What’s the Harm? Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad
What’s the Harm? Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad

What’s the Harm? Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad

 

I’m often asked, “Christianity doesn’t really hurt anyone. Why is it so important? Just let people believe what they want. At least in religion. Why should we bother critiquing and opposing belief?”

In some cases the question is terribly naive. In others, it’s meant to refer not to conservative and fundamentalist religion—whose dangers to society and to every individual, both within and without the faith, are countless and well documented—but to liberal theologies, so-called “safe” religions, that don’t appear to cause any overt harm. So here is how you can reply to this question, depending on which group you are getting it from—those so naive they don’t even know the dangers that conservative theologies pose, and those savvy enough to get that much, but who still don’t see what the harm is (for instance) in just believing you’re immortal and have an imaginary friend.

Why Conservative Theologies Are Dangerous

False beliefs lead to bad decisions. And that can be dangerous on a mass scale. Paradigmatic examples: the Catholic Church is an international rape factory; a majority of Evangelicals are perpetually pushing for war, the expansion of poverty, and the suppression of women’s autonomy; and Donald Trump is President. But just in case a few examples aren’t enough to make the point clear, let me give you a slightly expanded tour of the horrors of religious belief.

The What’s the Harm website catalogs examples of the often lethal but also economic dangers of all manner of woo and false beliefs that people might ask the same question about, including a section on the dangers of fundamentalism—and they don’t even include religious violence, like war, terrorism, and hate crimes. Nor do they count harms resulting from trauma, abuse, political suppression, and damaging and dysfunctional teachings about self and society. Conservative religion causes misery to countless people infected with it who don’t conform to its false worldview, from producing self-hating homosexuals to little girls terrorized by the idea they might burn eternally in hell for merely asking questions. And countless other examples we could name.

Conservative religion also inevitably corrupts us into ignoring or even supporting evil. Lawrence Krauss wasn’t wrong when he wrote in Scientific American that (my emphasis):

Religious leaders need to be held accountable for their ideas. In my state of Arizona, Sister Margaret McBride, a senior administrator at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, recently authorized a legal abortion to save the life of a 27-year-old mother of four who was 11 weeks pregnant and suffering from severe complications of pulmonary hypertension … Yet the bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olm­sted, immediately excommunicated Sister Margaret, saying, “The mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s.” Ordinarily, a man who would callously let a woman die and orphan her children would be called a monster; this should not change just because he is a cleric.

Even just the idea of giving enemies of the people a “pass” merely because they profess to be pious or clerical, is a threat to society that must end. But worse is the very production of such vile beliefs. Kill moms? Really? And that’s but one example.

In actual fact the Catholic Church is an international rape factory. And has been for decades; possibly untold centuries. Religious belief not only allowed that to happen, it is still allowing it to happen, as believers refuse to leave the church, refusing to effect any substantive reform that would prevent it, refusing to find a less deadly and destructive religion to believe in and support. And that’s not the only horror that Church has unleashed on the world. Even now that same Church also teaches false and dangerous, even lethal, things about a great deal else, from condoms and AIDS in Africa, to mental health and marital and parental and sexual relationships. The Church even denies charity to aid groups that so much as associate with gay people. And likewise enforces other positions it irrationally and harmfully endorses. Add it all up, and the harm Catholicism does well exceeds any good. Just see the Intelligence Squared Debate on whether the Church has been a force for good in the world—the affirmative is thoroughly annihilated by Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry.

And it’s not just Catholic evil that is spread and enabled throughout the world. Do you think mass child rape only happens in the Vatican’s corporate properties? Look over the nightmarishly vast collection of reported “black collar crime” that Freethought Today has published at least two whole newspaper pages worth nearly every month for decades now (you can find the latest issue online for an example). And the crimes they document aren’t just rampant child molestation, but range from fraud to manslaughter. Faith, trust in religion, support of religious institutions, makes this possible. Churches should be treated just like any other corporation: just as self-interested, and just as much in need of suspicion, criticism, oversight, and regulation.

