The term Homo sapiens was coined by the Swedish naturalist and physician Carl Linnaeus around 1758. The word Homo of course means human. The word sapiens is usually translated as intelligent or wise. If one is comparing humans to chimpanzees or lemurs, maybe the term sapiens is appropriate, relatively speaking. However, the term was coined by a human to describe humans and therefore may lack the objectivity required for scientific validity. Imagine how alien scientists visiting our planet might categorize us. Would they describe us as sapiens? I have my doubts. If they were to use the Latin binomial nomenclature developed by Linnaeus, what adjective would they place after Homo? Think about it. What is the one thing that typifies human civilization regardless of whether it is European, North American, South American, Asian, Australian, or African and regardless of whether it is primitive or highly advanced? It is the ubiquitous phenomenon of religion.

I have always felt that the term Homo sapiens was a misnomer and that Homo religiosus would have been much more appropriate. Our species is relatively young—perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 years old—and we are still evolving, but whatever the cerebral mechanism is that triggers religiosity, it is not going to evolve away overnight. If we as a species are going to outgrow the term Homo religiosus and earn the term coined by Linnaeus, we will have to rely on cultural evolution, which works much faster than physical evolution. This is why one of the chief goals of the humanist movement is to steer cultural evolution in a secular direction. Humanist organizations are indeed chipping away at religious hegemony by promoting their values and by fighting legal battles to limit the power of religious groups. But “chipping away” is a slow process. Can it go faster?

One of the quickest ways to secularize society would be to introduce the teaching of humanist values into the public school system. Unfortunately, I do not foresee the teaching of humanism becoming a standard of elementary or secondary education in the near future. The resistance from churches and parental organizations would be too strong. There would even be resistance from high places within the government, and a lot of educators would refuse to teach humanist values to their pupils and students. We have to look for other ways to accelerate secularization.

I often have the feeling that humanist organizations are too passive in their approach to religion. They seem to be striving for peaceful coexistence with it rather than for its gradual elimination. I will admit that peaceful coexistence might be a necessary first stage in the secularization process, but it would be a mistake to treat it as an acceptable long-term state of affairs. In the long run, peaceful coexistence with religion is not possible, because the religious will always want to wipe out secular humanism. I doubt that religion will ever be completely eliminated, but it is absolutely conceivable that as each generation becomes more secular, the religious will eventually be in the minority and will start to feel marginalized, which will motivate them to rethink their attitude toward religion. Is there more that we could do to speed up this process?

I have often wondered whether the medical profession could be of more help in furthering the humanist cause. Psychiatrists and psychologists often seem to be less religious than other people in the academic and medical world. (Could this be because they so often see the psychological damage caused by religion?) Many believe that religion is a mental disorder, a form of delusion comparable to superstition and belief in conspiracy theories. In this article, I will not only support this point of view, I will make the radical proposal that the mental health profession be more actively and systematically involved in the campaign to get our society to start approaching religion, clinically and medically, as delusion.

To a secular humanist, it is not at all out of the ordinary to think of religion as delusion. It was no coincidence that Richard Dawkins titled his 2006 book on religion The God Delusion. Sigmund Freud, who was greatly influenced by the book Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity) by Ludwig Feuerbach, published in 1841, also wrote about religion as a form of delusion. In his 1907 work Zwangshandlungen und Religionsübungen (Compulsive Behavior and Religious Practices), Freud argued that the human mind produces religion in more or less the same way that neuroses are produced. He felt that religion was a kind of compulsive or obsessive neurosis. He also believed that it was rooted in immaturity, like belief in Santa Claus. In his 1927/1928 work Die Zukunft einer Illusion (The Future of an Illusion), he related religion to a kind of “father complex.” That is, humans feel helpless and defenseless against nature, death, and even their own culture and fellow human beings. This produces a childish longing for a strong father figure to save them from all these threats. A god satisfies this need for a father figure. And just as children often both need and fear their father, religious people need and fear their gods.

