The harms of religion

[Gooders1002]

The harm is that it instills the fear of eternal torture from a very young age, making it almost impossible for them to break out of their particular religion, and does actually lead to the brainwashed idiots we see today such as Ray Comfort. It basically creates a new generation of misinformed, delusional sheep who will believe everything their pastor/preacher/rabi etc. tells them. For example, pastors in Nigeria told parents to kill their childeren as they believed them to be witches, and the parents obliged; there are now many activist groups pushing for creationism to be taught instead of evolution in science classrooms, led by people who have been "harmlessly" taught to believe in creationism; most major religions (especially in the East) demote women as some kind of inferior species, leading them to be forced to stay at home almost all the time, and cover themselves up when they do venture outside; atheists have been shown to be one of the most hated and mistrusted minorities in the world (by numerous religious surveys who put them next to rapists and murderers); statistically, those countries with the highest religious density have more murders, rapes, poverty, thefts, infant mortality, disease and famine than those with the lowest religious density, who have almost the lowest in all those things.
Religion has waged many hundreds of pointless and bloody conflicts over the years, and is far from becoming a harmless institution. If it is not snuffed out, with advanced weaponry and ever more efficient ways of destroying one another (as we will undoubtedly continue to discover in the future), these conflicts are going to become more and more unstable and high-caliber. That is the greatest harm.

Does any more need to be said?