And it doesn’t end there.

American Evangelicals lobbied for the mass murder of gay people in Uganda. Hundreds of thousands of American voters have in recent years supported “kill-the-gays” candidates even in the U.S. See my section on “Equivalence” in my article on Islamophobia for that and more. And again, that’s just one example. Homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, prejudices galore, all get rationalized, defended, and spread by conservative Protestant sects (and Orthodox sects and every other kind). On every political issue I’ve ever tried lobbying for, from environmentalism to peacekeeping to fighting poverty to women’s rights to stem cell research to abolishing vice laws to death-with-dignity legislation to improvements in tax and social welfare policy—literally everything—one group was always in my way: conservative Christians. Always. Their opposition to human betterment and social progress is extensive, multi-faceted, well-documented, and shameless. Faith. Belief. They create and feed that monster. And that’s why they must go.

But this has already been thoroughly demonstrated, on countless different dimensions. Marlene Winell’s advocacy for “Religious Trauma Syndrome” is but one example. For many, many more, see John Loftus’s Christianity Is Not Great, Hector Avalos’s Fighting Words, Valerie Tarico’s The Dark Side, Janet Heimlich’s Breaking Their Will, Billy Wheaton’s Hooks and Ladders, Darrel Ray’s Sex and God, Jerry Coyne’s Faith Verses Fact. You know. Just for starters. (And as I’ll show below, liberal Christian critics have also documented even more evils of conservative belief.)

Conservative religion not only damages the individual believer with false, harmful, even hateful beliefs about themselves and the world, it is “also highly correlated with violence and physical and emotional abuse, and the suppression of the liberties and well-being of others” (Problems with the Mental Illness Model of Religion). It therefore must be opposed.

That should have been obvious. But what about “nice” religions?

Why All Theologies Are Dangerous

First, all religions are systems of lies, designed to keep us trapped and controlled by fear. Liberal, conservative. Doesn’t matter. They can only survive at all, because so many are willing to keep telling and selling the same lies, because so many are so terrified of the truth they’d rather deny it than grow out of it. Even Bart Ehrman points out in Jesus, Interrupted how much the pulpit deliberately keeps from the public out of fear “it will lead to a crisis of faith, or even the loss of faith.” It’s doubtful that can ever be good. But certainly if we believe the truth matters, if we believe growing up and being an adult matters, then we cannot support believing in lies even if they are comforting, and even if the truth must necessarily be disturbing. There is no virtue in willful naivety. There is only danger.

People on their deathbeds, the mentally ill, those certain to flame out into conflict the moment anyone pushes back, those who are beyond all sense or time remaining to struggle with the truth—with some people, maybe we have to continue their delusions, not being able to rescue their minds, or not having ourselves the time, emotional labor, and other resources to put into the project. But most people are fully capable of taking the time to learn and cope with the truth. Including anyone who is reading our books and articles. For most people, therefore, the following is simply the truth…

If we do not confront the fact of our mortality, if we hide from it and evade it by fabricating fantasies that we are immortal, we do not really grow up. We remain emotionally stunted, never having come to terms with the truth about ourselves and our lives. Worse, we also fail to make the decisions we would have made had we known this, admitted it, and done what we needed to make peace with it. We are cutting off a lot of happiness and accomplishment and knowledge and experience that even we would agree mattered once correctly aware of the truth, on the false belief that we get to defer it to an eternal future. An eternal future never to come. Confronting our mortality, inevitably leads to enjoying more of the life we have. You appreciate more, what you only get to have for a short while.

Likewise, if we do not confront the fact that there is no one coming to save us, no justice assured, no future where we meet our maker or our lost loved ones, that salvation and justice only comes from flawed human beings organizing imperfectly to manifest it, we also, again, remain emotionally stunted, never having come to terms with the truth about the world and its realities and limitations. Being fired up by that harsh reality, to really start supporting the production of more justice in the world, is better. It’s more urgent, more important, that we really do this, if there is no superhero already on it.

