Is religion harmful?

[CrayZee]

There are positive aspects of religion, but not mutually exclusive to religion (i.e., community, altruism, death coping mechanism, etc.). But, yeah, religion is more harmful than not...but the "science worldview" could be too difficult for most individuals to grasp or appreciate. (Faith is easy, all you have to do is simply believe.)

Perhaps the "faith worldview" is something programmed into our genes in that we mostly like to follow authority. After all, the saying goes, "too many chiefs and not enough indians" leads to what, I don't know...too many skeptical thinkers out of control?

But on the positive side, people are generally more knowledgeable about the science perspective than in the past. At least in industrialized societies. This could be a reflection of the shift in work from labor jobs to more creative-type, specialized knowledge jobs in technologically and economically advanced societies.

[Taraz]

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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.


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It's thus far been very harmful, but there's a theoretical possibility that it doesn't need to always cause problems.

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I don't see how anyone can claim this as fact. I think you can make the argument that religious thinking in the modern society is 'harmful'. But to claim that over the course of history religion has been detrimental to humanity is a very bold claim for such an insanely complex issue.

[t.conley]

I guess I would say faith and religion are different things. Secondly I started watching and like 30 seconds in the narrator says, "those who adhere to Judaism, Islam and Christianity still prefer to ignore reason and have faith in their forever unprovable omnipresent creator." I could be mistaken but I suppose that this statement takes faith to have or at least I need faith to believe it is forever unprovable.

[Silent A]

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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.

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Why not just call it "hope" and stop trying to confuse it with "faith"?

Back to the OP ...

Inherent in most religions is the concept that certain ideas are not to be questioned, challenged, or denied. This is clearly harmful, IMHO.

Another concept in most religions is the existence of the supernatural. To the extent that this distracts us from the natural world, this is also harmful.

Finally, these religions require the use of faith to maintain these harmful ideas in the face of evidence that suggests them to be harmful.

This constitutes what I consider a three-pronged attack on reason and this has been very harmful in the past and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

[Metric]

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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.

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Why not just call it "hope" and stop trying to confuse it with "faith"?

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"Hope" does not capture the concept of steadfastness inherent in just about anyone's definition of faith. In mtheory's definition, it's there by the consistent excluding of all contrary evidence. In my definition, it's there as the ability to move forward with a promising concept despite the existence of some unanswered objections to it. I get the feeling that a lot of you want to define it as "something bad" simply because it's a word religious folks tend to use.

[Taraz]

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Inherent in most religions is the concept that certain ideas are not to be questioned, challenged, or denied. This is clearly harmful, IMHO.

Another concept in most religions is the existence of the supernatural. To the extent that this distracts us from the natural world, this is also harmful.

Finally, these religions require the use of faith to maintain these harmful ideas in the face of evidence that suggests them to be harmful.

This constitutes what I consider a three-pronged attack on reason and this has been very harmful in the past and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

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Even if I grant you all those points about religion being harmful (and I think I do for the most part), you haven't shown that this harm has outweighed the good of religion in human history.

I could easily make the argument that the use of reason has been harmful in human history. But I would never claim that it has done more harm than good, and I'm not even sure it's a provable claim one way or the other.

[Silent A]

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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.

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Why not just call it "hope" and stop trying to confuse it with "faith"?

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"Hope" does not capture the concept of steadfastness inherent in just about anyone's definition of faith. In mtheory's definition, it's there by the consistent excluding of all contrary evidence. In my definition, it's there as the ability to move forward with a promising concept despite the existence of some unanswered objections to it. I get the feeling that a lot of you want to define it as "something bad" simply because it's a word religious folks tend to use.

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I think the problem is that many religious people use the word "faith" to mean so many things.

They use it in the sense of a trust, or a leap of faith; they use it to express hope, and they use it to trump reason.

This last one gets us atheists really riled up, and so we attack it, but believers seem to think we're attacking their trust and their hope - even when people like Dawkins clearly say that they're only attacking the anti-reason aspects of the word "faith".

[Silent A]

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Even if I grant you all those points about religion being harmful (and I think I do for the most part), you haven't shown that this harm has outweighed the good of religion in human history.

I could easily make the argument that the use of reason has been harmful in human history. But I would never claim that it has done more harm than good, and I'm not even sure it's a provable claim one way or the other.

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I'm not interested in whether or not religion is net a "good" or a net "bad" because I think the question is silly. Religion is far too big a concept to neatly pigeonhole as "good" or "bad".

However, certain common characteristics of religion are clearly harmful and so I choose to target my attacks there.

[Peter666]

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In fact, Dawkins' pisses off more people than he pleases, so he is harmful.

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If the end-goal of life were for everyone to be ignorant and content, I'll admit that religion would be the way to go.

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The whole point of religion is to make conclusions about the truth in order to be content. Dawkins is preaching his own atheistic religion, whose main form of worship appears to be bashing other religions.

He is silly enough to believe that only science can answer all questions and that at the same time, people will continue being "nice" to each other, when history has already proven that nothing is more cruel than the atheistic, cold, calculating, scientific ethic.

[Ben K]

If Dawkins were preaching an atheistic religion, then there would be:

"A religion is a set of beliefs and practices generally held by a community, involving adherence to codified beliefs and rituals and study of ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and mystic experience. The term "religion" refers to both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction."

In line with the opening paragraph on religion in Wikipedia. There isn't a codified set of beliefs however so he isn't preaching a religion. It's very simple.