the greatest danger to humanity is religion

[miriam_e]

Terrorists, global warming, corruption, ecological strife, poverty... religion is not only more dangerous than all these, it is in many cases the driving force behind them.

The harm caused by religion is often deep and difficult to disentangle from our ordinary social conditioning.

The dangers:

• They artificially divide the world into goodies and baddies.
• They make morality a matter of religious doctrine instead of simple common sense.
• They convince people to defer the only lives they will ever have in expectation of an imaginary afterlife.
• They teach of an immortal unchanging soul when in fact our wonderful consciousness is fragile in the extreme and can be very easily broken.
• They perpetuate belief in all manner of damaging superstitions.
• They are at the root of a world-view which prevents people taking responsibility for their actions. God guides them.
• They see faith as a good thing when believing in things without any proof has been the basis for some of the worst tragedies of all time.
• They preach love but practise hate.

Three simple points never seem to occur to them:

how can thousands of totally conflicted religions all have believers so completely in touch with their gods and thoroughly convinced that they, and only they, are correct, and all the other religions wrong?
they believe that universe must have a beginning and have been created. But they are inconsistent in their "logic": their argument means that the creator must also have been created. The endless loop that produces is clearly absurd so they insist that the creator had no beginning. But if there is no need for a creator to have created the creator, then there is even less need to introduce the concept of a creator in the first place and the world can simply have always been.
teachings, handed down by person after person, written by fallible humans, must be less reliable than simply the world around us, which if we are to believe religion, is surely more so the direct hand of the god than any writings relayed by faulty humans. The silly statement that such writings are the word of god transmitted through people is obviously wrong -- the word has been rewritten, corrected, edited, many times and now finds itself given many totally different interpretations.

It astounds me that people can still cling to such superstitious craziness in the 21st Century. Slowly the numbers of atheists and agnostics are rising. Let's hope that religion loses its grip over people before too much damage is done.