Likewise, if we do not confront the fact that those lost survive only in our memories and the effects of their lives on the world they left behind, we also, again, remain emotionally stunted, never having come to terms with the truth about the world and its realities and limitations. We should be appreciating those we love while they still exist, enjoying our loved ones’ company more now, knowing full well it will end, rather than deferring it to a fictional future; we should be dealing with our grief and loss so we can move beyond it, rather than bottling it up in fear and false hope. Consequently the way of living that admits everyone’s mortality is better. Same, too, if we never learn to let go the imaginary friends of our childhood. Real friends are better. Admitting you are really only talking to yourself is better.

Second, even if we believed the truth is irrelevant and that we should believe false things merely because they comfort us, then we should instead believe we should construct any religion we want—indeed, we should construct, and only ever believe in, a religion that contains only comforting beliefs, none dangerous or alarming. We should, in other words, build a better religion. Better than literally any other popular religion on offer. A religion weighed down by no false beliefs that would cause us to lose resources or make bad decisions for ourselves or others, that support no prejudices, and that only contained imaginary friends (that can never save us or assure us of anything) and a magical immortality that we should act like we’ll never get (so as to not shortchange ourselves in the only life we’ll really have). Which really just amounts to doing nothing different than simply not believing at all. So why bother?

Indeed, people defending religion this way, are being hypocritical and disingenuous. If you really think religion’s only utility is in comfort, then you should condemn all religions that carry any dangers and discomforts, and fully support everyone fabricating any belief system that makes them happy. Lovable faerie worlds. Benevolent polytheism. Post-mortem solipsism. We get to live forever in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Anything. It’s all the best thing ever. All other religions, a curse. That should be your position. If it’s not, then you don’t really believe we should believe false things merely because of the comfort they bring us.

Liberal Theologies Entail Broken Epistemologies

And as even that thought experiment just illustrated, all religions require suppressing critical thought. Because you can’t maintain even a liberal religious belief, without a willully broken epistemology. And no net good comes of doing that.

As I wrote in Atheism Doesn’t Suck:

[B]ad epistemologies are always a net bad for you (and society), but you can only believe comfortable lies if you commit to a bad epistemology, the side effects of which will never be good for you or society overall—because bad epistemologies cannot protect you from harmful false beliefs (and even entail an increasing resort to harmful false beliefs in order to protect the harmless ones from being exposed).

In short, faith-based epistemologies always bear a cost, a cost always greater and more dangerous than of abandoning false comforts. It is literally impossible to build a method that will only ever lead you to a false belief that is literally harmless. Because to do that, you’d have to know the belief was false. It’s a Catch 22. Since the only way to really, reliably know a belief is harmless, is a method that can assuredly discover the belief would have no negative effect on you if it is false, nor even if it is true. But any method that could discern that, will unavoidably always discover the belief is false. Or at least, not likely true.

Any epistemology that sticks you with false beliefs, in other words, will invariably stick you with some false beliefs that are bad for you as well, or bad for others if you embrace them. Because it will have a blindspot, and that blindspot can’t police what gets in it. Hence you will never know which false beliefs are bad for you, or how to detect them. Because the broken epistemology you’ve chosen will also have to shield you from such discoveries. Indeed, to protect you from discovering your false beliefs, it will have to cause you to build ever more elaborate systems of false beliefs. Accelerating the likelihood and frequency of harmful false beliefs slipping in among them.

You will always be far safer with a critical epistemology optimally built to just always catch false beliefs, or as often as possible. And you won’t be able to “tool” it to do that better for harmless beliefs than harmful ones. That’s why only a globally good critical reason can protect you from harmful false beliefs. That it therefore must also quash harmless false beliefs that you find comforting is an inevitable price. But it’s a price far lower than the cost of the alternative. Because abandoning false comforts is what it means to grow into a mature adult and to take charge of yourself as you really are and life as it really is, and to get started on building true comforts in their place. Becoming a better, more honest, more realized person. Becoming less delusional, and therefore more enlightened.

