JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Indeed, it's facile to say that religion doesn't get clinical attention because psychology considers it a social construct that doesn't cause an inappropriate level of personal or interpersonal distress. As I've pointed out many times, my work environment is a roughly equal mix between adherents to my state's dominant religion and members of other religions or irreligious people. It's never a problem because there is an appropriate framing of religious belief in the overall culture of my city and in the microcosm of our workplace. The people who hold religious beliefs understand them to be beliefs, and that others around them appropriately do not share them. This degree of introspection is generally what would keep religious people off the clinician's couch.
But these days—especially in the United States—religion is being increasingly used to control other people's lives and experiences who don't share the belief. The interpretation of the First Amendment (and similar guarantees of religious liberty elsewhere) to convey inappropriately unassailable authority to religion as a motivation for social behavior and governmental regulation is inappropriate.
