GenesisNemesis
Let's Go Dark Brandon!
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2006
- Messages
- 3,909
- Location
- California
- Basic Beliefs
- Secular Humanist, Scientific Skepticism, Strong Atheism
Calling it a "disease" or a symptom would be based on entirely subjective notions of how society should be structured, so I would have to say it's an effect. Religion is an entirely normal aspect of the human condition, so I'm not sure how it would be a "disease" or "symptom" of anything. We didn't evolve to be critical thinkers. We evolved as a social species and religion is an outgrowth of that. That's not to say religion doesn't cause any harm- I just don't agree with the idea that it's a "disease" or a "symptom".
Nonsense.
Religion is a bad epistemology. Every religion teaches that it is virtuous to accept conclusions on insufficient evidence. Obviously, they do this in order to make the "flock" more willing to accept their absurd claims, but the problem is that their followers then go out and apply this same bad epistemology to other aspects of their lives. That's why the results of theism seem so haphazard: extremely helpful one moment, extremely harmful the next, and merely eccentric the moment after that. The followers are essentially arriving at totally random conclusions about things because they are very mistaken about why things are true.
While declaring faith to be a virtue produces bad decisions in other areas of one's life, the very nature of faith makes it extremely difficult to convince someone they have made a bad decision.
So religion does indeed do harm, but religion itself is not the cause of the harm, the bad epistemology is.
How does this make religion a "disease"?