The Case For Religion As A Negative Force In Society

[Junghalli]

In the "New Athiests" VS "“Accommodationists” discussion I said this:

I'll lay my cards right on the table here. I believe that religion, especially afterlife-centric religion, is a net negative influence in society, and I believe that the world would probably be significantly better off if more people were atheist. I have reasons for believing this which I can lay out of you wish (in fact I think I'll make a seperate discussion for them), but the point is I don't want to just defend the right of atheism to exist, I want to see it spread.

I feel I should present my reasons, but they are somewhat long and off-topic for that discussion. I will therefore create a new thread here for them.


Why I believe religion, especially afterlife-centered religions, are a net negative influence in society:

1: Religion promotes irrational thinking:
Religion is, at its core, a thing of complete irrationality. It asserts, in the absence of any evidence, that there are such things as gods, spirits, devils, mystical forces, or eternal souls. This pronouncement is based not on any rational attempt to understand the world but on (usually) some variation of appeal to authority or appeal to tradition. Islam, for instance, draws its credibility from the notion that the Qu'ran is the direct word of God: a textbook example of circular logic if there ever was one. The believer accepts religion because he believes these appeals to tradition or authority or because he subjective feels "faith"; in other words because he elevates what his emotions tell him over what his reason tells him. Religion provides its adherent with no framework for independent critical or rational thought. Indeed, the very idea is hostile to it, as the application of such thought to the religion's first principles will destroy the believer's faith. Instead the believer is encouraged to uncritically accept the judgments and values of the religion as (literally) gifts from the gods. Some religions do develop rich internal intellectual traditions, but even there those traditions are usually incestuous, focusing on better understanding the religion's pronouncements rather than critically evaluating them on an objective basis.

The main problem with this is that religion rarely confines its irrational pronouncements to metaphysics. Religions usually contain histories, cosmologies, moral codes, or some combination of the three. These things have practical relevance in the real world, and the pronouncements of religion on them are often very much at odds with what may be determined by reason. A good example is scientific theories on the origin of the universe and the evolution of life vs. Biblical literalist Creationism. Bluntly, religion frequently demands its adherents make real world decisions based on thinking 2+2=5 when 2+2 in fact makes 4.

The results of this are most distressing in the fields of morality. Religions almost always offer some sort of moral code, and this moral code, like the rest of the religion, takes its validity from appeal to authority or appeal to tradition and often contains objectively silly, arbitrary, or harmful rules. In some cases these rules may have served adaptive functions in their original context, but because religions are naturally resistant to change in their fundamental doctrines (they are, after all, all about appeals to authority and tradition), they continue long after they have outlived their usefulness and become harmful. Thus, religion creates a great deal of human suffering by inflicting upon its followers harmful rules that curtail their freedom and happiness for no rational reason. Worse, these rules are often presented as applicable to all humans, and so do not always stop with the followers of that particular religion. The Abrahamic prescriptions against homosexuality are a good example of such a harmful rule, which continue today to cause a great deal of totally unnecessary human suffering. The conviction of missionary religions that people of other faiths must be converted to theirs by any means necessary is another example of an aspect of religion that has created tremendous, totally unnecessary human suffering throughout history.


Religion devalues the good of humans
Religion frequently does not have the well-being of humans as its highest goal. The highest goal of many religions is the well-being or pleasure of the gods. For instance, in all the Abrahamic religions the highest goal is the service of God. When human happiness and well-being and the service of God conflicts, the service of God always wins. That is arguably the moral of the story of Abraham and Isaac; it was very important that Abraham prove that pleasing God was more important to him than the well-being of his own son.

By not making the well-being of humans its highest goal religion is inherently an ideology that more easily lends itself to abuse of humans. You can enact policies that harm people for no useful end, and all you have to do in order to justify them is claim that the gods desire them. For dramatical examples of this witness the religiously-inspired senseless human butchery of the Aztecs, or the continuing persecution of homosexuals by many religions today.


Afterlife religions can make you embrace death:
Here I move on from "religion" in general specifically to afterlife religions, which are especially harmful in several ways. The first is that they make the death of humans more palatable. Humans fear death because they fear the termination of their own existence. Millions of years of evolution have wired our brains this way. If you believe that the death of the body does not mean the end of the individual this fear is eliminated (or at least reduced). This is probably why afterlife religions are so popular in the first place: as soon as humans developed the cognitive capacity to understand that their physical death was inevitable that knowledge must have tormented many of them horribly, and belief in the afterlife would be an excellent coping mechanism; a means for these people to stay happy and sane by simply refusing to believe that the end of their body was the end of their existence as thinking beings. But this comforting belief has a dark side. It can provide a framework for justifying the killing of a person in the belief that their death is actually in their best interests, or that it does not truly cause their end.

