Beliefs — what people believe to be true or false about our world — are vitally important. Just because we take them for granted and they don’t feel important doesn’t mean they are not important. Everything we do can be traced back to our beliefs. If we want to encourage a bad person to be good, we have to teach that person perhaps that people are not as bad as he or she thinks. Anti-social acts are often committed out of fear of others and to feel in control. Fearing other people always lead to disrespecting them at least in your thinking.
All our beliefs are important for they make us what we are. Religion says that religious beliefs are the most important beliefs of all. For the God believer, believing the doctor can help you is a sin. Believing that God uses the doctor to help you is a duty. It is to be all about God though believers may seem to act like secular people when they go to doctors.
From the perspective of the safe side, people who believe their religious beliefs entitle them to special treatment must be ignored. We can't pander to every form of religion. Religions disagree with one another. We have rights as people not as religionists. To expect special treatment because one accepts certain doctrines is just arrogant and silly. To expect people to say nothing critical about religion as if religion were something special is just paying homage to religious fundamentalism and implicitly endorsing it.
Dangerous beliefs can lead to death. For example, a Muslim terrorist or a Christian fundamentalist can believe that evil must be destroyed and this can lead to her or him planning to destroy a whole area thought to be populate with infidels and profligates with a small bomb.
Religion is said to motivate people to do good.
Religious leaders and religious people strongly frown upon any criticism of their dogmas – beliefs they are committed to stand by. They make religion very important. But it is precisely because it is that important that it must be criticised or people must look to see if there is any faults in it.
Should we give tolerance to religious beliefs? We all agree that in minor things intolerance is to be tolerated. For example, we tolerate the mild rudeness of a cranky neighbour.
Religious believers themselves would not tolerate who says that God lives in the river and we should drink the water to be saved. Indeed they would turn against that person. To them that person would be a fool and a lunatic. They look for a tolerance for their beliefs that they won’t extend to others. Yet it is clear that some beliefs are so foolish that those who profess and/or promote them should be treated as fools. Consider the Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine physically become the body and blood of Jesus Christ despite no physical change being detectable. Religious belief should be shameful.
Commanding is bad. God should not say, "You shall not murder." He should say, "Murder is wrong". Commanding suggests that you must suffer if you don't obey. It is an implied threat. Islam and Christianity are intrinsically vicious for they are concerned with what God commands and make commands of their own. Commanding implies that you must do good because you want to be obedient and not because the good is good. Priests and mullahs find the commanding side of their religion and their God very very attractive and it makes them feel powerful. God is massaging their egos.
Religion can command dangerous things. So can any teacher of ethics. There is a lot of disagreement about right and wrong. So it is simply stupid to say that religion necessarily has to be good or should be good. Liberal and moderate believers in religion are assisting the so-called “extremists” in their religions. How? They defend violent religious texts. The Catholic Bible has God commanding that parents be permitted to stone their wayward children to death. A theologian will come up with some excuse to avoid the implications of such a teaching but it is only his opinion. He still says the text is the word of God and people must believe it meaning that those who take a different view are being encouraged to obey it to the letter if they wish. The liberals and moderates create a need and a taste for the religion in people. These people can discover that the scriptures advocate violence and upon realising that they may feel they have to be violent too to be consistent with their faith.
The liberals are really saying, “We don’t advocate violence. Our scriptures appear to advocate violence but there must be explanations and these scriptures should be honoured as God’s word”. They are encouraging and helping to implement the conditioning of people to get them to feel and want to believe in these scriptures. This amounts to advocating the violence in those scriptures. Some say that Jesus did away with the laws of God in the Old Testament that ordered the people to kill homosexuals, apostates and adulterers in the name of God. God threatened Israel with destruction if it did not obey his law. If Jesus did abrogate the laws, the believers today are still admiring what God did and how obedient the people were in carrying out his laws. They are saying that God commanding killing is not intrinsically wrong and if God wanted us to do it we should do it. Belief in God who has the right to take life automatically implies that God as the right to order his Church to kill for him. Its a bad belief and some humanity is lost if we assent to belief in God. That is why there is no such thing as harmless religion or faith in God.