Citing the rare few believers who engage with passion moral issues that actually matter because of their false beliefs, is a red herring. Because the vast majority of believers actually use belief to rationalize their complacency and indifference. And plenty of people engage those moral issues just as passionately without false beliefs. We don’t need a world where we trick people into sacrificing themselves for us with lies. We can come to much more honest ways of motivating them, compensating them, and solving our problems. We ought to do so. As only that would be a genuinely better world.

In short, faith is simply an unreliable path to knowledge. And as such, it is an inherently dangerous epistemology to adopt—much more promote. As it can lead you, and others, into real folly. Even if it hasn’t done yet, it will do. If not to you, then those who come after you. Statistically, it’s inevitable. Just a matter of time. So taking that into account, and the fact that we live in a shared community with others, even liberal religiosity is damaging, because people can’t help but let the epistemology they need to sustain their religion then go on to influence yet other decisions they make, other beliefs they form, that will impact others. And by endorsing that bad epistemology, and teaching it and passing it on to the next generation, you hobble yet another population with a dangerous epistemology doomed eventually to lead them into yet more harm.

And that’s just the truth of it. The only way to hold on to “harmless” false beliefs, is if we embrace and defend some faulty epistemology that allows us to maintain a false belief even in the face of evidenceeven in the face of objective reason. But if you will believe things without evidence or reason, even against evidence and reason, what other false beliefs will you be vulnerable to, on account of that same fault in your epistemology? Even beyond the domain of specifically religious beliefs, with that epistemological software installed, you will be in danger of false social beliefs, false political beliefs, false beliefs about yourself and others, false beliefs about the world (see The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking and A Vital Primer on Media Literacy).

The epistemology itself, wholly apart from the religion it is being used to sustain, is harmful. And saving the world from that dangerous epistemology, simply has the inevitable side-effect of also removing liberal theologies from the world as well. Trivial price, for more reliable knowledge of just every single thing there is.

So one might instead want to ask…

Why are they still clinging to remnants of supernaturalism? What are they in fear of? Why does it matter to them? The answer, the real answer, is not likely to be any more commendable than the defenses people give to spirit mediums and other hucksters duping the public with false hopes.

Wouldn’t they and the world be better off if they admitted and faced those fears and coped and made peace with them and built ways to work around them, rather than constructing an elaborate, untouchable delusion to avoid all that? And if they aren’t in fear of anything, why do they need to keep believing things they don’t need to? And why teach this faulty epistemology to others, by endorsing and exemplifying it? Why not denounce it as untrustworthy? Why invent excuses not to denounce it?

It’s all the worse that faulty epistemologies also leave us vulnerable to exploitation. If you don’t have a filter that protects you from false beliefs, your vulnerability to false beliefs (including excess reverence for the “pious” and “clergy”) can easily be used to exploit and manipulate you, by churches, church leaders, politicians, corporations, your communities, everyone. There is no good in this. Better armed against this fate, than a puppet of it.

Yet Further Dangers of Moderate Religion

In “The Top One Reason Religion Is Harmful,” Greta Christina aptly wrote:

[Even] moderate religion still does harm. It still encourages people to believe in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. And therefore, it still disables reality checks… making people more vulnerable to oppression, fraud, and abuse.

What’s more, moderate religion is in the minority. The oppressive, intolerant, reality-denying forms of religion are far more common, and far better at perpetuating themselves.

And moderate religion gives these ugly forms credibility. It gives credibility to the idea that believing in things there’s no reason to believe is valid, and actually virtuous. It gives credibility to the idea that invisible worlds are real, more real and important than the visible one. It gives credibility to the idea that our seriously biased personal intuition is more trustworthy than logic or verifiable evidence. It gives credibility to the idea that religious beliefs, alone among all other ideas, should be beyond criticism; that the very act of questioning religion is inherently intolerant. (It also, I’ve found, has a distinct tendency to get hostile and decidedly un-moderate towards non-believers when questioned even a little.)