The obvious example I could use is suicide bombers who go to blow themselves up fortified with the belief that they will earn their way to paradise. Would they be so willing to kill themselves if they believed it was the end of their existence? Some might indeed be so ideologically committed, so angry, or so hopeless that they would, but I suspect if we were to magically remove belief in the afterlife from humanity suicide bomber recruitment would probably suffer at least a little.

However, I think there are other examples that would serve even better to illustrate the unique madness of this belief, which is that it can make or enable people to commit utterly heinous acts for no good reason, all the while believing that they are doing good. A good example of this, I think, is parents who permit their children to die of preventable infections out of religious conviction. Some of these parents may indeed be truly horrible people, ghouls in mind if not in flesh, but the horrifying thing is I suspect many of them aren't. They weren't psychotics, sadists, or sociopaths. They didn't enjoy watching their child die in pain, in their hearts it horrified them as much as it would horrify us. But they stood by and watched their own children suffer and die because they thought that suffering would translate into kudos points in the other world. They believed that once their child expired from their soul would just go through the wormhole into Heaven; their pain was a temporary stage on the journey to the afterlife, mercifully relieved by death, rather than horror followed by nothing. The awful thing is that once you accept their irrational first principles their choice can actually appear rational: if you believe that there is an eternal afterlife waiting for you, and that your well-being in it is dependent on pleasing God, and that God is displeased by you using antibiotics, then allowing somebody to die of infection rather than treating becomes nothing more than an exercise in prioritizing the person's long-term good over their short-term good.

For another illustration, I'd point to Creepiest Death Rituals From Around the World. It's a humor site, but quite illustrative nevertheless. The two most horrifying practices listed there, Sutee and Buddhist Mummification, were both justified or inspired by this madness that I speak of.

Sutee was justified by the idea that spouses would be re-united after death. But I think Buddhist self-mummification is an even better example, because it wasn't something inflicted on frequently unwilling victims: the self-mummifiers did it to themselves, of their own free will.

You really have to read about it to appreciate the tragic farce it was. Self-mummification was a long process that includes several years in a special diet designed to change the body chemistry to allow the corpse to mummify more readily. After years preparing for your death ritual in this manner you'd drink a poisonous tea that causes explosive diarrhea and vomiting. Its purpose was to change the chemistry of your digestive system to stave off decay. Then you'd go to a small underground cubby where you'd be buried alive. This was done in the belief that to achieve enlightenment you must separate yourself from the physical world entirely so that at death, instead of being reborn, you become one with Buddha. Think about that for a minute. These men buried themselves alive in the belief that it would help them achieve enlightenment. And in all likelyhood all they got was a slow, painful end to their existence. The courage, dedication, and faith required for this act is astounding to me, and it was probably all just so they could screw themselves over horribly in the end. I can't think of anything that would better illustrate the tragedy of misguided belief in the afterlife in a universe where it probably does not exist.

[Junghalli]

Afterlife religions can encourage passivity in the face of death and suffering:
Another dark side to belief in the afterlife is that it makes suffering and death in this world less objectionable. Death, obviously, becomes less objectionable because it is not believed to be the termination of existence. This has a number of undesirable effects. It makes decisions that result in the deaths of humans, such as war, more palatable, since you can console yourself with the idea that the dead continue on in some other realm. It also reduces motivation to eliminate natural phenomenon that result in the mass death of humans such as hunger, disease, and aging. One is logically more strongly motivated to pursue solutions to these problems if one believes death truly entails the termination of existence.

Afterlife religions also encourage people to be more passive toward suffering in this life, because this life is seen as only a minor prelude to the afterlife and thus not terribly important. Oppressed people can be bribed with the promise of an imaginary world of compensation beyond the grave. The idea that a person might spend their life in suffering becomes much more distressing if one treats their life in this world as the only conscious existence they will ever enjoy. Helping people achieve greater success in an imagined afterlife can become a "lazy man's alternative" to alleviating people's suffering in the real world; e.g. one may be tempted to try to "help" the unfortunate by "spiritually uplifting" them so they get a better deal in the next world, rather than helping them with their problems in the real world (giving them a few lines from the Upanishads so they won't have such lousy luck in the next reincarnation probably takes less resources than giving them skilled job training, after all).


