Many people respond to religion that way, but not all people.

@skado I'm not talking about the response by the believer, I'm talking about the very nature of religious beliefs (encapsulated best by the phrase "God did it" ).

@JeffMurray
When I go looking for “the very nature of religious beliefs” I am (so far) unable to find a scholarly consensus. Do you have a source for this information that you could share?

@skado You really don't agree that the vast majority of religions, past and present, are fundamentally based on a God doing or creating things that would otherwise be explained by science?

@JeffMurray
I tend to see ‘religion’ from the perspective of the believers. If we could wave a magic wand and make all written doctrine go away, people would still carry beliefs. But if people stopped carrying beliefs the written doctrine would instantly become irrelevant. So when I hear “religion” my mind goes to where religion actually resides; in the minds of believers, not a collection of pages with ink on them.

It’s true I think that a majority of believers take their scriptures literally, but it has never been true that all do. For as long as there have been religions and scholars, there have been scholars who see religious scripture as allegory describing observable truth about human psychology, rather than an erroneous account of historical fact. And a careful reading of the scriptures with this in mind reveals ample evidence that it was the original intent of the writers for the material to be taken metaphorically rather than literally. This metaphorical interpretation is not contradicted by any science, but in fact is fully harmonious with all relevant modern science.

@skado Your explanation of where you believe religion lives in no way changes what I said. People still believe god does things that are, or will eventually be explained by science, and that, necessarily, inhibits inquiry. I don't understand your objection to that.
Additionally, in your first reply to me you spoke of how people respond to religion as if they were separate from it and influenced by it, but now you're saying it's essentially innate and distinct from the written word. But whatever explanation you want to go with, the fact of the matter is that believing something without evidence, especially things people are willing to kill and die for, is a horribly dangerous thing.

As for the scholars, these aren't really the people we're talking about. I can be a professor of African American studies without being black or a professor of political science without being a politician. Saying a few people can discern a more rational interpretation of bronze age nonsense, even if they identify as a member of the religion, in no way changes the fact that the vast, vast majority of the billions actual believers in the religion cannot.

@JeffMurray
Everything you say is true about superstition, but even though religions are saturated with superstition, the two aren’t synonymous. Humans carry superstitious attitudes into whatever they do. Science has the best program for keeping it to a minimum, but it attacks all human endeavors - not just religion.

But Religion isn’t only about belief; it’s best understood as a practice. In what other discipline do we let the undereducated majority set the standards? If you want to say most, I can’t argue. But when you say all I have to object.

Everything we don’t understand naturally looks like nonsense. Dan Dennett says before we destroy it we should come to understand if first. I agree.

@skado I didn't say religion is superstition, I said religion requires belief without evidence or proof, which necessarily inhibits inquiry and results in its followers believing and/or doing dangerous things. I still believe that is "the wrong thing about religion" (per the OP request) and I don't really understand your objection to or counter evidence of that claim.

I also never said religion is only about belief. All belief (not just about religion) invariably informs practice. You seem to keep putting words in my mouth just to argue against them instead of my original claim. Let's avoid straw men going forward.

You and I can disagree on your last point here. It seems to claim that we don't understand religion. I have no idea what you could be basing that on. It has been studied, debated, and tested for thousands of years. If you can't say something that not only has no supporting evidence, but actually a tremendous amount of counter-evidence is nonsense, nothing could ever meet your burden of proof for such a label. Essentially your collective argument is:
-We've tried to understand it for thousands of years, but we still don't.
-Because we don't understand it, we shouldn't label it as nonsense/reject it.

By that rationale, the more nonsensical a proposition is the less likely we are to be able to understand it, and thus, further away from labeling it nonsense and rejecting it. Does that really make sense to you?

@JeffMurray
The aspects of religion you reject I reject equally. But you seem to think those aspects are all there is to religion, and that just isn’t accurate. You’re describing religion as nothing more than a belief in something that there’s no evidence for, and that’s just not an adequate, comprehensive definition.

I think religion is Homo sapiens attempt to find relief from the discomfort of evolutionary mismatch - being a hunter-gatherer creature in an agricultural environment.

I think what inhibits inquiry is that it’s human nature to think we already know all we need to know about a given subject, and we carry that attitude everywhere we go, not just into religion, but into personal relationships, business, government, and into war. We’d carry it into science as well, if science hadn’t been specifically designed to prevent it. And why did science need to be designed that way if we carried such attitudes only into religion?

Thinking we know what we don’t is our nature. Religion has no franchise on that error. Religion’s problem is two-fold; it doesn’t have the self-correcting mechanism that science does, and it believes it’s a bad idea to tinker with the sacred.

But the need for a counterbalance to mismatch is very real, and will always be with us. And that is the core of what religion attempts to correct. Build a suitable secular counterbalance and religion will die a natural death. Forcibly remove religion without providing a replacement and you create a vacuum which will draw every miserable kind of chaos into society.

I agree that belief without evidence, or counter to evidence, inhibits inquiry. You believe that’s all there is to religion, but the evidence says otherwise.

My favorite contemporary quote by an atheist.

I love to watch her! Too bad she left the Atheist Experience. Hope she comes back.

I agree.

Freedom?

@JeffMurray You betcha.

@wordywalt I'm not going to start a whole big thing in this thread about choice as it relates to belief, but if you think about it (and maybe read about it) you'll realize you have no power over it. As a quick, rhetorical thought experiment ask yourself if you can choose to believe in God, Santa Claus, or that the sky is purple with pink polka dots.

@JeffMurray I think you are misinterpreting what I am saying. I am saying that people who choose to believe in either religion or a total system political ideology are choosing to escape from the potential freedom that they have. Evidently you have never read Erich Fromm's classic book on the ps7ychology of religion, ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM.

@wordywalt You just said "choose to believe". So again I'd ask: can you choose to believe in God, Santa Claus, or that the sky is purple with pink polka dots? If you can agree that you can't choose to believe all those things, then you you at least agree, at minimum, that not all beliefs can be chosen. From there, it requires a thought experiment of indeterminate length to get you to realize that you can't choose any beliefs. (It mostly centers on one's justification for how one belief can be chosen while another cannot, ultimately getting you to realize that none of the conditions that inform your "choice" are actually under your power, and thus, are not actually a choice at all.)

Personally,the worst thing about religion is that it minimises you and tells you that you’re nothing without God.I was told i was broken,flawed and sinful and its was ultimately abusive.The bible is poorly written,man made and fiction which also describes a jealous,petty and morally bankrupt God.

The only thing i could think off is that religion can sometimes be helpful explaining life and death to people of lower intelligence.

@averykings It can also provide a community for the lonely and does some charity work, but there are other ways of doing all those three, and secular charities especially are usually vastly better at their jobs.

@Fernapple you’re right

@averykings That's flawed reasoning. You're saying something is easier to explain if you lie, but then you're not really explaining are you...