It is commonly thought that as a society we need religion, we need politics and we need science. Religion is form of politics dealing with other levels of existence. If we have politics on earth we don't need the politics of Heaven! Politics can go wrong and has led to so many wars and injustices and so much corruption. Science has given us the knowledge of how to make Hell on earth and destroy ourselves forever. Religion, politics and science can go bad. So many argue then that just because religion can go bad does not mean that we should discard it.
We may need faith but not religion. Despite the threats the Roman Catholic Church for example against those Catholics who decide to cherry pick from its teaching that they will be punished for this sin and are heretics in the eyes of God, most Catholics simply pick what they like out of what the Church teaches. It is the same even with most Muslims. Most members of religion are not true members. They want to act like members and do what they want. So the evidence is against the view that people need religion. If they needed it they would believe in it properly and obey it better. What they want is to fit in and to have beliefs that suit them. If they need anything it is faith not religion.
Liberals have many doctrines that fuel the extremists.
Religion undermines what is best for people by judging actions wrong because a God forbids them and not because of the suffering the actions cause. They believe in a God who uses suffering and lets it happen.
Religious believers put their views beyond falsification. Nothing however evil disproves the love of God. The contradiction between Jesus dying and being with his disciples afterward is solved by the explanation that he miraculously rose from the dead. A person who gets into this non-falsification habit will end up perhaps thinking that God can want him to kill unbelievers. If you have one irrational belief then why can't you have another?
Fundamentalism refuses to listen to critics and seeks to demonise them and is irrational and often violent. Religion tends to be fundamentalist.
Even sweet religious ideas such as that we must love the sinner and not love the sin are fundamentalist. They seek to blind people to the fact that the difference between a sinner and a sin is linguistic only. We are never against any sin. We are against the bad character of the person. The sin is only a communication of what is inside the sinner - of what kind of person the sinner is.
Can an atheist be a fundamentalist? There has to be such a thing as a non-fundamentalist. Belief in God urges that God be treated as important. Belief in naturalism (the denial that there is any God or supernatural power) says people are important and gods are not. Which one is not fundamentalist? Which one is not putting belief before people?
Atheist fundamentalists are thought to be those atheists who want to debunk religion and leave old people without the comfort of God and faith. They are thought to be those atheists who force secular ways on believers. They are thought to be those atheists who have a bad opinion of religion.
Many people die happily without belief in God or an afterlife. The belief in these causes addictive behaviour in some people who suffer without them. Many old people would be glad to be rid of their belief. It is better to believe death is the end than to fear that death may be the door to everlasting torment in Hell.
An irrational or stupid faith is a dangerous thing for a person to depend on. It seems uncharitable to take their faith away from them. But would it not be worse if the whole house of straw came falling down with the death of a loved one or some other disaster? What if we had a better alternative for them to believe in?
If it is right to force a bully to stop it is right. If it is right to fix a dangerous bridge then to fix it is right. If the state should be secular, then religion should not be complaining. It should not be moaning that it has secular ideas forced on its members. What can it expect? What else can we do?
And if religion deserves to be thought badly of it should not be objecting when naturalists say it is harmful.
Religion should not try to influence politics. For example, if Catholics have to legislate for or against abortion, they must think of the pros and cons without letting themselves be influenced by their religious feelings about abortion or by the teaching of the Church. It is hard enough to legislate fairly, without religion coming along to make things even more complicated. And if the Catholic religion really trusts it's God, then why does it try to influence and control the law and stop divorce and abortion? If somebody wants to sin by wishing they could have an abortion, the law banning abortion or allowing it is going to make no difference. And surely God can fight abortion and divorce by grace and not by law?
Conclusion: Religion is dangerous.
APPENDIX
Who would want to believe in Catholicism?
