"Good" religion?
The idea that all religion is harmful, vs. the idea that harm is a bug rather than a feature of religion, is something I have been struggling with for some time now. There are branches even in American Christianity that genuinely are about loving your neighbor rather than acting as a cloak for bigotry, and that were instrumental in calling out and changing the bigoted beliefs I held when I was younger. (Beliefs that were implanted into me by religion in the first place, mind you. Nevertheless, beliefs that I began to question and ultimately reject because of religion). But... as far as I can see, even the "good" types of religion have, by the very nature of BEING religion, at least four built-in, unavoidably harmful elements. 1. Credulity. Religion asks people to take things on faith - to believe things without evidence or even despite the evidence. And that is, in itself, harmful. Believing things without evidence is exactly how we get bigotry - it's how people end up b...