Indeed, I think a common problem pervading liberal sects is a more subtle conservatism, pressuring, and exploitation. They may be on the right side of most things, unlike conservatives; but they often still stand in the way of future advances in social wisdom, with their own peer pressuring and passive-aggressive judgmentalism—such as punishing anyone who becomes ethically nonmonogamous, or reinforcing mainstream everyday “benevolent” sexism. And as I already noted, they don’t really teach (and in some ways even counter-teach) effective critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning. That they still require the shibboleth of publicly expressed belief already entails there is something they are attempting to defend against too much questioning, against too effective thinking. And anything like that is usually not something that should be defended.

Liberals are also less able to really debate conservatives, which is why they almost never do. Because the liberals “have no text.” That is, they do not use the Bible as written (unlike the conservatives claim to). They use human interpretations—which means any interpretation can replace it. In truth, the conservatives always do this too; but they pretend they aren’t, giving them an often impenetrable self-righteous edge. The liberals can’t get away with that pretense; that they are “reinterpreting” everything is what overtly defines their sectarian stance. And in debate, this becomes indefensible. What the liberal theologian insists is true, is no longer anchored to any evidence, any proof, anything that could persuade. This is well argued in Hector Avalos’s book The End of Biblical Studies, which has a whole section on liberal Christianity that is the best I’ve read, explaining in detail why it has no salutory or effective method of coping with or arguing from the Bible. In its practical effectiveness, it’s worse than atheism.

Even more broadly that’s the case. When (in Does Christianity Harm Children?) Phil Zuckerman tried explaining the basic Christian doctrine, which even liberal Christianity endorses and graphically depicts in its own ways, to his young daughter, a child, he had to confess, “The whole thing is so totally, horrible, absurdly sadistic and counter-intuitive and wicked. Not to mention baldly untrue.” Liberal Christianities might try to de-emphasize or whitewash all that, but the fact is, they teach the same horrible shit. To children.

Some of what Zuckerman lists is only in conservative dogmas—hells, devils, salvation irrespective of merit; damnation for non-Christians, even Christians of other sects; that masturbation is evil. But some is shared even by liberal sects. Pretty much every version of “Christianity teaches children that they are intrinsically evil…just by being born” and “that God killed his own child to make up for their” being evil. And that that’s okay. Indeed, the best thing ever! Horrifying.

Indeed, although liberal Christianities tend to try and ditch the crazy, abusive teachings of devils and hells and unearned salvation, they can only replace them with something almost as bad: that God, even Jesus, is the example we should look up to, of the most loving and just person possible—yet allows all the horrible, evil things in the world and does nothing about them, because this is somehow all for the best. Disease. Cancer. War. The Holocaust. Mass starvation. Mass drownings from floods, tsunamis, storms, sinking ships. It maximally exemplifies being loving and just…to do zip all about any of it? How is that not a messed up thing to teach anyone? Especially children? It’s hard to imagine it’s doing society any favors to build a human being who thinks these things.

Valerie Tarico has provided another astute catalog of dangers, in “6 Reasons Religion May Do More Harm Than Good.” Reasons that apply not just to conservative and liberal religions, but some even to ideologies outside the usual definition of religion:

  • Religion promotes tribalism. [Believers vs. unbelievers, saved vs. unsaved.]
  • Religion anchors believers to the Iron Age. [Through still-revered scriptures.]
  • Religion makes a virtue out of faith [Promoting faith-based epistemologies and over-trusting the clerical and the pious.]
  • Religion diverts generous impulses and good intentions. [Enabling exploitative enterprises and institutions; draining resources from where they’d be better spent.]
  • Religion teaches helplessness. [“Jesus take the wheel”; “Let go and let God”; “God will sort it out”; “God has his reasons”.]
  • Religions seek power. [Churches are literally just untaxed corporations. With less oversight. Think about it.]

On top of all that, even liberal theologies plague us with one over-arching danger:

Teaching everyone they have a reliable guide to what the right thing to do is (or what the right thing to think is) either (A) in some distorted construct of primitive superstitious writings or (B) in a magical God-blessed intuition. Neither is true. Both are really bad ideas, ripe with danger.

