On Religion: The Negative Argument

O, boy. Anyone who knows me will know this is a loaded topic. This also comes right in the beginning of my endeavor to read the Bible cover to cover, intensively. Because I have already given so much thought to the topic, I will make here two cases: one for and one against the practice of religion.

First off, let's define what we mean by religion. The Merriam-Webster dictionary (by the third of three definitions) will tell you that religion does not require belief in a god, only that the belief be important to the individual. In that case, my worldview, although wholly natural, could be considered a religion. I will not be addressing this definition. I will, instead, refer to the first two dictionary definitions which are the belief and/or worship of a god or gods.

Resolved: Religion is a net positive for people.

The negative argument

Intro: Religion no longer has all the answers

C1: Human knowledge is constantly growing and refining itself & human advance requires people to challenge current beliefs
C2: Religion dissuades creative and contrarian thinking
C3: People separate on ideological grounds
C4: People turn to violence to protect deeply-held ideology
C5: Religion enforces unchallengable ideology
Con: Religion hurts human cohesion and advancement

For thousands of years, humanity has lived in nearly the same condition. People in rural areas farmed or hunted for subsistence to feed their family and possibly a small community. Urban centers were nothing like today's industrial centers. People lived close together to increase their market for entrepreneurial endeavors, but much of the day remained dedicated to the gathering and preparation of food, even if food was found at a local market. Although this life may have been spiritually fulfilling, there was little time for specialization for all but the highest classes. After the industrial revolution, which allowed more people to spend more time working on things other than feeding themselves and maintaining their dwelling (this of course came after the regulation of work hours and big business tyranny), people had time to work on other things for the majority of their day. The advent of time-saving gadgets perpetuated itself in saving more time and allowing people to answer some of the biggest questions of humanity. People were able to answer with astounding certainty questions of medicine, geology, astronomy, meteorology, psychology, and physics. Until then, answers to these questions had come by "revelation" from a deity. Although many questions remain for the religious teachers to answer as they will, the modern world has given us a way to live without depending upon the speculations of spiritual leaders.

To be fair, science has not always been correct. Science told us that sucking blood with leeches would cure disease, that no object could move through air faster than sound, and that there were nine planets in our solar system. We now know these things to be demonstrably false (sorry Pluto). It of course begs the question of what we know to be true today that will be proven wrong in our future. Although the process is imperfect, it is the best way we know to stumble our way into truth. Theories are contrived, refined, refuted, and refined again. It may take an infinite amount of iterations to reach truth, but stopping at the first claim does not offer this ability to inch closer to a useful explanation. Edison may have found hundreds of ways not to make a light bulb, but it was his willingness to challenge what he thought to be true to eventually produce the first of a gadget that would help the world in its insomniac-like work. Einstein's theory of the photon challenged widely-held beliefs about light, and now the technology that depends on his theories offer a clean alternative energy in a time when dependence on petrofuels needs to decrease. If people were afraid to challenge what we know to be true, we would still be bartering for food in wooden markets (nothing against farmers markets, but supermarkets have enabled and industrial society).

Religion has almost uniformly opposed this system of challenge and refinement. Most religions are founded on the idea of revealed knowledge of the origin of the world or the purpose of human life. To challenge this knowledge is to challenge the deity that passed the word to the "enlightened." If we were to rely on the Catholic church to provide our scientific advances, by the end of the 20th century we would have gotten as far as recognizing that the Earth revolves around the Sun. At the end of the 15th century, Baghdad, which had been the knowledge center of the globe at the time, receded into the stone age when a new ruler declared mathematics heretical. By design, religion opposes change. Religion has become the value center of many communities. It keeps people grounded. It gives them something that remains familiar. At the current rate of technological advancement and knowledge propagation, the modernized world is in nearly absolute flux. Religion continues to challenge the advances of science despite its vast contributions to the quality of life of the religious. Religion has done nothing but slow the pace of advancement.

In our part of the world, the Christian church has been the biggest culprit of the retardation of science, but they are not the only ones calling for a slowdown. Of the hundreds of religions around the world, all of them teach different answers to the same questions. This disagreement causes major divides in society. People tend to surround themselves with people with whom they agree and shun those with whom they disagree. Conservative people tend to find others who watch Fox News and read the Examiner. Liberal people tend to watch MSNBC and read Huffington Post. People naturally struggle with conflict. To refute another's ideas requires critical thinking, which requires effort, and people do not want to expend effort when they are trying to relax with friends. Admittedly, there are many counterexamples (myself, being one of them), but overwhelmingly, people do not like to be told they are wrong. Strict ideologies divide people on such a fundamental level that civil debate is all but impossible, and swaying the other side with logical argument is completely futile. On it's face, this division is bad enough, but history has taught us that these divisions are the beginning of the worst atrocities.

When disagreements enter the realm of life-choices, dislike can turn to hate. Throughout history, violent factions of political groups have sprung up to defend their beliefs. Nazi storm troopers forced Berlin into submission with their brown-shirted terror, the Bolshevik revolution painted Russia red with the blood of their comrades, and the KKK continues to defend the glory of the Old (racist) South to this day. I have written before on the correlation of fear and hate. There is strong evidence to support the theory that hatred (which often spawns violence) is a direct result of the fear that comes with the lack of knowledge of other people. When ideologies clash, willful ignorance stands to block this understanding. Anecdotal evidence has consistently shown that when rival groups begin to understand each other, the walls of rivalry crumble. When people work together, almost anything is possible. WWII and the Cold War brought the United States together in such a way that things that seemed fanciful only a couple decades before were becoming real. The cooperation required to develop nuclear technology, put men on the moon, and push massive civil rights reform may not even be possible in today's divisive political atmosphere. We can only imagine what the human race could do if people united across borders.

As noted in contention 3, religion teaches and unchanging ideology. Revealed knowledge requires another revelation to change the doctrine. Even in Islam with its multiple prophets, this only happens once every few hundred years. With the myriad of separate teachings, all as sacred as the next, people become divided along the most fundamental lines. Religion may bring small communities together, but as long as the cornucopia of religions exists, uniting the human race will be impossible.

It may be indirectly, but religion causes hatred, division, and regression within the human race. Without religion, humanity may have the chance to cooperate across boundaries in a way never seen before and achieve scientific and technological advances that make life comfortable and enjoyable for all of humanity.