Common Sense Philosophy/Chapter 12

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Chapter 12: Religion as Obstacle -- When Faith Becomes Harm

A Necessary Distinction

This chapter will anger believers. That is not its purpose, but it is probably its effect, and I will not pretend otherwise. The argument that follows is directed not at the experience of faith -- the sense of transcendence, the comfort of community, the hunger for meaning -- but at what organized religion does when it acquires institutional power. The distinction is essential and must be established at the outset.

Personal spirituality -- the individual's encounter with the numinous, the sense that reality has dimensions beyond the immediately visible, the quiet practice of meditation, prayer, or contemplation -- is a feature of human experience that appears in every culture and every era. It may be, as the cognitive science of religion suggests, a byproduct of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for other purposes: our tendency to detect agency, to seek patterns, to construct narratives that give meaning to suffering. Or it may be, as the religious believer insists, a response to something genuinely transcendent. This chapter takes no position on that question, because it is not relevant to the argument.

What is relevant is the question of institutional power. Throughout history, human beings have organized their spiritual impulses into institutions: churches, mosques, temples, monasteries, theological schools, ecclesiastical hierarchies, religious states. These institutions have done an enormous amount of good. They have built hospitals, fed the hungry, sheltered the homeless, educated the illiterate, created magnificent art, preserved ancient learning, and provided millions of people with a sense of community, purpose, and consolation in the face of suffering. To deny this would be dishonest, and this chapter does not deny it.

But these same institutions have also done an enormous amount of harm. They have launched wars of conquest and extermination. They have tortured and killed heretics, apostates, and unbelievers. They have systematically suppressed scientific inquiry. They have subordinated women to men, persecuted sexual minorities, controlled reproductive choices, enforced caste hierarchies, justified slavery, and demanded intellectual submission on pain of social ostracism, imprisonment, or death. They have claimed authority not from evidence or argument but from revelation -- and revelation, by its nature, is not subject to question, revision, or falsification.

The question this chapter asks is not "Does God exist?" It is not even "Is religion true?" It is the question that a rational compass requires: "When organized religion exercises institutional power, does it advance or retard human flourishing?" And the honest answer, drawn from the historical record, is: both, but the harm has been catastrophic.

The Ledger of Harm

Let us examine the record.

The Crusades. Between 1096 and 1291, European Christendom launched a series of military campaigns to recapture the Holy Land from Muslim control. The First Crusade alone resulted in the massacre of virtually the entire population of Jerusalem in 1099 -- Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians alike -- in an orgy of violence that participants described, without irony, as God's will. Raymond of Aguilers, a chronicler of the First Crusade, wrote of the Temple Mount: "Men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins." The subsequent Crusades killed hundreds of thousands more, devastated the Eastern Mediterranean, and established a pattern of religious warfare between Christianity and Islam that echoes to this day.

The Inquisition. The Roman Inquisition, established in 1231, and its various national successors -- most notoriously the Spanish Inquisition, established in 1478 -- systematically persecuted heretics, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, and anyone else whose beliefs or practices deviated from Catholic orthodoxy. The methods included torture, forced confession, public humiliation, imprisonment, confiscation of property, and burning at the stake. The Spanish Inquisition alone is estimated to have conducted approximately 150,000 trials and executed between 3,000 and 5,000 people. The broader social effects -- the atmosphere of fear, the suppression of intellectual freedom, the destruction of Spain's Jewish and Muslim communities -- are incalculable.

Jihad and religious warfare in Islam. The early expansion of Islam through military conquest, from the seventh century onward, brought vast territories under Muslim rule through warfare that was explicitly motivated and justified by religious ideology. The concept of jihad -- understood in its military sense -- provided religious sanction for conquest, and the subsequent treatment of conquered populations, while often more tolerant than Christian practice, nonetheless involved systematic subordination of non-Muslims to Muslim authority. In the modern era, jihadist movements from al-Qaeda to ISIS have carried out mass murder, enslavement, and the destruction of cultural heritage in the name of religious purity. The argument that these movements "distort" Islam is heard frequently and is not without basis, but it requires the uncomfortable admission that the distortion draws on texts and traditions that are genuinely part of the Islamic heritage.

