When is a belief system a Mental Disorder?

Now this may be exactly the right idea: I read once that among some Siberian peoples, a man that a Western psychiatrist would call a schizophrenic is instead called a shaman, and the voices in his head are viewed as spirit voices. Hell, Joan of Arc was likely just the same.

Isn't there a "still, small voice" somewhere in Ezekiel? Didn't Saul/Paul get spoken to at his conversion?

There are some - an honor student friend of my daughter's said she doubted their existence, 'cause her preacher had said they weren't real. Southern Baptist, I think.

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. And they have horses and cows over here in precolumbian times, too.

I guess there's just a complete absence of evidence for the Mormon claims: no cow or horse bones, no ruins of cities like the Book of Mormon describes in the areas they were claimed to be. I would think that there might be historical records of the first cattle, etc., introduced by Europeans, but there might not be much hard evidence as to the absence thereof before 1492.

But I've been reading AiG and such for several years now. Let's do find another example - Hindu or whatever.

Another belief similar to the Ghost Dancers' is that of the snake-handling Christians in the US - folks that take some Biblical passage about "deadly poison" (nearly) literally. They fool around with rattlesnakes, but then I've yet to hear of any of them trying a half-gram of Sarin in a cup of lemonade.