“what is the point you are trying to make with # 16?”
Bruce doesn’t “understand why someone would post something they don’t believe.”

“I don’t understand why someone would post something they don’t believe”

Richard Dawkins, _The Selfish Gene_ (2016)

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Page 433 — Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it).
But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases they are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need for further justification.

Richard Dawkins, _The God Delusion: A Study of Religious Belief and Skepticism_ (2006)

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Page 28 — The dictionary supplied with Microsoft Word defines a delusion as
‘a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder’.
The first part captures religious faith perfectly.
As to whether it is a symptom of a psychiatric disorder, I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig, author of _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_:
‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.’

“David… wants to be congratulated”
Some people fancy themselves to be mindreaders.

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**Yes, in certain communist regimes, religious belief and practice were pathologized or treated as a form of mental disorder or “illness,” though this was never a formal, universal classification of “religion” itself as a psychiatric diagnosis in official medical manuals like the DSM equivalent.**

### Soviet Union
In the early Soviet period (1920s–1930s), there was a clear **medicalization of religious faith** (*pathologia religiosa*). Soviet physicians and psychiatrists, influenced by Marxist materialism, frequently portrayed religious belief as a pathological condition or health risk. Believers were sometimes described as suffering from chronic “religious feelings” or as victims of a kind of morbidity linked to religiosity. Anti-religious propaganda intertwined with medical discourse, framing religion as something to be “cured” through scientific atheism and psychiatric intervention.

Later, under the broader system of political psychiatry (especially from the 1960s–1980s), religious dissidents, believers who refused to abandon their faith, and members of unregistered religious groups were sometimes diagnosed with fabricated or elastic conditions such as “sluggish schizophrenia.” This diagnosis was used against political and religious nonconformists alike to justify involuntary hospitalization and “treatment.” The practice was widely documented as psychiatric abuse rather than genuine medical classification of religion as an illness.

### China
The Chinese Communist Party has a longer and ongoing history of pathologizing certain forms of religious practice:

– During the Mao era and Cultural Revolution, religious belief was often linked to “feudal superstition” or counter-revolutionary thought and could be treated as a mental or ideological disorder.
– In more recent decades, especially regarding Falun Gong and Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, Chinese authorities have explicitly framed religious practice in medical terms. Official documents and propaganda have described Islamic belief or “religious extremism” as an “ideological illness,” a “mental illness,” a “virus,” or a “poisonous medicine” that requires “treatment” in re-education camps (sometimes presented as hospitals). Practitioners have been forcibly detained, medicated, and subjected to psychological “correction.”

Chinese forensic psychiatry has also been used against religious nonconformists in ways similar to the Soviet model, diagnosing them with mental disorders for political reasons.

### Summary
Communist states did **not** generally list “religion” as a formal psychiatric diagnosis in the way schizophrenia or depression is classified. However, they systematically **pathologized** religious belief and practice—treating it as a form of mental or ideological sickness that required medical, psychiatric, or “re-educational” intervention. This was most explicit in early Soviet anti-religious medical discourse and in contemporary Chinese policies toward certain religious groups (especially Uyghur Muslims and Falun Gong). The goal was political control and the promotion of state atheism rather than genuine clinical psychiatry.