Interesting, if weird, idea. Many things to take issue with, but I will take just one: ``The most recent expansion of this religion is from "mental" to "behavio

Interesting, if weird, idea. Many things to take issue with, but I will take just one: ``The most recent expansion of this religion is from "mental" to "behavioral" health; i.e. not only your internal thoughts, but also your outward actions, are under scrutiny and subject to control.`` Behavioral health is arguably a shift _away_ from policing the internal state of the person to instead focus on specific behaviors that interfere with a patient's life. It is bizarre to suggest this places behavior under "scrutiny and control." You may have noticed that, in fact, all of our behaviors are already under personal, legal, and social scrutiny and control. The point of behavioral health is to help people cope with _that_ reality without engaging unnecessarily with psychological narratives which, as you and others have pointed out in this thread, may not be evidence based. Also, "In the past two centuries, the new priesthood has succeeded in establishing a secular church". This may be true in some sense, but psychoanalysis and its descendant practices have nothing like the cultural and political dominance of Catholicism in its heyday. I guess its possible to think of psychoanalysis as a church if you allow "church" to mean just any collection of ideas around which people organize and in which people believe without a level of scrutiny they apply to other kinds of ideas, but that covers quite a lot of ground. "psychoanalysis was explicitly designed to usurp and work at crossed-purposes to the religiously-branded type." I'm genuinely interested in whether Freud ever wrote anything that suggested that he was trying to usurp Catholic confession.