face of critiques from outsiders.

I think it is more fair and accurate in most cases to say believers have been successfully indoctrinated than that they are delusional. The guy who thinks squirrels are the Illuminati was not raised to believe that his whole formative years. That doesn't mean no religious beliefs are delusional, they can certainly rise to that level. But there's a clear difference between being indoctrinated and being deluded, mainly that you're not under tremendous social pressure to accept the idea that the squirrels are secretly running the world.

It's said (paraphrasing) that if one person thinks something crazy, it's a delusion, if a million people think something is crazy, it's a religion. There is a real difference in what's going on in those two cases.

[The Grand Nudger]

The difference being social pressure and societal acceptance, not the nature of the belief. The beliefs themselves aren't even advantageous - conformity in any belief can have the belief traded out for any other (and there are plenty). None of these beliefs, meanwhile, has resisted change over time. It's not true, for example, that the "best beliefs" - to use a quick term, are those that have been most successful at retaining members, because the beliefs aren't the same as they were even a decade prior.

The institutions, the apparatus of conformity, it's ability to service the religious economy (and it's changing needs)... is..again, the operative mechanism.

In another example of a delusion, however, the faithful think that it's -god- or the beliefs of the moment, themselves... doing all of that. Yes, they've been indoctrinated, but what have they been indoctrinated into? A delusional belief system.

[Angrboda]

Just for the sake of clarification, one of the purposes of clinical diagnosis is to identify treatments that are likely to reduce a person's symptoms. The reasoning being that people with similar clusters of symptoms correlates well with beneficial response to specific treatments. This is further contextualized by the specific cluster of symptoms. For example, you might not expect a person suffering hallucinations who has been grouped with people having borderline personality disorder to necessarily respond appropriately to the same treatments which address hallucinations in a person with schizophrenia. This assumes that there is a common basis for similar groupings of symptoms, and seems largely correct. With that in mind, it seems unlikely that people with religious beliefs are likely to respond to treatments aimed at other groups, or even at all. In addition is the question of quality of life, which motivates much treatment. It's not clear that treatment for religious belief would result in an improvement in quality of life, so that rationale, too, seems precluded. For these reasons, while it may serve as a useful model or basis of analogizing, I don't think the clinical concept of delusion would be appropriate. Perhaps someday it will be. But given our current understanding of things, it seems an inappropriate conflation of whatever behaviors the religious are engaging in, and which may be maladaptive, and the clinical concept of delusion.

I'm not going to go into it at this time, but as I suggested in the other thread, I think there may be good reason for separating out religious behavior from that of simple human error. Regardless of what you feel about analogizing it to delusion, I think it's clear that there is more going on than applies to people in non-specific reasoning and belief.

[brewer]

I don't think most of us are stating that the religious delusion being discussed are clinical/medical. There are all types of delusions (mostly fantasy) that don't meet the "clinical" criteria.

[Fireball]

Anyone unwilling to sacrifice a virgin to appease the gnomes and unicorns is not a true gardener.

If it'll make my callas really pop....line em up. 

Sacrificing them on the Divine Inseminator doesn't count.

[Foxaèr]

I don't think most of us are stating that the religious delusion being discussed are clinical/medical. There are all types of delusions (mostly fantasy) that don't meet the "clinical" criteria.

Indeed.

[Angrboda]

I don't think most of us are stating that the religious delusion being discussed are clinical/medical. There are all types of delusions (mostly fantasy) that don't meet the "clinical" criteria.

Indeed.

Well then, are you differentiating between the theist simply being wrong and being delusional?

[robvalue]

I can kind of reverse the question here, and ask why someone would refer to their own belief as religious. What is the line that separates regular beliefs from religious ones?

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PS: Let me add that atheists can be religious, so "God" is not an adequate cut-off point for what counts as religious belief.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

It seems to me that strictly religious beliefs get a pass when it comes to being delusional.  One man believes that a Jewish carpenter was actually the son of God with power to cure leprosy, blindness, death, calm storms, wither fig trees, cast out demons and so forth.  A second man believes that leprechauns are real and have the power to grant wishes, bestow wealth and magically repair shoes.

Why are the latter beliefs adjudged to be delusional and not the former?

Boru

[robvalue]

Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to pin down criteria for a religious belief, but "getting a pass" is certainly part of it. Let's try:

Religious beliefs :

1) should be respected, even protected by law
2) don't require evidence
3) don't count as delusions
4) are held dogmatically
5) speculate on the nature of reality at best, or contradict current knowledge at worst

It's like if you say your belief is religious, you've raised a force field around it. I would hope that no beliefs I hold would qualify for any of the above criteria. I raise no force fields. I encourage thorough examination of all my beliefs, and I'm always prepared to change them.

They're generally socially accepted, but only the generally established ones. One-off religious beliefs of some cult of one would not be similarly accepted.