Afterlife religions can encourage you to live for death:
As well as encouraging one to embrace death, afterlife religions can encourage one to compromise one's well-being an happiness in this life in order to secure a better afterlife. After all, once you accept the premise that there is an afterlife, and it's much longer than your earthly life, then giving it highest priority is only good long-term planning. And, as I have touched on before, many religions have rules that you will secure a better afterlife by following but which reduce your well-being and happiness in this life. "Living for death" in such a manner, then, is an extremely bad bargain in a universe where there is actually no afterlife, as ours likely is.


Objections:

1: But secular ideologies can justify abuse of humans too! What about Communism?
That is certainly true. However, the ones that most naturally lend themselves to the abuse of humans are also irrational and/or don't place the good of humans as the primary goal. Even in a system that does place the good of humans as the primary goal there is plenty of possibility for abuse (there's a reason "the ends justify the means" is a favorite catch-phrase of Hollywood villains after all), but at least you have a rational consistent framework for deciding whether or not the creation of suffering is justifiable.


2: But what about all the good religions do in the world? What about religious charities, great men who were motivated by religion etc.?
It is true that religion motivates people to do great good as well as evil. However, I see no reason why religion is required for most of these qualities and acts. Charity, for instance, is every bit as important under an atheistic humanist ethical system as under a religious one. Atheistic humanist ethics is just as committed to social justice as religion may be.

Frankly, there's only one thing I can think of offhand that religion may be especially good at in this respect: making assholes and morons act ethically. Religion often entails the idea of cosmic judgment; an all-seeing cop and judge from which there is no escape. For some sociopathic or borderline-sociopathic personalities this may very well be a powerful force in making them act ethically. I've seen some scary statistics for how many people admit they would commit crimes like rape if they were guarenteed to get away with it, so such people may indeed be rather frighteningly common. It certainly puts a lot of those arguments that atheists would automatically lack morality in a new light, doesn't it? I suppose if you were such a person naturally you would assume that was the case, extrapolating from your own wretched moral condition. Morons likewise may have an easier time with the hard and fast moral rules offered by some religions than with humanism, which actually requires people to think about their ethics. However, we have fear of real punishment to make people act ethically, and I am skeptical that the added suffering of assholes acting unethically where they could get away with it would outweigh the benefits of reducing religion. Another point to consider here is that religion has a far from 100% success rate at getting its own adherents to follow its own dictates; a lot of religious assholes seems to act unethically anyway, they just cloak it in hypocrisy.


3: But religion makes people feel better and gives them meaning!
That is certainly true. That is one of the reasons it is so popular: it fills many emotional needs of humans. However, most of those needs can be filled outside religion as well, and I am skeptical that the joy religion brings to humans in this respect truly outweighs the suffering it creates in the world.


4: That doesn't sound like my religion!
Keep in mind I was referring to religion in general, and frequently was careful to use phrases like "religion often" or "many religions". I'm not going to pretend this is a comprehensive evaluation of every religion on the planet. And, of course, even believers of the same religion often have different takes on it.


5: But you're basing all this on the premise that atheism is true! That's circular logic!
I am basing it on the fact that atheism is the most logical possibility, as there is very little evidence for the claims of religion. Note also that my argument would work as well if we assumed that there was a god but it did not care about humans. Religion generally makes not only one unsupported claim but two: that there is a god and that it cares about humans.


6: You're just being intolerant and hateful of religion!
I can see how theists might find this analyses uncomfortable or even offensive and disagree very strongly with it. However, it is not my intention to be hateful; this is imply my analysis of the costs and benefits of religion from a human well-being utility viewpoint. If you think I'm mistaken please present logical arguments as to why.


7: The Aztec sacrifices/Sutee/the Crusades etc. weren't really about religion.
They may very well have had other factors that shaped and fed them (the Aztec mass slaughters might also have been political theatre, for instance). Nevertheless, religion was an important part of their apparatus of justification.

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Note: I must confess my knowledge of Buddhist self-mummification comes entirely from that article. It's possible I made some horrendous blunder, anybody who knows more about the subject can correct any mistaken ideas I might have developed about it.

Also, I realize I really should have included the objection that rational ethics are based on an arbitrary first principle (suffering is bad), but I didn't feel like going into that too.

Oh, and sorry for the length.