In Die Zukunft einer Illusion, Freud asks what the future of religion, an illusion, will be and expresses the sincere hope that science will one day surpass it and that reason will replace faith. He admits that religion is an important part of more primitive civilizations because people often have to be scared into good behavior, but he argues that as societies become more developed and better educated, “scaring” people into good behavior becomes unnecessary. This is of course consistent with the arguments of Steven Pinker in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Where Freud may have erred, however, was in his belief that religion might eventually be supplanted as societies become more advanced. Let’s face it: the Scientific Revolution began four hundred years ago, and the Age of Reason or Enlightenment around three hundred years ago. There has been more than enough time for science and reason to supplant religion, especially in countries with as much science and technology as the United States. And yet religion persists. The only explanation is that being human means being religious, hence my term Homo religiosus. As I will discuss below, being human means being delusional, and religious people simply form a subset of those who are delusional.

Even though being religious seems to be part of being human, one must still pose the question of why this is so. In other words: What is the evolutionary survival advantage of religiosity? We know, and Freud knew, that religion satisfies a lot of different needs. People are afraid of death; religion promises an afterlife. People are inherently curious and want to understand the origins and destiny of the universe; religion provides an explanation. People who are repressed and tyrannized need to believe that a better life awaits them; religion offers that better life. And not only the repressed and tyrannized but also those who do the repressing and tyrannizing often find religion a very useful tool for scaring people into submission. Yes, religion satisfies a lot of burning needs. But it is based on such preposterous assumptions and premises. Are people really that gullible?!

Actually, they are.

Not too long ago, I read an article in the Autumn 2014 issue of The American Scholar written by Richard Restak titled “Going Haywire: Delusions Can Occur in Perfectly ‘Normal’ People.” Restak has published over twenty books in the field of psychology. I was struck by two observations in his article. The first is that human beings in general, even people who would ordinarily be considered by psychologists to be “normal,” are very prone to delusion. Restak, who defines delusion as “beliefs divorced from reality,” gives examples from several different sources in his article, one involving himself. He had taken an overnight flight from Washington, D.C., to Munich, where he was to give a lecture on the human brain. He had been awake for thirty-six hours and was suffering from sleep deprivation. While walking down a street at dusk, he saw a woman come out of a department store and get into a limousine. He had only seen her for a few seconds, but by her gait and style of dress he became convinced that she was his wife, who had come to Munich in secret to surprise him. He was about to go up and tap on the window of the limousine when the vehicle pulled away. At that moment, he realized that the woman was a stranger. Restak writes, “This unsettling incident conformed in several respects to the conditions that could lead, in the predisposed, to the development of a delusion.” Restak of course realized that his experience had been due to fatigue.

I couldn’t help but think of an example of my own delusional behavior. I went to Cleveland for a job interview many years ago, and while I was walking to the interview, I was thinking about the one and only person in Cleveland whom I knew: a girl I had gone to university with named Debbie. I saw a girl coming toward me who had the same height and hair color as Debbie, and I literally saw Debbie’s face in this girl. I even said aloud, “Hi, Debbie!” At this moment, I embarrassedly saw the girl’s real face and realized that she was not the person I had known. And I was not suffering from sleep deprivation.

The second observation in Restak’s article that struck me was that any psychologist who deals with delusional people will tell you that the more you confront them with hard and fast evidence that they are delusional, the more adamantly, and sometimes aggressively, they insist that they are not. Restak does not mention religion in his article, but I couldn’t help but think that it actually meets all the criteria of delusion, especially the one regarding going into denial when confronted with contrary evidence. Think about racism, the belief that one’s race is superior to others; nationalistic exceptionalism, the belief that one’s nation is superior to and has more rights than others; or misogyny, the belief that women are inferior to men. The evidence against these beliefs is overwhelming, but people persist in them nonetheless. They are forms of delusion, and so is religion.

