I guess what's tough is that it's hard to trace back the cause from some of the effects. You go back far enough and religion really means "cultural group" - so often the bad things are happening because they are expedient and humans envision an ingroup/outgroup relationship - for example, the various ways that Jews have been persecuted I think has less to do with actual Christian beliefs (though those were obviously the pretext) and more to do with the fact that people wanted to seize the Jews' property.
Of course, that's not true in every case. Sometimes there are genuine harms that result directly from belief systems - peep the Quiverfull movement or the FLDS today and some of the abuses that occur within those contexts.
But even then it is more complex. Yes, beliefs have something to do with people becoming Quiverfull, but so do wider societal ills like sexism and racism etc. And I don't think those are purely the fault of religion - or, at least, removing religion isn't a silver bullet that removes them, and getting religion isn't an infecting thing that infects you with them, at this point!
So to me, it would make more sense to talk about the ills of in-group/out-group thinking than to single out religion. But of course, that's from the perspective of a religious person - so I am not surprised that we would differ on this! ;)
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I guess what's tough is that it's hard to trace back the cause from some of the effects. You go back far enough and religion really means "cultural group" - so often the bad things are happening because they are expedient and humans envision an ingroup/outgroup relationship - for example, the various ways that Jews have been persecuted I think has less to do with actual Christian beliefs (though those were obviously the pretext) and more to do with the fact that people wanted to seize the Jews' property.
Of course, that's not true in every case. Sometimes there are genuine harms that result directly from belief systems - peep the Quiverfull movement or the FLDS today and some of the abuses that occur within those contexts.
But even then it is more complex. Yes, beliefs have something to do with people becoming Quiverfull, but so do wider societal ills like sexism and racism etc. And I don't think those are purely the fault of religion - or, at least, removing religion isn't a silver bullet that removes them, and getting religion isn't an infecting thing that infects you with them, at this point!
So to me, it would make more sense to talk about the ills of in-group/out-group thinking than to single out religion. But of course, that's from the perspective of a religious person - so I am not surprised that we would differ on this! ;)