Mental illness has many symptoms. Dramatization of concepts is one of them. These can be literary concepts, concepts drawn from pop culture or TV, or even from religion. It is not the source of the concepts that makes for madness, but the dramatization of them. Deciding to go on a crusade on behalf of the old Jehovah of the Old Testament, at the expense of others' lives and mutual peace, would be an example of insanity painted with the colors of a religion.

Irresponsibility consists of displacing one's own causation for one's own condition and projecting it onto other forms, people, agents, or forces. HEre again it can be the schools, the church, the "society" (whatever that may mean to the individual), one's parents, siblings, tragedies in history, religious doctrine or even invisible metaphysical forces such as God, Jesus, aliens, radio w aves or what have you.

Again it is not the target of the dispalcement that mnakes for madness but the fact of shedding the ownership for the causing of one's own life.

In these ways and some others, religions are often used as masks of madness or vehicles for dramatization when in fact they are in and of themselves no more or less mad than any other philkosophical belief system.

It needs to be pointed out that madness in various degrees can be precipitated -- especially in the young or infirm -- by enforcing ideas with which the individual cannot readily reason. Such ideas can include irrational moral codes, arbitrary authoritarian rulings, images of all-powerful but obsessed entities who rule one's life, invisible beings who might punish one, and other imaginings used to control the thoughtsof another person. THis is the most unhealthy and toxic use of religion and does not deserve the name of religion, as it is the cognitive equivalent, when it is done, of lambasting someone with a belt or a two-by-for in order to induce understanding, a failed methodology.

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