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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Religions seem to start around a great person and the less than great people add in all of their messed up ideas and after enough time passes it seems hardly about the great lives that began it all. I read Souless and was far from convinced, you argument is very simplistic; maybe that works for you. Descartes' ghost in the machine.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. For instance Jesus was a truly brilliant social innovator. I would have loved to have known him. The point you make about people screwing the original message is yet another reason why religion is a giant mistake.

My argument in Soulless is simple because the point is incredibly simple. There really is nothing complex about it. A problem people often have is in thinking important questions can't have simple answers. But in Soulless I show that the whole deal with religion can be completely undercut by asking about the existence of a soul. It is easy to show that the soul-as-consciousness does not have independent existence. With our modern knowledge of the brain the old mind/body dualism is surprisingly simple to disprove. And when you do, religion falls away as an empty shell. Unfortunately, religion has become so heavily entrenched in society people blind themselves from seeing the obvious. Luckily the world is gradually becoming more moral and at the same time less religious. I just hope the shift happens fast enough to avert major religious calamities.