Agree, skado, but with one caveat. What specifically are you referring to as ignorant? Ignorance is a lack of knowledge. By that definition, you're assuming that those that believe in God are lacking knowledge but I believe, rather, your latter statement...their worldview is different.

@crazycurlz
Yes, that’s exactly how I meant it; lack of knowledge. I assume that some people carry superstitious beliefs only because they haven’t been exposed to enough education to know that alternatives exist, but there are also plenty of educated people who just hold different worldviews. But in neither case is it a mental illness.

nice. religious belief is just that...belief.

“We’ve had this debate before.” Apparently so ...as I innocently stepped into it interrupting the OP’s question to be far less than what most are letting loose with… But I’ve a personal adage I’ll let lose myself -- Show me a person who's a little religious, and I’ll show you a person who's a little messed up. Show me a person who’s very religious - and I’ll show you a person who’s very messed up!

I’ll stand by that

@Varn maybe it’s just the people you know. My grandparents were very religious and also the best people I have ever known - kind, generous, loving, non-judgmental. Their three children are all successful, happy and high-functioning people who also believe in god and attend church. Nobody’s perfect but these are pretty much the last people on earth who anyone would describe as “messed up.” The rational, high-functioning religious folks are not the people who preach and judge and shove their beliefs down your throat. they are just living their lives like normal people.
Yes, there are plenty of religious people who are messed up and do messed up things and justify it with religion. But I stand by my initial statement.

@A2Jennifer My grandparent’s (both sides) lack of religion allowed theirs to grow unencumbered, not the least bit held back. It’s not the court of public opinion that determines a person's value, either. In this day & age, even theirs, those clinging to religion represent/ed closed minds … this atheist finds nothing admirable about that..

@Varn i’m Not arguing the value of religion or that atheists lack or are limited. I am only saying that religious belief ALONE doesn’t make someone crazy, or dysfunctional or messed up.

yes! 1 in 4 is conservative...

I watched a psychiatric intake nurse nearly blow her drink out her nose ..proclaiming something like, “Fifty percent?” “from what I’ve seen, that’s a low estimate!”

I apologize. I got a little sidetracked there with the point that was on my mind and not the one that was on yours. I think your consumerism is more discerning than what we see around us everyday regarding faith.
Some things: eternal life, having an explanation for the universe, relief from pain perhaps, love, being adored by the best god, the most powerful and gracious fearsome being in all of ever, or perhaps just the feeling that someone has your back, have always been top sellers in human history. You pay what you want I guess. Some people have given their whole lives for this product, some might have thrown a dollar in the collection plate. It's really a great deal for everyone, except those that don't play or play for some other team. I don't really see this there's a bunch of individuals with mental illness. I believe it is in the nature of our species so far, perhaps for survival purposes, emotional needs, and probably other stuff, to have faith in a connection to god. it's probably perfectly normal. of course once in awhile a human may not have this as a strategy to understand and engage their world. they like to say they rely on rationale and truth. I myself feel like there's someplace in between where happiness is found. the second group of folks can be happy without god, when they allow themselves. I apologize if I'm rambling too much.

Civic leaders, doctors, CEOs of our large and small corporations, presidents of public universities, the folks involved in the Flint water crisis coverup, the dictators that populate the UN...Atheists that believe in their own superiority and separateness from other humans, as if they live in a bubble...can't many religious and non-religious people in authority be accused of narcissism?

@crazycurlz Religion appears one of a narcissist’s tools of choice. I don’t envision any narcs among the Atheist’s I’ve met or known.. It’s not a powerful or prestigious enough platform for them. But the Narcs are the leaders, the average idiots having allowed their fears and phobias to remain unanswered in this age of information remain a rich brew of humanities worst … disorders included..

So, what diagnosis do you take pride in..?

@BeerAndWine how many of the members on this site used to believe in the things you mention? Isn't it often that those beliefs come about through socialization and indoctrination? @Varn in my experience in the health professions, the most honest amongst us ultimately admit to anxieties, fears, apprehensions...mental illness. I believe it's just part of the human experience.

@BeerAndWine ..not sins in my book ...whoops - no book

@crazycurlz ...and there’s such a spectrum of ‘believers’.. I think the OP has in mind the most virulent, pushy or aggressive ‘believers,’ the type everyone takes a step back from ..and can’t help wondering, ‘what’s their problem?’ Within the spectrum of mental illnesses, is ‘any one’ more prevalent among ‘true believers?’