No, the character of Jesus in the Gospels was not the wisest and kindest of beings—he is actually quite loathsome and rarely gives anything but really bad advice (just see the first paragraphs of The Real War on Christmas). No, the rest of the New Testament isn’t all that great—it’s full of support for slavery and the subordination of women and superstitious woo nonsense; and never endorses democracy, human rights, or positive sexuality. Just for example. And no, the Old Testament is not a Good Book—it’s actually full of racist, sexist, genocidal, tyrannical, and horrific teachings (see my collection of examples in The Will of God, just for starters).

Revering these books sends the wrong message to everyone; teaches the wrong things; ingrains bad standards and practices. And it prevents us from doing instead what we ought to do, which is question why anything we think is correct, and come up with verifiable reasons before committing to it—whether whatever we are thinking “is best” comes from some antiquated book written by ignorant superstitious bigots, or not.

The alternative, that “God imbued in me a reliable sense of right and wrong,” is precisely how every wrong person on earth justifies screwing themselves up and screwing the world over. It’s exactly the worst thing to believe, totally hostile to any effective methods of rooting out error and discovering the real truth about anything. It’s the most magical of Dunning-Kruger effects. Philosophy is better: tentative, revisable, critical, testable, rational, and evidence-based. Just to start you out with an example, try my book Sense and Goodness without God. Compare its methods, and its content, with any holy book on earth, with anyone’s untested and untestable “intuition.” And ask yourself: Can any “scripture” or “intuition” replace the critical thinking and research a worldview like that requires to arrive at? Or even that would be needed to fix or improve on it?

Shouldn’t we instead be encouraging critical thinking and research and self-examination and questioning and testing, and not reliance on scriptures or intuitions? And if we abandon scriptures and intuitions, if we test them all against evidence and reason, what religion survives? None. Honestly. Other than purely social enterprises devoid of supernatural beliefs or dogmas.

Giving Liberals Their Due

To be fair, the devotees of liberal theologies are much less dangerous than their conservative peers, much less psychologically messed-up, much-less callous and hate-filled, and much less a burden on society. They are allies on so many missions of progress in the world. Though only so long as you don’t ask too many questions or start exposing too many things they’d rather their congregations not know. We can work with them. But we cannot submit to them. They will not be allowed to silence us.

It’s also not quite true, as Richard Dawkins once alleged, that liberal theism gives conservative theism cover; or as Sam Harris once alleged, that the respectability of liberal theism makes it harder to critique and oppose conservative theism. Because liberal theism also gives religious liberty and secularism cover, too. And in fact its availability as an option has proven to be a necessary escape valve for believers to leave conservative theism. So in fact liberal theism does not make it harder to combat conservative theism, but easier. In fact these liberal sects exist precisely because of that combat; and their size and growth is evidence of success at it.

This should be one of the most obvious lessons of the last three hundred years: the secularization of governments and human rights has created a context in which religion could be moderated by dissent over time. Which is precisely why Christians aren’t waging crusades and inquisitions anymore, and though hundreds of thousands of Americans still want gays executed, they are now but a tiny and shrinking fraction of Christians in America, most of whom find these murderous peers repulsive and would never support their passing of laws. How many converts to atheism do we know, who first escaped their conservative theology by going through a liberal theological phase, before finding deism palatable, than agnosticism…then finally atheism? That’s how it often works.

We sometimes forget how enormous a shift this is from the Middle Ages. If it can happen to Christianity, it can happen to Islam, and anything else. And really, that’s the only way it’s going to happen. You aren’t going to convert a billion Muslims to atheism. But you can create a context in which they will gradually liberalize themselves over the next two hundred years. Like we did. Because that’s the only way we did it. That then opened the way, gradually to be sure, for atheism to have breathing room, and eventually itself grow. This all simply requires the secularization of governments and human rights—such as accepting freedom of religion and freedom of speech as fundamental rights.

