Is religion harmful?

[luckyme]

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Fables and myths have their place. Just because a turtle and a rabbit never had a race in real life doesn't mean the story is worthless.

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Breathing causes harm.
Overall, it's a good thing.

When we refer to a harmful or helpful action it is the sum of it's parts that matters, we'd be hard pressed to come with something that is 100% good or 100% harmful.

Picking some aspect of religion as 'doing good' doesn't answer the OP, it's a given that something about it would be useful.

luckyme

[m_the0ry]

Faith has been detrimental to humanity since its conception, and certainly religion is not dependent on faith as we can see from the practice of Buddhism. Faith is the chink in the armor of human rationale - it delivers blinding happiness at the cost of awareness. It is not religion or spirituality that is harmful; it is faith that makes a religion so easy to propagate and sustain, and faith that makes every act in its name unjustifiable.

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." ~ Benjamin Franklin

[kerowo]

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Faith has been detrimental to humanity since its conception, and certainly religion is not dependent on faith as we can see from the practice of Buddhism. Faith is the chink in the armor of human rationale - it delivers blinding happiness at the cost of awareness. It is not religion or spirituality that is harmful; it is faith that makes a religion so easy to propagate and sustain, and faith that makes every act in its name unjustifiable.

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." ~ Benjamin Franklin

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Tell it to Stalin.

[m_the0ry]

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Tell it to Stalin.

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Any correlation you see there is so contrived it's hard to know where to start. I cannot see any part of this comment that is worth rebut.

[Metric]

I don't think faith is by definition a bad thing. I tend to think of the following psychological scale:

constant faith 1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9--10 constant re-analysis

If you expend all of your energy re-analyzing and second guessing the rationale behind what you are doing, you will never get anything done. And likewise, if you simply attach yourself to the first idea you're exposed to and never re-think its foundatons, you stand a very good chance of wasting your efforts on the development of lousy ideas.

[m_the0ry]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't think faith is by definition a bad thing. I tend to think of the following psychological scale:

constant faith 1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9--10 constant re-analysis

If you expend all of your energy re-analyzing and second guessing the rationale behind what you are doing, you will never get anything done. And likewise, if you simply attach yourself to the first idea you're exposed to and never re-think its foundatons, you stand a very good chance of wasting your efforts on the development of lousy ideas.

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Interesting interpretation of faith but I disagree. Maybe I consider faith something different than you do.

When someone has faith in some idea, that means they will actively reject new propositions relevant to that idea without analysis. I believe this is inherently bad without exception. I do not believe that the polar opposite of faith is 'constant re-analysis'. Rather I believe the opposite of faith is admittance of new information.

[Bill Haywood]

Is a crowbar harmful?

[Metric]

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I don't think faith is by definition a bad thing. I tend to think of the following psychological scale:

constant faith 1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9--10 constant re-analysis

If you expend all of your energy re-analyzing and second guessing the rationale behind what you are doing, you will never get anything done. And likewise, if you simply attach yourself to the first idea you're exposed to and never re-think its foundatons, you stand a very good chance of wasting your efforts on the development of lousy ideas.

[/ QUOTE ]

Interesting interpretation of faith but I disagree. Maybe I consider faith something different than you do.

When someone has faith in some idea, that means they will actively reject new propositions relevant to that idea without analysis. I believe this is inherently bad without exception. I do not believe that the polar opposite of faith is 'constant re-analysis'. Rather I believe the opposite of faith is admittance of new information.

[/ QUOTE ]

It seems to me that this is a pretty narrow definition of faith (simply ignoring evidence), but I pretty much agree on the conclusions you arrive at based on that definition. I'm trying to capture a little of the Biblical definition "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." I.E. someone attaches to an idea based on the promise it shows.

A non-religious example: Someone studying string theory or loop quantum gravity may be aware of counter-arguments to the foundations of their approach (counter-arguments which haven't been completely refuted). However, if you hope to achieve anything in building the theory, you at some point have to attach yourself to the good aspects of the theory and see what you can get out of them. Re-analysis of your approach is a good thing, but it can't be all-consuming -- at some point you need to put the (possibly good) counter-arguments out of your mind and just go with it.

[kerowo]

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Tell it to Stalin.

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Any correlation you see there is so contrived it's hard to know where to start. I cannot see any part of this comment that is worth rebut.

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The point you are avoiding is that while there has been lots of damage done by organized religion there has also been tremendous damage done by those who are non-religious.

Categorically decrying religion as the worst of the worst is exactly the same as decrying the secular world as the worst of the worst. You've gone so far away from religion you caught up to it on the other side.

[luckyme]

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The point you are avoiding is that while there has been lots of damage done by organized religion there has also been tremendous damage done by those who are non-religious.

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That's mixing very different levels in the comparison.
It could be an answer to a question, "Have religious people done harm?" but not a very good one even to that.

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Categorically decrying religion as the worst of the worst is exactly the same as decrying the secular world as the worst of the worst.

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The comparison in context of the OP would be -
Is religion harmful? - Yes.
Are there secular philosophies that are harmful? -Yes.
Are there secular philosophies that are not harmful? - yes. moderate western democracies are an example.

As long as we stick to religion = theism. If we put "a devotion to french fries" under religion, which some posters on here do, then the question becomes meaningless.

luckyme