@BeerAndWine I think humans run the whole spectrum from sane to delusional and we're all wrapped up in mental illness one way or another. As a health professional, I regularly assess for delusions and hallucinations. Belief in God is BELIEF. Beliefs are not delusions or hallucinations. @Varn, you're ASSuming what the OP thinks.

You’re suggesting mental illness can result from religion … but not vice versa?

As agnostics we have to accept that religion works for some people by getting them through life to the end in blissful ignorance. Mission accomplished if you can buy into the faith thing Extremes in all areas brings up the mental illness angle,

@Varn I look in my post in vain for such an assertion ... so no. I didn't address it. To be clear, mental illness can make a person more disposed to be fixated on certain kinds of religion -- but on the other hand, it can make them more disposed to be fixated on any number of other things too.

Any mental health professional will tell you that there's a high percentage of religious / god talk in the mentally ill but I think that just reflects the ubiquity of religion because you can say the same thing about those who are not diagnosed mentally ill.

@Matias Some belief systems are less delusional and require less imagination than others -- even within the subgenus "religion". It's one thing to hold to a useful abstraction, it's another to hold to dysfunctional abstractions for no more reason than that others assert them to be true despite being unable to evidence them or even to be particularly coherent about them.

@Matias My claim has never been that all religion is by definition dysfunctional. Only that a great deal of it manifestly is, and that it carries within it the seeds of enabling that dysfunction. I would even allow that a minority of religious expression carries the bulk of the dysfunction, but the problem with that is that it has an outsize influence. It's one of the prime enablers of Trumpism in the US for example.

@Matias I think there are many interrelated reasons for our national affection for dominionist / Christian reconstructionist leanings. We were founded largely as a nation of religious contrarian firebrands, individualists and misfits to begin with. We have a longstanding tendency to weird conflations of personal piety, jingoism and guns. Eisenhower for example connected personal piety with patriotism and encouraged religious adherence as a fundamental value of good citizenship, and this was a counter to the perceived existential communist threat of that era (which is, itself, a conflation of communism with godlessness).

In the mix also is "American exceptionalism", which, while it has some benign aspects, has to my mind a marked tendency towards a sense of national entitlement. And this entitlement is in turn based in part on the promise of god's blessing for his chosen people (or the people who choose him), which produces an impulse to preserve this national entitlement by preserving our devotion to various religious tropes that are seen as uniquely American. This also has echoes of the 19th century doctrine of "manifest destiny" which was used to rationalize our treatment / dehumanization of our native peoples and the primacy of our drive to expand geographically to continental proportions.

It's a hard-to-track, largely irrational stew of hectic ideations that is not very much examined so much as mindlessly endorsed.

It is also easy to underestimate. People like RJ Rushdoony, the 1960s originator of reconstructionism, seem to have deceptively small numbers of overt adherents. And if you're counting people who openly think, as Rushdoony did, that the US legal system should be replaced with Old Testament codes, you won't find a lot of those. However, Rushdoony's movement and various follow-ons gave us Christian homeschooling for example and the revisionist notion of history, commonplace today on the right, that the US is a Christian nation founded by Christians on Christian principles. That latter idea has attained such penetration that I daresay some atheists believe it.

@Matias Sure that has occurred to me. But at what cost -- to native americans, to our intellectual life, to our compassion and empathy for each other much less outsiders, and to every exasperated European who complains of the "ugly American"? I even said that "American exceptionalism" has some benign aspects. That's not the point. Natural selection doesn't optimize for enjoyment or fairness -- only for survival. And to pursue your metaphor of organisms riddled with disease ... viruses evolve to move from host to host but tend to get it wrong at first, killing off huge numbers of hosts until subsequent generations learn to tone it down, lest there be no more hosts to infect.

I think we Americans are like that ... we may destroy our country with too much of a "good" thing. There are now more and more plausible scenarios for us that are, from an American perspective, dystopian. If nothing else we will (or perhaps already have, even if not completely played out) fall into irrelevance morally, ethically and economically and as a world power.

Another reason why this may be so is that our national zeitgeist is not as suited to the 21st century as it was to, say, the 18th and 19th.

In considerations like this, I try to keep in mind the saying, "your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness".

If the "American way" is supposed to reflect "truth and justice for all" then it is going to have to define "all" as something other than "White anglo-saxon Protestant heterosexual males and sufficiently demure females".

Well put ~

I think she is saying you need not respect the delusions of the diagnosed mentally ill

@LenHazell53 I think he’s a she.. And wonders if she’s alone in concluding that those honestly espousing religion possess a degree of mental illness.

@Varn typo corrected thank you

@LenHazell53
I’m just going by the words she used. She didn’t say theistic ideas, she said theists.