Can the mentally ill hold religious beliefs?

[Warpy]

1. Gods, devils, angels and demons

are what the severely ill use to try to make sense of their garbled thinking and sensory overload.

While this produced most of the saints, especially the female saints, in the official litany, these days most of us recognize the symptoms as those of a severe mental illness, not just a belief system.

The mentally ill can and do have religious beliefs. However, they stray from orthodoxy in religion as they stray from reality in their delusions.

Mentally ill people who commit heinous crimes as the end result of that illness need to be hospitalized. The punitive approach just doesn't seem quite fair since no one decides when they wake up some morning that they want to spend their lives in the terror of mental illness.