I debunk religion, not from a theologian perspective, but a human operating-systems perspective.
More harm than good by a long shot. Religion poisons everything, is the reference I make to the late Christopher Hitchens, who answers that question succinctly from an in-depth and informed theologian perspective.
In short: Christopher frames religion as a belief in a celestial dictator, we are supposed to love, the essence of sadomasochism. And we can all imagine what sadomasochism does to humanity. Some of us have discovered it on an interpersonal level.
I will add to Christopher’s rationale my perspective on what damages the critical success-factors of humanity. Success defined as the strengthening of the evolution of humanity to prolong human sustainability. A quality of success religion does not seek to establish or challenge, for it claims to have all the answers already, while it loves death more than life, even in the absence of any reasonable proxy of proof.
Religion as a system is incompatible with evolution; here is why:
- Religions depend on a land-grab of absolutism, where only a theory and appreciation of relativity can successfully encircle the world.
- Religions depend on new answers from a tiny and narrow sliver of an unlikely and disproven past. An attempted extrapolation of the past used as the sorry prognosticator of foresight.
- Religions are static, whereas our evolving discovery of nature requires us to adapt dynamically to a changing equilibrium with nature.
- Religions, by its indoctrination and practices, are in gross violation of equal freedom. It not only treats women as second-class citizens, comfortably ignoring their pertinent role in the evolutionary prowess of us all. Let alone freedom being the impetus to important discoveries.
- Religions resist criticism, evidence, and affirmation against the numinous, in ignorant defiance to reason, and even the evolution of itself.
- Religions rely on stale dictatorial control of its beliefs hailed from scripture, where evolution assigns new merit to critical faculties absolving inaccurate or outdated proxies.
Religion is the umbilical cord to hindsight that turns our evolution into a numbing repetition of our past. Any religion that is, not just theologies, including the stale religion of economics that fails for the same reason.
The world is our oyster when we shift from a debilitating reliance on the resurrection of hindsight to the exciting discoveries of foresight that make our planet a better place. Our founding fathers were right to separate church from state, which we now must extend to mean church subjugates to the state unless you do want religion to literally poison everything.
Think for yourself, in all matters of life.