The caste system. Hinduism's caste system, rooted in the concept of varna articulated in the Rig Veda and elaborated over millennia, created one of the most enduring and systematic forms of human oppression in history. The Dalits -- "untouchables" -- were consigned by birth to the lowest social position, forbidden from education, denied access to temples and public facilities, subjected to ritual pollution rules that regulated every aspect of their lives, and punished with extreme violence for any attempt to transcend their assigned status. An estimated 200 million people in India today continue to face caste-based discrimination, despite legal prohibition. The caste system is not incidental to Hinduism; it is rooted in Hindu scripture and upheld by Hindu religious authority. Its partial dismantling in modern India has been achieved not by religious reform but by secular constitutional law, political mobilization, and the brave defiance of individuals like B. R. Ambedkar, himself a Dalit, who explicitly rejected Hinduism precisely because of its association with caste.

The suppression of science. The conflict between organized religion and scientific inquiry is not a myth invented by secularists. It is a historical pattern documented across multiple religious traditions. The Catholic Church's persecution of Galileo for his defense of heliocentrism is the most famous example, but it is far from the only one. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for, among other things, proposing the existence of multiple worlds. The Church's opposition to evolutionary theory, beginning with the hostile reception of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 and continuing in some circles to this day, represents a sustained attempt to subordinate empirical evidence to scriptural authority. In the Islamic world, the closure of the "gate of ijtihad" (independent reasoning) in the medieval period and the subsequent decline of the scientific tradition that had flourished in the Islamic Golden Age represent a parallel pattern of religious authority suppressing intellectual freedom.

The persecution of sexual minorities. The Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- have, throughout most of their history, condemned homosexuality as sinful, criminal, or both. This condemnation, rooted in a handful of scriptural passages, has been used to justify the imprisonment, torture, and execution of homosexuals across centuries and continents. Today, same-sex relations are criminalized in approximately 70 countries, virtually all of them with strong religious traditions that provide the ideological justification for these laws. In several countries -- including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and parts of Nigeria and Somalia -- homosexuality is punishable by death, and the death penalty is explicitly justified by religious authority.

The subordination of women. Every major world religion has, for most of its history, taught that women are subordinate to men. The specific mechanisms vary -- from the Pauline injunction that women should "keep silent in the churches" to the Islamic doctrine of qiwamah (male guardianship) to the Hindu Laws of Manu that declare women perpetual dependents of fathers, husbands, and sons. The practical consequences include the denial of education, the restriction of movement, the control of reproduction, the exclusion from religious leadership, and the systematic undervaluation of women's intellectual and spiritual capacities. The progress that has been made toward gender equality in the modern era has been achieved almost entirely against the resistance of religious institutions, not with their support.

The control of reproduction. The Catholic Church's prohibition of contraception, articulated in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae and maintained to this day, has contributed to unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions, overpopulation, and the spread of HIV/AIDS -- particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where the Church's influence is strong and access to secular healthcare is limited. The Church's opposition to condom use during the AIDS epidemic, when condoms were the most effective available tool for preventing a disease that has killed approximately 40 million people, represents one of the most lethal examples of religious authority overriding empirical evidence.

The Mechanism: How Unfalsifiable Beliefs Become Instruments of Control

The specific harms catalogued above, while important, are less important than the mechanism that produces them. That mechanism is the combination of unfalsifiable belief with institutional power.

A belief is unfalsifiable when there is no possible evidence that could demonstrate its falsehood. The claim "God exists and has revealed his will in this text" is unfalsifiable because any evidence against it can be dismissed as a test of faith, a mystery beyond human understanding, or a product of sinful human reason. The claim "the Pope is infallible when speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals" is unfalsifiable because the criteria for determining when the Pope is speaking ex cathedra are themselves controlled by the institution that claims infallibility. The claim "the Quran is the literal word of God" is unfalsifiable because any criticism of the text can be dismissed as a failure of the critic's understanding rather than a flaw in the text.

Unfalsifiable beliefs are not, in themselves, necessarily harmful. The belief that the universe has meaning, that consciousness is more than an epiphenomenon of brain activity, that love and beauty point to something beyond the material -- these are unfalsifiable beliefs that may enrich human experience without damaging anyone. The problem arises when unfalsifiable beliefs are institutionalized -- when they become the basis for laws, social norms, educational curricula, and the exercise of political power.

