For the pharmaceutical industry, mental illness is a religion! :-)

They make millions pushing pills down people who need not pills but good emotional counselling and an actual sense of purpose or a healthy sense of their own worth and identity to motivate them in life. It's a bloody disgrace, and a far bigger one than that perpetrated by most churches, in my opinion.

These threads that knock "religion", as if it were just one simple monolithic subject instead of an enormously complex and varied one, are threads for lazy thinkers who probably feel very proud of the fact that they don't approve of people who kick dogs, steal cars, and abuse children. Masters of the painfully obvious, I mean...

Know'm sayin', Peter? Money is probably the religion that's got you by the balls. Or is it sex? Or success? Or consumerism? Or fame? Or popularity? Just take a look at whatever it is that you reserve your strongest faith in and put the most attention on...and THERE is your religion, complete with its gods, its rules, and its superstitious fantasies and spurious rewards and punishments.