Fear and ignorance are the in and out of the same glove, I would suggest; fear breeds ignorance, and is always born from ignorance, and the path out is to learn and to face.

But truth be told this thread is a Granfaloon; semantically there is no single thing called "religion", it being a container as large as the San Diego zoo and as full of different animals both in and out of the constructed environments. The notion as well that there is a single thing called "mental illness" is very over-stretched. I refer you to the remarkable books of Thomas Szasz, a professional in the field who had enough one day and decided to pull the little curtain back like Toto, to reveal the hollowness within.

Some find, in a variety of religious experience, an escape from ignorance by discovering they themselves are the empowered seat of all knowing, and they lose all fear because their own center is restored.. Others find in religion a safe answer to all ignorance fabricated as a wall against endless possibility, built of arbitrary conclusions and vicious certainties. For them, their fear is never lost, but it gets reformed and buried in a stiff collar. Shake their embraced certainties and the old storm of ignorance and fear breaks out like the locusts from Pandora's box.

The question is null, much as the question "Is thought crazy?" would be.

Sometimes 'tis, sometimes 'taint.

A