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So, no, not all religions are violent and/or harmful.
I've been an devout atheist since about the age of 10. That doesn't stop me from seeing that:
a) some religions are relatively harmless and mostly helpful to their believers
b) some religions are very destructive to everyone
I don't think we should go much further from here.
The degree of bad depends on the religion and the believer.
Plus one must not forget that, for most believers, religion preceded adulthood, even maturity. Meaning it was never a choice, but imposed through indoctrination and immediate social pressure.
> Never helpful
It clearly is helpful to believers at times. For example, when a loved one dies, it can be extremely comforting to think you'll see them again soon in a paradisical heaven. Comfort when you're hurting is helpful.
Comforting? Sure.
Yet it can be positive if and only if there's no value in grief.
For someone about to die, I think any grief is probably negative. Any personal growth or development won't be utilized. I think of it kind of like morphine, if you're dying it's fine to keep it flowing even if you are getting seriously addicted to it
Religion has saved the lives of many who converted at swordpoint.
Admission to thinking about science as a belief betrays lacks of understanding of the scientific method, which is founded on rigorous doubt and verification.
What you’re describing is a people problem, not a religion problem.
You're confusing atheism for a religion.
Those murders were conducted by oppressive governments with a specific agenda, that didn't come from some atheist scripture.
> What you’re describing is a people problem, not a religion problem.
It's a problem of organized groups of people motivated by a collective ideology. This is manifested primarily by religions, since most religious texts have some passages that reject foreign groups, or outright invite acts of violence against them[1,2].
[1]: https://www.openbible.info/topics/killing_non_believers
[2]: https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/violence.aspx
Atheism is a religion. Atheists observably claim to have achieved gnosis. It’s agnosticism that is an absence of belief.
"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion."
> One thing for sure is that life is uncertain. We never really know what situations may yield us—good, bad, or otherwise. Whatever happens in our life, we’ll never be sure of the consequences it may bring in the future.
In real-life, losing a horse or breaking a leg is a bad outcome over 99% of the time, and gaining free horses and avoiding conscription (and defeating despots attempting to conquer the world) is a good outcome over 99% of the time.
The rest of us understand that though few things are 100% certain, many things are possible to predict with a high amount of certainty.
My practical ethic is something closer to deontology. And it includes things like “don’t mutilate your body.” It’s precisely because I can’t follow those higher order consequence chains that I settle for following general moral principles instead of attempting teleological justifications for my actions.
Your defeatist attitude leads to bad public policy, where the powerful take advantage of the weak because the weak are stupidly convinced that they cannot understand the consequences of limiting their own exploitation.
Why don't you chop off your arm? You don't know if that will turn out to be good. Stories like that of the Chinese farmer and Pippi Longstocking are for children, not for thinking adults to blindly believe. The point of the Chinese farmer for children is that even though bad things happen, things can get better, which helps them get over it. To make it go down easier, they show that even though good things happen, things can get worse.
Your attitude that you can understand a complex dynamical system such as the one that we live in is the truly childish one.
If you ask "why don't you" you're either asking in bad faith or don't fundamentally understand the fable.
I assert that if you don't understand the "why don't you" question, you don't fundamentally understand the fable. Why don't you tell me why it doesn't apply?
I'm in Sweden. Religion here has sort of faded into the background. Very few people are religious. We observe the religion here more or less as as a cultural thing. It's something we do at births, school exam celebrations and burials but not much else.
Bload soaked club? Yes, a few hundred years ago.