Karl Popper understood this. His criterion of falsifiability was developed not as a theory of meaning but as a criterion of demarcation between science and pseudo-science. But its implications extend beyond epistemology to politics. A society that bases its laws on falsifiable claims -- claims that can be tested against evidence and revised if the evidence warrants -- is a society capable of self-correction. A society that bases its laws on unfalsifiable claims -- claims that are by definition immune to evidence -- is a society that has surrendered its capacity for rational self-governance to an authority that cannot be questioned.

David Hume, writing in the eighteenth century, identified the essential problem with characteristic precision. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779), Hume demonstrated that the standard arguments for God's existence -- the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the argument from design -- do not withstand rigorous philosophical scrutiny. But Hume's more radical insight was that even if these arguments succeeded, they would not justify the specific moral claims that religious institutions make. The existence of a creator, even if granted, tells us nothing about whether that creator wants us to persecute homosexuals, subordinate women, suppress science, or kill unbelievers. The gap between "God exists" and "God wants X" is bridged not by reason but by authority -- the authority of priests, mullahs, rabbis, gurus, and popes who claim privileged access to the divine will and demand obedience on that basis.

This is the mechanism by which faith becomes harm: not through the spiritual experience of the individual believer, which may be profound and enriching, but through the institutional claim of religious authorities to know what God wants and to enforce that knowledge on others. The harm is proportional to the power of the institution. In societies where religious institutions have little political power -- contemporary Scandinavia, for example -- religion is a relatively benign cultural force. In societies where religious institutions exercise significant political power -- Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Vatican's influence on Catholic-majority nations, the Hindu nationalist movement in India -- religion becomes an instrument of control that systematically impedes human flourishing.

The Distinction That Matters: Personal Faith vs. Institutional Religion

The "New Atheist" movement of the early twenty-first century -- Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett -- performed a valuable service by breaking the taboo on criticism of religion and documenting, with considerable force, the harms that religious institutions have inflicted. Hitchens's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything remains a masterpiece of polemical writing. Dawkins's The God Delusion introduced millions of readers to the philosophical arguments against theism. Harris's The End of Faith connected religious belief directly to the problem of political violence.

But the New Atheists made an error that this chapter will not repeat. They treated religion as a single phenomenon -- "religion poisons everything" -- rather than distinguishing between the many different ways in which religious belief and practice manifest in human life. The Quaker who refuses military service, the Buddhist who meditates in silence, the Catholic nun who devotes her life to serving the poor, the Sufi mystic who seeks union with the divine through poetry and dance -- these are all "religious" people, but their relationship to the harms catalogued in this chapter is radically different from the relationship of the inquisitor, the jihadist, the televangelist, or the Hindu nationalist politician.

The relevant distinction is not between belief and unbelief but between faith that is held personally and institutions that enforce faith on others. A person who believes in God, prays regularly, finds meaning in scripture, and derives comfort from religious community is exercising a basic human freedom. A person who demands that others believe what they believe, that laws reflect their religious convictions, that education conform to their theological commitments, and that dissent be punished as blasphemy or heresy is exercising power -- and that exercise of power must be evaluated by the same criteria we apply to any other exercise of power.

By this criterion, the question becomes empirical rather than metaphysical. We do not need to determine whether God exists in order to evaluate the consequences of religious institutions' exercise of power. We need only ask: when religious institutions control education, do they produce more or less knowledge? When they control law, do they produce more or less justice? When they control medicine, do they produce better or worse health outcomes? When they control sexuality, do they produce more or less human happiness? When they control speech, do they produce more or less truth?

The empirical answers to these questions are not uniformly negative, but the pattern is clear. Religious control of education produces ignorance of evolution, hostility to critical thinking, and ideological conformity. Religious control of law produces the criminalization of victimless behavior, the subordination of women, and the persecution of minorities. Religious control of medicine produces opposition to contraception, stigmatization of mental illness, and the promotion of faith healing over evidence-based treatment. Religious control of sexuality produces shame, repression, and the punishment of consensual adult behavior. Religious control of speech produces blasphemy laws, censorship, and the imprisonment of those who ask inconvenient questions.

Religions That Have Reformed vs. Those That Resist

The historical record shows that religions are not static. They evolve, sometimes dramatically, in response to changing social conditions, internal reform movements, and external pressure. The fact that some religions have reformed significantly -- while others resist reform -- is both encouraging and instructive.