Restak also refers to what he calls “mental infectivity,” the process by which a person can transfer a delusion to another person. I would say that when a lot of people are simultaneously involved in a delusion, a sort of mass hysteria ensues—making the delusion not only easier to transfer but making it more convincing. (Incidentally, in an article in the January/February 2018 issue of The Humanist, Gurwinder Bhogal provides a fascinating comparison of the spread of ideas and ideologies with the spread of parasites.) In any case, I think that one can easily and justifiably compare religion to other mental phenomena that are purely delusional and driven by what Restak calls mental infectivity.

Yes, religion really can be related to different forms of delusion. Ask Christians if they believe that their god is all-loving and all-good. They will answer in the affirmative. Then ask them why there is a hell—a place of eternal, excruciating punishment. Or ask them why their god ordered the Israelites to massacre the Canaanites and “not to leave a single soul alive.” They will still insist that their god is incapable of evil. Ask them why they still believe that Jesus is going to return to earth flanked by angels even though he is, according to his own oft-repeated predictions, nearly 2,000 years late. When Christians are confronted with questions such as these, their response is one of total denial. It’s time to start treating religion for what it is. If someone is really delusional about a matter other than religion, for example if one believes that the North Koreans have bugged one’s house, that one is Napoleon, that one has been abducted by aliens, or that one has ants crawling around under one’s skin, that person is taken to a psychiatrist. Yet a person who believes that a virgin had a baby and that a man rose from the dead and ascended into heaven on a cloud and that he will return to earth on a cloud flanked by angels is exempt from psychological or psychiatric therapy. It makes no logical sense.

In Chapter Five of Zukunft einer Illusion, Freud mentions that there are three reasons religion manages to enter our belief system: first, our ancestors believed in it; second, we have been given arguments that are held to be proof of religion’s validity; and third, society has strongly discouraged or even forbidden the questioning of religion. Freud’s statement seems plausible, but underlying his three reasons is something even more basic: there are simply things that our brains are “wired” for that are not necessarily good for our species as a whole. Restak’s concept of delusion and Brotherton’s concept of intentional bias are perhaps two good examples, and religion fits right in with them. Yes, our species is indeed Homo religiosus, and it is difficult not to wonder, despairingly, if we will ever be rid of religion. Fortunately, thanks to cultural evolution, the spirit of the times does seem to be changing. As authors such as Steven Pinker and James A. Haught have argued, education levels are rising, and there is a general shift toward freethinking.

Approaching religion as clinical delusion is a delicate matter. It will be very hard to get through to people if you insult them by telling them that an important personal belief they hold is delusional. Furthermore, delusional people do not even realize they are delusional. Often, they apply critical thinking to every aspect of their lives except one, religion, and they view themselves as quite normal.

In the Autumn 2017 issue of The American Scholar, there is a short article by Celeste Headlee, which states:

Our resistance to information we don’t like is well researched and documented. In a study at Stanford in the 1970s, scientists noted that even when the participants’ belief had been completely refuted, people didn’t change their underlying assumptions. … How can we advance beyond forming opinions quickly, based on little evidence, and holding tightly to these opinions in the face of overwhelming fact?

This sums it up. The challenge of secular humanists is to get through to people, preferably when they are young, and teach them the importance of open-mindedness and the need to base beliefs on scientific evidence. Churches, families, the government, and even schools will continue to resist our efforts and will reach children before we do. Giving up is not an option. Secular-humanist organizations must continue to publicize their philosophy and fight against religious hegemony, but I think it would be worthwhile investigating the possibility of obtaining support from the fields of psychology and psychiatry. The involvement of mental health professionals would lend more credibility to the claim that religion is delusion, a mental disorder. It would also enable the humanist cause to reach more people.

Americans love their shrinks. If large numbers of psychiatrists and psychologists started to publicly discuss religion as delusion, millions of people would begin rethinking their beliefs. No one wants to be stigmatized as delusional. The question is how to enlist the support of mental health professionals. Perhaps organizing a national or international conference would be a good starting point—a good opportunity for brainstorming. Who knows? Maybe our species could advance from Homo religiosus to Homo sapiens in our lifetime!