In his defense, religious belief has a history of sliding down that slope at full speed in most cases when left to its own devices. I feel that religious extremism is often treated much less harshly than secularist abuses. One example of that is how various Western countries reacted to that French teacher being beheaded: they were more immediately concerned with discrimination than with the actual murder and its implications.

Definitely, but if you start treating religion as a mental illness like OP suggested, you ought to also consider flat earthers and conspiracy theorists the same. And what is the line between a conspiracy theory in the usual sense and simply a yet-unproven theory that a conspiracy actually exists? That the government is spying on us all the time might've sounded like a conspiracy theory before Snowden, so should all the people who believed it have been committed to mental hospitals? Obviously this is a slippery slope argument in and of itself, but it illustrates the possibilities for abuse.

But yes, religion seems to be a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card these days - people and organizations get away with a lot of shady stuff under the disguise of religion and something really needs to be done about it.

It's a bit circular because mental illness is societally determined. If enough people deem something to be an illness or no longer one, then so it shall tautologically be.

>But yes, religion seems to be a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card these days - people and organizations get away with a lot of shady stuff under the disguise of religion and something really needs to be done about it.

Well that was my point: secularist impulses are often rejected, especially in the anglosphere. The people who could do something are often prevented from doing so, while religious orders are free to leave broken lives in their wake.