Bad religion: A harm reduction approach to God
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Many people use religion. It provides them benefits we can’t ignore. However, it also causes health, social and economic harm. Harm reduction began as a response to drug addiction but it has wider application. Drug use isn’t the only intractable habit people are unwilling or unable to change. The harm reduction approach accepts that some level of unhealthy behaviour may be inevitable and focuses on minimising the damage it causes. It offers a model for policies to deal with other unhealthy activities such as the use of religion. The principles developed for drug policy need little amendment. A harm reduction approach would, for example:
Most critics of religion simply condemn its use and most governments simply ignore the problems it causes. The Australian Government still includes advancement of religion as a charitable purpose qualifying for tax concessions. However, the risk of harm from the use of religion is being increasingly understood. A Guardian/ICM poll reports, “More people in Britain think religion causes harm than believe it does good”. Children are especially at risk. Users of religion don’t simply make lifestyle choices as consenting adults. They feed the Kool-Aid to children too young to understand the harm it might do. There is widespread community concern for protecting children, but hundreds of thousands remain at constant risk of initiation into the use of religion and its inherited dogmas and disputes. We need immediately to remove tax anomalies encouraging the spread of religion and urgently to develop a new response. The work done for drug policy provides an easily adaptable model:
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10 Comments
AMEN BROTHER !!!
read “the aethiest manifesto” to see the human construct of the whole thing.
better still do what happened to me I saw “the life of brian” at 8. he is “not the messiah he is a very naughty boy”
See Guy Rundles article:
”.. 60% of the US say they believe in the literal truth of the bible, 20% are young earth creationists (ie the earth is 6-10,000 years old), 30% believe in alien abductions.
this article should be taken serioiusly.
Too late for the USA
I’m not religious and I think it is silly and of no help practically or conceptually. The problem for mankind with for the great monotheistic religions which all point to the ineffable omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent is belief . Belief is not that to which the founders of such faiths point.
“Intervene based on the relative harmfulness of the religion” has been tried many times before:
Who decides on what constitutes ignorance and ‘harmfulness’ etc?: Meeeeeeeeeeeee!
Goddammit! I agree with Mungo!
What a stupid analogy.
I do enjoy Crikey for the most part but this article is churlish, disrespectful and not half as funny as the author thinks it is…I am guessing Gordon-Smith is paid by the word, but hopefully not too much!
I’m guessing that those that found the article churlish and stupid believe in some religion. Had a friend that said religion is the original software[1] virus. Pretty accurate, really.
[1] These days we’d say wetware.
What a brilliant analogy. Love it.
Oh please, Crikey must have scraped right through the bottom of the barrel to find this ridiculous article. The only other explanation I can think is that it is some kind of unannounced reverse satire which seeks—successfully—to make atheists look like narrow-minded bigots.
It also admirably demonstrates how easy it is to be concurrently not serious and not funny.
Interesting convoluted thinking by Allen Brown. Perhaps all myths we tell children constitutes child abuse as they are in effect lies.
I suspect Willem Schultink (today’s Comments, corrections, clarifications, and c*ckups) was not confused at all. I’m sure religion is not equivalent to moral belief. However, Schultink, has an extraordinary understanding of what constitutes a religion. I do not have a religion and I know personally many more without “a motivating set of beliefs that constitutes his or her religion”. Life is prior to belief and not the other way round!
Either way, in my opinion(?belief) the article is an exercise in wankery and not be concerned over.
Willem Schultink misses the point. He’s confusing religion with moral beliefs. We tell kids all sorts of myths: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and religion, amongst others. But with all the others, sooner or later we tell them it’s all a “fairy story”, and they understand that. There aren’t any scary adults dressed in black saying, “You must believe in the Tooth Fairy, or you’ll burn in hell!” And that’s why religion is child abuse.