Conrad Mills

   There is nothing wrong with holding a religion.  First off, it says that at some point in time you will be judged which keeps people from going off the wall and doing things that they would not normally do.  This can be evidenced in Athens, when the city was under siege and people were dying at an insane rate; civilization broke down because their religion did not judge them.  They were not afraid of what might lie after death and did things that they would learn to regret a few weeks later when the army outside their gates left.

    Second, people who believe in God are less likely to believe in magic, the Loch Ness Monster, conspiracy theories and North Dakota.  This has been shown by numerous studies in recent years - why?  Those who believe in nothing will believe in anything.  So it is only logical to prevent your own stupidity and embarrassment by accepting something supernatural that provides a moral backbone as a bonus.

   Third, the things prohibited by religion as a whole are generally self-destructive and wind up causing more harm than good.  So by avoiding those things, life gets better. Religion details those things and how to avoid them.

   Fourth, there is advice on just about everything in most religious texts, how to get out of situations, how to apologize well, how to deal with emotional trouble, and even how to approach a question of logic or science.  After all, science found its start in the big three (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam).

   Finally, if there was no greater purpose to life than what atheism suggests—why bother living?  All our purpose and place in the universe would be the continuation of the species by reproduction; there would be no home for emotional attachment.  Males would wander about having kids everywhere, females would exist only to have kids, and science, math, literature and all those elegant and thoughtful things we do would be useless and obsolete.  Welcome to a world without God.

Irina Demeneva

   Religion is, most definitely, a corrupt and immoral illusion that blinds the human race, and should therefore one day be entirely abolished.

   No matter the name of a religion, whether it be Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or any other one, most include some concept of a deity.  According to scholar Albert Ellis and his professional colleagues, a psychotherapist tries to help his patients to be minimally anxious and hostile, and to this end, he tries to help them to acquire the following kind of personality traits:  self-interest, self-direction, tolerance, acceptance of uncertainty, flexibility, scientific thinking, risk-taking, and self-acceptance. These are the kinds of personality traits that are universally believed to the essential to a well-minded, properly functioning human being.  Some people say that religion helps human beings to achieve these healthy traits and to avoid becoming anxious, depressed, or hostile.  However, religion really doesn’t help at all.  In fact, in most cases it severely sabotages mental health.

   First things first.  Religion is not self-interest – it is god-interest.  The religious person must, by virtual definition, be very concerned with whether or not his deity loves him, and whether or not he is doing the right thing to continue to keep in this deity’s good graces.  Therefore, the person must, at very best, put himself second, and sacrifice some of his most cherished interest in order to appease this deity.  What is more, if this person is a member of any organized religion, then he must choose his deity’s wishes first, those of this church and it’s clergy second, and his own views and preferences third.   Masochistic self-sacrifice is an important part of almost all organized religions, and is shown through the various forms of ritualistic self-deprivation that Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, and other religionists must continually undergo if they are to keep in good with their assumed deities.  Masochism stems from an individual who is deliberately inflicting pain on himself in order to experience some kind of pleasure.  Both masochism and religiosity are, to a large degree, forms of mental illness.  In regard to self-direction, it can easily be seen that the religious person is very dependent on his religion.  Therefore, religion and self-sufficiency are contradictory terms. 

   The next trait is tolerance, and it is one that religion has no place for either.  Jehovah said, “I am the Lord thy God and thou shalt have no other gods before me.”  This means that whatever any given god and his clergy believe must be absolutely true, and whatever any other person or group believes must be absolutely false.  It has been shown that gods have no tolerance for those who sin, or go against what they supposedly preached.  It is a god-given, absolute law that one shall not, must not do a wrong act, and if one does, then one is a mean, miserable sinner – a worthless being who must now severely punish oneself for being a wrongdoer and a fallible human.  Thereby, whenever humans err – and they all do – religion dehumanizes and self-deprecates them, as well as teaches others to do the same to those who erred. 

   If one of the requisites for emotional health is acceptance of uncertainty, then religion is clearly the unhealthiest state imaginable.  Because people think that they cannot accept life’s many vicissitudes, they invent deities and thereby pretend that there is some final answer to things.  These people are fooling themselves, believing that there is a purpose to life; that a deity has laid out some grand plan for everyone. 