Christianity has undergone several major transformations. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century broke the monopoly of the Catholic Church and established the principle that individuals could interpret scripture for themselves. The Catholic Church itself has undergone significant reform, particularly at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which abandoned the doctrine that non-Christians were necessarily damned, acknowledged the value of religious freedom, and opened a dialogue with modernity that would have been unthinkable a century earlier. Many contemporary Christian denominations have embraced gender equality, accepted homosexuality, and adopted positions on social and environmental justice that are indistinguishable from secular progressivism. The Church of England ordained its first female bishops in 2015. Pope Francis has made cautious but real gestures toward greater inclusion of LGBTQ+ Catholics.

Judaism has similarly evolved. Reform Judaism, originating in nineteenth-century Germany, reinterpreted Jewish law and tradition in light of modern values, ordaining women as rabbis, welcoming LGBTQ+ members, and treating the Torah as a human document subject to historical criticism. Conservative Judaism occupies a middle ground, and even Orthodox Judaism has engaged in significant internal debate on issues of gender and modernity.

Buddhism has been perhaps the least politically harmful of the major world religions, in part because its institutional structures have generally been weaker than those of the Abrahamic faiths, and in part because its core teachings emphasize compassion, non-attachment, and the transcendence of the self. But Buddhism is not without its institutional harms. The complicity of Buddhist monks in the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the support of some Buddhist clergy for Japanese militarism in the first half of the twentieth century, and the patriarchal structures of traditional Buddhist monasticism all demonstrate that no religion is immune to the pathology of institutional power.

Islam has produced rich traditions of reform and internal critique -- from the medieval rationalism of the Mu'tazila to the modernist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to contemporary Muslim feminists and progressive theologians. But these reform movements have faced fierce resistance from conservative authorities, and the question of whether Islam's institutions will undergo a transformation comparable to Christianity's is one of the most consequential cultural questions of the twenty-first century. The honest observer must acknowledge both the genuine reform movements within Islam and the powerful forces that oppose them -- without either demonizing the religion as a whole or pretending that the problems do not exist.

The pattern that emerges from this survey is instructive: religious reform occurs when religious institutions lose the power to suppress it. Christianity reformed not because the Church voluntarily surrendered its authority but because the printing press, the rise of secular states, the Enlightenment, and the growing power of civil society undermined the Church's ability to enforce orthodoxy. Religions reform when they must, not when they should. And the force that compels reform is not internal theological reasoning but external pressure from secular institutions, scientific knowledge, and democratic politics.

This observation has a practical implication: the most effective way to reduce the harm caused by religious institutions is not to argue people out of their faith -- an enterprise that is both futile and disrespectful -- but to ensure that religious institutions do not exercise political power that is not subject to democratic accountability and constitutional constraint. The separation of church and state, enshrined in the constitutions of many democracies, is not an anti-religious principle. It is a principle that protects both the state from religious capture and religion from political corruption. Religions flourish most authentically -- most spiritually, most charitably, most humanely -- when they do not wield the sword.

The Protection of Children: A Non-Negotiable Boundary

One area in which the harm of institutional religion demands particular scrutiny is the treatment of children. Children cannot consent to religious indoctrination, and the imposition of religious beliefs and practices on children raises moral questions that religious institutions have consistently refused to confront.

The physical harms are the most obvious. Male circumcision, practiced by Judaism and Islam, involves the surgical modification of a child's body for religious purposes without the child's consent. Female genital mutilation, discussed more fully in the next chapter, is defended on religious and cultural grounds. The refusal of medical treatment for children on religious grounds -- practiced by Christian Science adherents, Jehovah's Witnesses (who refuse blood transfusions), and various faith-healing communities -- results in preventable deaths every year. In each case, the child's bodily integrity is subordinated to the parents' religious convictions.

The psychological harms may be even more pervasive. The doctrine of original sin, taught to Catholic and Protestant children, tells a child that they are born guilty -- that their very nature is sinful and that they deserve eternal punishment from which only divine grace can save them. The concept of hell -- the threat of infinite torture for finite transgressions -- is, when presented to a child as literal truth, a form of psychological abuse. The suppression of natural curiosity through religious prohibitions on questioning, doubting, and independent investigation produces adults who are intellectually stunted and emotionally fearful.

