Theory : Religion by itself is fairly benign.

It is only when religious doctrine is combined with political power that great damage is done by AND to religion.

It is often forgotten that the separation of church and state was strongly urged by churches to protect those churches from the power of the state and the power that other religions could wield if they combined with the states.

That having been said... :popcorn:

Like all tools, it can be used to make something useful, make something terrible, even to destroy.

all of your problems start to look like nails.

The problem with the fundies is that their 'faith,' their religion, is their only way to look at and comprehend the universe. Therefore, all of their 'answers,' their solutions to the world's problems, have to be reconciled with a 2000 year old mythology that had no concept of the questions that would be presented to the modern conscience. The final answer to them is to plunge the world back into the dark ages, when the only authority was vested in religious leaders and/or some kind of royalty that was ordained by god, whoever that is.

It's people who are fucked up.
Now if we could have religion without all those people believing it, we might be better off. :evilgrin:

came up with the idea for a pope surrounded by a gerontocracy of cardinals to interpret the faith for the faithful, keep them from going too far astray from it. Alas, the gerontocracy itself started to be the real problem and saddled the poor pope with the burden of infallibility and now the Church is just as weird as the hangups of its hierarchy are.

The decentralization of the Reformation Protestants was an attempt to solve THAT problem, but that ended up producing the Calvinist wingnuts we have today giving all Christians a bad name (or trying to).

The fundies point to the book as the source of all wisdom, but that book was written by different men at different times and carries enough contradiction, exaggeration, and parable to be vulnerable to all sorts of misinterpretation, and they're back to the original problem that caused the early Roman church to pick a pope to decide all that stuff.

It would be hard not to think all religious roads lead to the same sort of screwy hell on earth that so many people find due to religion were it not for the fact that so many good people very sensibly stick to the precepts regarding altruism, sobriety, constancy, and so on, making religion a major part of a stable society.

logical, objective thinking, replacing it with dogma, the outcomes can be extremely dangerous. However, if banned of political activities, their threats can be largely contained, which is what you have already said.

That's not to say that all religion functions in that fashion, but the second that dogmatic claims replace objectivity and reason, then it becomes a threat to humanity.

From Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists:


Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State.