   The trait of flexibility is also blocked and sabotaged by religious belief.  A person who dogmatically believes in a god and who sustains this belief with a faith that has not been founded by fact – this person is clearly not open to change and is bigoted.  Any time anyone unempirically establishes a set of religious postulates which have a superhuman origin, he can use no empirical evidence to question the dictates of this god or those postulates, since they are beyond scientific validation.  When there is no contradiction – or even option of contradiction – there is no flexibility.  

   As far as scientific thinking goes, it needn’t be said that such a trait is quite antithetical to religiosity.  It has been pointed out by numerous philosophers that in some final analysis or principle, all theories must be confirmable by some form of human experience.  However, all religions are worthy of being able to state that their deities cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt, or otherwise humanly experienced, and that their gods and their principles are therefore distinctly beyond science.  To be religious even a little, therefore, is to be unscientific at least to some extent. 

   In regard to risk-taking, it’s obvious that the religious person is highly determined not to be adventurous or to take any of life’s normal risks.  He fears failure and falsely defines his own worth as a person in terms of achievement by sacrificing time, energy, and material goods and pleasures to the worship of the assumed deity, so that he can be sure that at least this god loves and supports him.  Religion is needless inhibition because the religious person sells his soul, surrenders his own basic urges and pleasures, all so that he may feel comfortable with the deity that he himself invented. 

   Finally, to counter the trait of self-acceptance, religion makes the acceptance of worshippers contingent on the acceptance of their definitional god, the church and clergy who also serve this god, and all other believers in their religion.  If all these people and things accept them, they are able to only then start to accept themselves.  This means, of course, that they define themselves only through the reflected appraisals of others and lose any real, existential self that they might otherwise keep creating. 

   To summarize what has just been said, it’s inescapable that religion is directly opposed to the goals of mental health, since it basically consists of masochism, other-directness, intolerance, refusal to accept uncertainty, unscientific thinking, needless inhibition, and self-abasement.  In worst-case scenarios, these mental issues can lead to seriously disturbed notions and irrational ideas.  The first idea is that it is a dire necessity for an adult to be loved or approved of by all the significant figures in his life.  This idea leans on the philosophy that if one cannot get certain people to love or approve of him, one can always fall back on god’s love.  The second idea is that one must be thoroughly competent, adequate, and achieving in all possible aspects.  Another idea is that certain people are bad, wicked, and villainous, and that therefore they should be severely blamed and punished for their sins.  Idea number four is the belief that it is horrible, terrible, and catastrophic when things are not going the way one would like them to go.  The final irrational idea is the idea that human unhappiness is externally caused and that people have little to no ability to control their sorrows or rid themselves of their negative feelings. 

   In conclusion, it would seem that there is a strong connection between mental illness and religion – almost to the point of neurosis, which is a childishness or dependency – since religion is little more than a synonym for dependency.  Therefore, it would seem that religion is neurosis.  It is a corrupt and immoral illusion that blinds and handicaps the human race, and should therefore one day be entirely abolished.

    To have religion or not to have religion: that is the question. As anyone who’s read my articles knows, I’m not usually one to sit on the fence on any issue. But this is something I’m truly torn on. I have strong feelings on the topic, but I can’t come to a clear-cut decision on which is right.

   On the one hand, religion is important. Even if you’re like me and don’t believe in all of the hubbub of a higher power or someone who created the world, it gives people structure and a moral code to follow. The perceived threat of damnation for all eternity is a far stronger force in our criminal system than any police officer could be. People have been using beliefs and stories for millennia to explain the unexplained. Religion allows people to move on from questioning the bad in the world and lets them focus on the here and now instead. It’s human nature to be curious, and religion satisfies our curiosity.

   On the other hand, religion has led to wars, battles, and more deaths than can be counted. From the Crusades, to the Salem Witch trials, to the Holocaust and homosexual hate crimes, the belief that your religion is better than someone else’s has led to violence and hatred that is as deep as faith. And I’m not trying to limit this to Christianity – 9/11 was a travesty whose motive was rooted in a difference of religion, and there are even Jewish terrorist organizations! Religion is good because it teaches people how to act, but what happens when people conveniently and temporarily forget that “thou shall not kill” and wage war on other religions? On a less global scale, marriages have fallen apart and friendships have been lost over a difference in beliefs. Is this really a good thing?

   Religion could be a great organizational tool, and in a perfect world where we could all coexist peacefully there would be no problem, but is it really worth it when people are corrupt and you have to believe the worst of others to survive?