(this is an essay I'm writing for an arab atheist magazine called Shabakeh. any criticisms and/or suggestions for improvements are much appreciated.)
Is Religion Harmful?
Religions are harmful because they are inherently irrational, meaning that they discourage people from being open to changing their mind, to block avenues to finding the truth. Now I'm not saying that all religions do this equally, nor that only religions have this flaw.
To explain why religions are inherently irrational, I have to explain some background information about the relationship between people and ideas, what memes are, and their role in people's thoughts, emotions, and actions.
Like all memes, religions are ideas that spread from person to person. Now some memes spread because people find them useful, like the wheel, while other memes spread because they discourage their holders from critically questioning them. These memes effectively work for the memes gain instead of the person's gain.
These can be categorized as rational and anti-rational memes. Rational memes are ones that people find useful and which evolve over generations, improving iteratively. Notice how we use much evolved wheels today compared to the stone ones our ancestors used.
In contrast, anti-rational memes do not spread by being useful to the people that have them, and instead they spread by putting pressure on the holders of these memes to refrain from questioning them. And when a person acts on these memes, in lots of cases this puts pressure on other people to adopt these memes, thus helping the memes to spread further. Take for example the case of Muslims threatening to kill those who leave Islam. This puts pressure on people to hide their disbelief of Islam and to continue sending their kids to the Mosque, helping the meme to survive into the next generation.
So, how do anti-rational memes work? One way to explain this is that these memes hijack the person's creativity for their own ends. The memes effectively work to keep themselves from being criticized. Criticism of the meme puts pressure on the person to stop thinking, and to react emotionally. This works towards encouraging the person to refrain from rejecting the meme and encourages the person to spread it further.
Now some people think that this talk of anti-rational memes is dehumanizing, but that's a mistake. I'll clarify this by explaining again in a different way.
Memes are not like viruses that invade people. A person is basically a bunch of ideas, many of which are memes that he got from other people. Many of these memes are learned, held, and spread unconsciously. And many of them exist non-explicitly, meaning that the person that has the meme doesn't know how to explain it in words and instead he knows it as a vague feeling. And most people today don't recognize their vague feelings as ideas that they learned from other people. Instead, they buy into socially accepted ideas that those feelings are genetically determined or inherent to human nature.
Consider the example of the feeling of shame. Shame is not inborn. It's learned from other people. And it's a mistake. When someone feels shame, that does not encourage him to learn why he is wrong about what he did, which is what he needs in order to change his mind. Instead, feeling shame encourages him to stop thinking and to avoid doing the behavior out of fear of social punishment. So the person effectively punishes himself so that he prevents himself from doing the behavior, instead of finding out the truth about whether the behavior is right or wrong.
So to review, here are three equivalent expressions:
1. An anti-rational meme hijacked the persons creativity for its own goals, I'll call them goals A B and C.
Consider the shame example. When a parent tries to make his child feel shame to try to control him, and if it's not effective, the parent will use his creativity to come up with new ways to try to make his child feel bad. So this is a case of the meme hijacking the parents creativity for its own gain. The shame meme doesn't have its own creativity, so it needs the persons creativity to try to survive and spread.
This next version is clear that this a moral issue, that there is a choice being made.
2. A person chose to act on one of his ideas, to the exclusion of it's rivals, and that idea's goals are A B and C.
This makes it clear that it's an idea in the persons mind. This is important because people have the ability to reject ideas. They can change their minds.
So this implies that in a court of law, your actions are attributed to you, regardless of what anti-rational memes you have. Those memes are you. You are your memes.
Here's another version that clarifies who is responsible.
3. One part of you X has hijacked another part of you Y to fulfill X's goals A B and C.
As I said before, religions are not equal. Some religions are worse than others in how much they pressure people to refrain from criticizing the religion. For example, Muslims put pressure on people to kill those who openly leave Islam, and this isn't an issue in any other religion.
But that doesn't change the fact that all religions have a component in them that certain parts of it are supposed to be accepted uncritically. For example, in Christianity you're supposed to have faith in the Christian God. This means you are expected to ignore criticisms and rival ideas of the existence of God, in other words, to arbitrarily accept one idea over all of its rivals.
Now that's not to say that all non-religious ideas don't have this quality of having parts that people are pressured to accept uncritically. Lots of ideas do. So this bad feature of religions is not exclusive to just religions.
For more on meme theory, see chapter 15 of _The Beginning of Infinity_, by David Deutsch. (This book is currently being translating to Arabic.)
To learn more about rationality and atheism, and to contribute your own ideas, join my group Rational Atheism.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/popperianatheism/
Topic: Is religion harmful?