I think it stifles critical thinking and denounces science. It's not just religion though. I hate when I hear adults answer little kids questions with, "That's not important." or "You don't need to know that." They have know idea what discouraging children's curiosity will do to them in the future.

It's sad and aggravating at the same time.

Stifling curiosity or any kind of critical thinking. I was regularly told by my church to stop asking questions and to just have faith.

I've always believed it has something to do with the delusion of having an omnipotent being in your corner. Why worry about anything? Just pray the cancer away.

I wouldn't say stupid or mentally defective.

I might say "not in touch completely with reality".

A belief in something through faith alone is right up there with the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. It's a cognitive disconnect.

Sometimes it's the only cognitive disconnect - but it does tend to make people more malleable and prone to put up with crap without taking a stand. (Maybe a character defect?).

Religion teaches defective reasoning. Religion gives answers in the absence of, or contrary to, evidence, and demands that we believe, based on that toxic mixture of insanity and ignorance called faith. In this way, people are inured to mental laziness and choose to remain willfully ignorant in a community where it is dangerous to question, and sinful to doubt.

It seems to me that stupidity, on the other hand, may have more to do with heredity than to a given belief system or mode of thinking. To quote the comedian Ron White, "You can't fix stupid." If one is born with a given intellectual capacity, he/she doesn’t grow up to ‘become stupid or mentally defective’ just by being raised in a church—at least that’s my personal experience.

It made my mother very passive at times she should not have been. Her answer for everything is to pray about it instead of taking action. She stood by and watched her husband be sadistic and abusive to her children, and assumed "he must have a good reason". She stood by and watched her father, and then her second husband, sexually abuse children and prayed that God would forgive them. She watched her daughter be very abusive toward her grandson and again, did nothing but pray about it and cry. She is such an enabler she could probably watch anybody do anything to someone helpless and spend a great deal of time weeping and whining about how bad it makes HER feel, but literally do nothing to stop it. Not sure if this is stupid, mentally defective, or a combination of the two, but I definitely feel its a personality flaw that I don't want to emulate.

By learning to obey & not think critically for themselves as an autonomous human.