When is a belief system a Mental Disorder?

Imagine that you're a psychiatrist. A new patient comes to see you and says that he regularly talks to an invisible being who never responds, that he reads excerpts from one ancient book and that he believes wholeheartedly that its contents must be accepted implicitly, if not taken literally.The patient goes on to say that that the world is only 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs never existed. He brazenly rejects modern science's observations and conclusions, and subscribes to the notion that after death he will live in eternal bliss in some alternate dimension. And throughout your meeting, he keeps handing you his book and urging you to join him, lest you end up after death in a far less desirable alternate dimension than him.Is this a mentally healthy person? If you were a responsible psychiatrist, how could you answer yes? These symptoms border on delusional schizophrenia, which the American Psychological Association's DSM-IV describes as involving a profound disruption in cognition and emotion, assigning unusual significance or meaning to normal events and holding fixed false personal beliefs.So, should you insist on follow-up appointments along with some strong medication? Well, quite obviously, the patient is a religious fundamentalist. So he would most likely not be diagnosed with a psychological problem. In fact, such a diagnosis could land you in hot water; the patient's religious beliefs are constitutionally protected.Yet, perhaps it's time this changed, and that we made religious fundamentalism a mental and cultural health issue. People should be able to believe what they like, but only so long as their convictions don't harm others or, arguably, themselves. Fundamentalism, however, breeds fanaticism and often leads to terrible violence, injustice and inequality. If society can force drug addicts into rehabilitation because they're a danger to themselves and the public, then we should be able to compel religious fundamentalists to undergo treatment as well.

I also had a paranoid schizophrenic brother, who died by dousing himself with gasoline and lighting it. We think his voices had told him to do it but we'll never know. There was no religious content in any of his experiences.

Or it could be that if you look closer you'd recognize that it isn't about observed reality at all, but about an interpretation that is imposed upon reality, and that the wilful ignorance is to be found elsewhere.

Not a good one as the evidence in that case really is unchallengeable.

Well, then your topic isn't quite what you are claiming it is. It is just your way of calling the opponents of old earth crazy without having to address the arguments themselves.

By the way, you haven't been here very long, unless I am mistaken, and I don't recall seeing you dealing with any of the actual arguments about the old earth. Have I missed this?

We could pick on the Mormons! They have fabulous cities of Israelites in North America back a couple of thousand years, with not even a stick of evidence.

That's what I thought. You haven't bothered.

I've already participated on many threads on the subject and yes I do believe your professors are wrong about the timescales. They are perfectly idiotic as a matter of fact. I believe that the evidence on the side of an old earth is restricted entirely to radiometric dating methods. There is no other objective evidence. And that evidence is open to question. If you haven't bothered to read the threads on it, there's not much point to discussing anything about "reality" with you.

The problem is that these things are debated here all the time (except for the bullets won't kill you bit), and if you haven't bothered to familiarize yourself with the way they've been debated, why should anyone take your claim seriously that there is definitive evidence against any of it, or that what you think is definitive evidence against it all makes me or anyone else crazy?