RE: What's your biggest beef with religion?
September 20, 2018 at 7:58 am
(This post was last modified: September 20, 2018 at 7:58 am by Angrboda.)
(September 20, 2018 at 7:38 am)robvalue Wrote:(September 20, 2018 at 7:30 am)Jörmungandr Wrote: I've been trying to figure out a response for several days. When I come to it, there isn't any one thing which is particularly disturbing about religion. If it were only one thing, I might have a more casual attitude toward religion than I do (and I'm pretty casual toward religion overall). But it really is a basket full of deplorables. It isn't that any one thing is all that bad, and things like anti-intellectualism or hypocrisy tend to be simply extensions of common human traits, it's more that all together religion makes up a perfect storm of bad things. If I were to pick out one thing as my biggest beef with religion, it would be that the little good that it does offer is so massively outweighed by all the negative.
Well put. It was difficult to pick a single one when I could probably fill a list of 20 or more. I wonder how long I could keep going in fact.
I'm now torn between my previous answer of indoctration, and divisiveness. Again though, I think the former is largely responsible for the latter. My even more general answer would simply be harm. If it didn't cause harm, I wouldn't be nearly as concerned about it.
I don't know about divisiveness, but the reason we find indoctrination a negative is because we find religion itself to be a negative. The one is a consequence of the other. We don't object to parents indoctrinating their children into not putting their hands on a hot stove or not playing in traffic. We oppose indoctrination because of what it leads to.