And likewise, though liberal theologians almost never debate or really challenge conservatives anywhere near as frequently and head on as atheists do, some do speak out; the media just never reports on it. In the last ten years I’ve come more than ever to realize how distorted reality is by media’s selection bias on what it tells us. We have by now of course become aware that what the media does report should be treated skeptically; but we often forget that far greater distortion is caused by what the media doesn’t report. Because it’s thus invisible, we don’t know that it’s not being reported!

Indeed, the media distorts even our perception of conservatives. And I don’t mean just liberal media, but all media—FOX News included. As for example I discovered with the media coverage of the recent immigration issue: see Giving Christians Their Due–Which Even Christians Won’t Do. In actual fact even a lot of prominent conservative religious leaders do not at all share the perspective of the Trump Evangelicals, but actually openly chastise their peers for being so un-Christian. The media hardly reports on it (it will get, here and there, a tiny story at best, barely circulated, and hardly noticed). Similarly, the leading organization in the U.S. that fights for church-state separation is a liberal Christian enterprise, not run by atheists. And it rakes in millions a year in donations, far more than any explicitly atheist organization on earth. How often do you hear about that in the media? Or even that it exists?

Rarely do liberal leaders get heard in the media, either. Jimmy Carter only gets press because he was frickin President of the United States once (a scale of media-access privilege even the media can’t ignore). And even then, I still meet tons of people who have never heard of his attacks on conservative Christianity. And yet his latest and most viral one, isn’t even the only one.

Other major leaders speaking out are largely ignored. Yet there are many (some even conservatives): see Ronald Sider, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience (Baker 2005); Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant (Viking 2006); Gregory Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Nation (Zondervan 2007) and The Myth of a Christian Religion (2009); Robin Meyers, Why the Christian Right Is Wrong (Jossey-Bass 2008). Just for starters. (Which books, BTW, catalog yet more evils and harms of conservative religious belief.)

Some will re-pose the Dawkins-Harris complaint in a more formal way, by stating that liberal theologies move the Overton Window, thus increasing the credibility of conservative theologies. Fundamentalism thereby looking more respectable and a viable option, because liberal theism does. It moves the window, to overlap the respectable with the crazy. But this works both ways. Liberal theism keeps the Overton Window on the other side overlapping atheism, so that the existence of liberal theism also gives cover and respectability to atheism.

Just look at hard-line Islamic nations for a demonstration of this fact: the less liberal theology there is, the more fundamentalism there is, not the other way around. Atheism is then all but crushed into hiding and certainly not even respectable enough to admit, much less evangelize. Whereas as liberal theism grows, so does atheism, while fundamentalism shrinks. The history of Europe, Canada, Australia, even the US, for example, also exhibit this trend. Liberal theology did indeed move the Overton Window…for atheism. Not for conservative theology. We do not find a correlation “more liberal theology, entails more fundamentalism.” We see the opposite. Not only less fundamentalism, but more (and more open and accepted) atheism.

Conclusion

But for all that, even liberal theologies pose their own dangers we must still continually oppose. We should not want these faith-based systems of false-beliefs to continue. They are handy as a gateway. But that bridge ultimately also needs to go. Because liberal theologies saddle us with dangerous epistemologies, they hold back our growth as human beings, they leave us more vulnerable to oppression, fraud, and abuse; indeed more vulnerable to causing and spreading abuse ourselves. They distract us from what we really ought to be doing, which is building evidence-based, testable, revisable worldviews. Meanwhile, conservative theologies pose far greater and even more obvious dangers we must oppose in every civil way possible.

So when someone asks, “What’s the harm?” The answer is that. All that.

-:-

Add your own reasons religion is harmful in comments; but any reason you give, please back it up with specific examples. It’s okay to accumulate yet more reasons for the harm of fundamentalist religious belief, although that seems a bit like beating a dead horse. But I am especially interested in hearing out reasons I may have not mentioned that even liberal religious beliefs harm us or entail risks we’d be better off without.

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