They deny that feeling that everything will always be okay eventually is better and more important than believing in God but assert the opposite. Belief in God is intrinsically fundamentalist. It is based on a hard attitude - it will evolve into religious violence and intolerance.
They claim that faith is knowledge - it is not just an opinion. They say that faith coupled with doubt is just an opinion not faith. Roman Catholicism teaches that faith is supernatural - God opens your mind to see that the Church teaches only the truth. So it is more than faith. It is a miracle. It is knowledge. Many conservative Evangelicals don't go that far and despite calling themselves fundamentalists say they would change their beliefs if they were proved wrong. Roman Catholicism is a dangerous form of Christian fundamentalism. It is more extreme than the evangelicals.
They claim that putting yourself at risk of doubting the faith and doubting the faith is sinful. In other words, if the Church is wrong you are not allowed to let yourself see it.
They claim that faith is a supernatural gift from God - meaning God gives you light to see that what the Church claims is true. This insults other religions which believe God tells them things that contradict Catholic doctrine. Its sectarian.
They claim that the Eucharist is physically changed into Jesus though no physical change can be detected.
They claim that babies are born without God and need baptism to put God into them - God has to forgive the baby in baptism for non-existent sin but we are expected to accuse them of sin nonetheless.
They claim that baptised babies are better than unbaptised babies. That is worse than racism.
They claim that forced conversion has no value and they engage in forced conversion of children baptised into their faith. This is the prime example of forced conversion. An adult who is forced to convert is an adult and so they must at some point have let themselves be forced. A child is different.
They claim the right to believe that some people are so bad that they divorce themselves from God forever and prefer everlasting sorrow! It doesn't bother them that you need serious evidence to accuse people of being able to be so bad.
They claim that birth control is wrong because it is unnatural and would oppose it even if it was 100% effective and protected everybody against AIDS.
They claim the right to revere the Bible as God's infallible word despite God explicitly commanding violence against adulteresses and genocide and inciting attacks against nations that were not harming Israel at all.
They claim that a separated husband and wife who hate each other are still married. If any law calls them married that law is lying about them.
They say loving a person does not mean loving all that they do and it says we must love. We are very changeable. We can hate a person and love them the next. Loving the sinner is loving the sin for the sinner in a sense is the sin. The sin is not real apart from the sinner.
The Church claims that the ideal state is the state that makes its laws based on Catholic doctrine. In other words, Catholics should strive to vote in such a way that the power of the Catholic faith is promoted. And when it is in power, it has to be kept in power.
They claim that secularism is sinful for saying that the state should be neutral in religious matters for whatever is not for God is against him. God says we must him above our neighbour. Jesus said we must love God with all our hearts and powers. He denied we should love any person that much and said we should love them as ourselves instead. Religion would say that God gives the true religion the right to expect obedience to it from the state.
They claim to be honest in their faith. How can they be? They start with what they want to prove or have evidence for. They assume that it is true and they bend the evidence to fit it. They start with what they want the answer to be and then they dredge through new information as it becomes available to try and find validation or seeming validation in it. This is not the open-minded unbiased attitude we would expect. It is anti-scientific and anti-truth. And the Catholic religion makes very serious claims - claims for which a lot of evidence would be required to justify believing in them. For example, Hell, original sin and the resurrection of Jesus. Even if you have the truth and use the approach religion uses, you adhere to the truth not because it is the truth or because you care but because what you adhere to could be anything as long as you feel like it.
They claim that you need religion and that we are obligated to worship God in the true religion, Catholicism. We do not need religion though we do need some kind of a faith. We need to find reasons to think that life is not so bad and won't be so bad and that we will overcome challenges. Religion is a system that claims the right to put limits on what you may believe. It cares more for the system than for you needs. Some people are happier casting spells than praying. A religion cannot satisfy all the needs of its members. Religion is intrinsically arrogant and controlling and limiting. This is true of religions that claim to be striving for the truth. And the extreme form of bigotry is when a religion claims to be right and everybody else is wrong.