The sexual abuse scandals that have engulfed the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and numerous other religious institutions reveal a further dimension of harm. The institutional structures of religious organizations -- the hierarchy, the secrecy, the deference to authority, the reluctance to involve secular law enforcement -- created conditions in which predators could operate for decades without detection or consequence. The Catholic Church's systematic cover-up of clerical sexual abuse, documented in investigations from the Boston Globe's Spotlight team to the Australian Royal Commission, revealed an institution that prioritized its own reputation over the safety of the children entrusted to its care. This is not an aberration. It is a structural consequence of institutions that claim moral authority without being subject to external accountability.

The protection of children from religious harm does not require the prohibition of religious upbringing. It requires the principle that children are rights-bearing individuals whose physical and psychological welfare takes precedence over their parents' religious convictions. A society that applied this principle consistently would prohibit the physical modification of children's bodies for religious purposes, require medical treatment for children regardless of their parents' religious objections, protect children from psychologically harmful religious doctrines, and subject religious institutions to the same child-protection standards that apply to secular organizations.

A World Without Religious Authority Is Not a World Without Meaning

The fear that motivates much of the resistance to secularism is the fear that a world without religious authority would be a world without meaning -- a cold, materialistic, nihilistic wasteland in which nothing matters and everything is permitted. Dostoevsky gave this fear its most memorable expression through Ivan Karamazov: "If God does not exist, everything is permitted."

But this fear is empirically false. The most secular societies on earth -- the Scandinavian countries, Japan, the Czech Republic, Estonia -- are not nihilistic wastelands. They are, by virtually every measure of human wellbeing, among the best places on earth to live. They have lower crime rates, lower rates of violence, higher levels of social trust, stronger social safety nets, better educational outcomes, and greater gender equality than most of the more religiously devout societies. Their citizens report levels of life satisfaction that are among the highest in the world.

The philosopher Philip Kitcher has proposed the concept of "secular humanism as a successor to religion" -- a framework in which the functions that religion has historically performed (providing meaning, building community, offering moral guidance, marking life transitions, cultivating the experience of transcendence) are fulfilled by secular institutions and practices without the requirement of supernatural belief. Kitcher's proposal is not hostile to religion but honest about its limitations: if the functions of religion can be fulfilled without the harms that institutional religion produces, then the insistence on religious authority becomes hard to justify.

Meaning, beauty, community, moral purpose, the experience of awe before the vastness of the universe, the depth of love, the mystery of consciousness -- none of these require the mediation of religious institutions. They require only the human capacity for wonder, which is older than any religion and will outlast them all.

Conclusion: The Rational Position

The rational position on religion is neither the aggressive atheism that dismisses all religious experience as delusion nor the polite agnosticism that treats all religious claims as equally worthy of respect. The rational position is this: personal faith is a private matter that deserves protection as a basic human freedom; institutional religion is a form of power that deserves the same critical scrutiny we apply to any other form of power; and the historical record demonstrates, with overwhelming evidence, that when religious institutions exercise political authority unconstrained by secular law, democratic accountability, and scientific evidence, they produce systematic harm.

The path forward is not the elimination of religion -- which is neither possible nor desirable -- but the consistent application of the harm principle. Religious practices that involve only consenting adults and cause no harm to others deserve legal protection and social respect. Religious practices that cause harm to non-consenting others -- the mutilation of children's bodies, the denial of medical treatment, the criminalization of consensual sexual behavior, the suppression of scientific education, the enforcement of gender inequality -- deserve the same critical opposition that we would direct at any secular institution that inflicted comparable harm.

This is not an anti-religious position. It is a pro-human position. It values the spiritual experience of the individual believer while refusing to grant institutional religion a special exemption from moral scrutiny. It recognizes the contributions of religious traditions to human culture while honestly accounting for their costs. And it insists that no authority -- secular or sacred -- has the right to override evidence, suppress reason, or inflict suffering in the name of a truth that cannot be questioned.

Bertrand Russell, in his 1927 lecture "Why I Am Not a Christian," observed: "The whole conception of a God is a conception quite unworthy of free men." One need not share Russell's conclusion to appreciate his principle: that free human beings should base their convictions on evidence and reason, not on authority and tradition. When religious institutions respect that principle, they earn respect. When they violate it, they deserve resistance.

The next chapter examines a different kind of intellectual obstacle -- one that, paradoxically, arises from the attempt to be tolerant: cultural relativism and its betrayal of universal humanity.

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