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At this point, religion isn’t just outdated — it’s actively harmful. Not because believers are stupid, but because religion is an exercise of power. It stops being a moral system and becomes a political one.

Morality should ask difficult, uncomfortable questions:

• Does this reduce harm?
• Does this increase care?
• Who is suffering unnecessarily?

Religion asks different questions entirely:

• Who is in charge?
• Who must obey?
• Who is allowed to question?
• Who must be punished?

Certainty. Religion’s Gift to Us.

Religion doesn’t just offer certainty in an uncertain world—it sanctifies it. But we are told certainty comes from God. And once certainty is labeled “God’s will,” disagreement isn’t wrong. It’s disobedient.

Across history, one of the most consistently punished “sins” is not cruelty, greed, or violence — it is curiosity. Doubt is framed as rebellion. Inquiry becomes heresy. Independent thought is treated as a threat. Religion asks us to “Doubt your doubts.”

The first human “crime” in the Bible is not theft or violence — it’s eating from the Tree of Knowledge (Genesis 2–3). The act that fractures the divine order is learning! According to religion, the first transgression in this world was to acquire knowledge! This framing echoes through history to the modern day.

Truth does not fear investigation. Authority does.

Historical Examples: Religion as a Hammer, Not Moral Guidance

History is unambiguous about what happens when religious authority merges with political power: inquiry becomes heresy, dissent becomes sin, and harm is reframed as righteousness.

Galileo Galilei and the Criminalization of Evidence (17th century)
In 1633, Galileo was tried by the Roman Inquisition for defending heliocentrism — a model supported by direct astronomical observation. His crime was not error, but contradiction: heliocentrism challenged Church-sanctioned Aristotelian cosmology and biblical literalism. Under threat of torture, Galileo was forced to publicly recant and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The Church did not formally acknowledge its error until 1992, nearly 360 years later. This was not a moral dispute. No one was harmed by heliocentrism. The punishment existed solely to preserve institutional authority.

Giordano Bruno and the Execution of Intellectual Dissent (1600).
Bruno was a Dominican friar, philosopher, and early scientific thinker born in 1548 in Nola, Italy. Bruno embraced the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus, which proposed that Earth revolves around the Sun. But he went much further. He argued that the universe is infinite, that stars are distant suns surrounded by their own worlds, and because of this, countless inhabited planets may exist. These ideas directly contradicted the rigid cosmology and theology upheld by the Roman Catholic Church at the time. Refusing to recant his beliefs, Bruno was condemned for heresy. On February 17, 1600, in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori, he was burned at the stake upside down with spike in his mouth to prevent him from speaking during his execution. His death was a warning, not a correction — a demonstration of power meant to enforce obedience through terror.

Charles Darwin and Theological Retrenchment (19th century).
Darwin was not imprisoned or executed, but the reaction to On the Origin of Species (1859) illustrates religion’s recurring hostility to evidence-based revision of belief. Evolution by natural selection directly contradicted literal creation narratives, prompting fierce opposition from clergy and religious institutions.
The infamous 1925 Scopes Trial in the United States — decades after Darwin’s death — criminalized the teaching of evolution in public schools, prioritizing religious doctrine over scientific consensus. These laws endured well into the late 20th century and continue to resurface in modified forms today.

Medieval Inquisition and Doctrinal Enforcement (12th–17th centuries).
Inquisitorial courts institutionalized the idea that belief itself could be a crime. Tens of thousands were imprisoned, tortured, or executed for heresy under joint church–state authority. These systems were meticulous, legalistic, and deeply religious — and entirely indifferent to human suffering so long as orthodoxy was maintained.

Biblical Defense of Slavery in the United States (18th–19th centuries).
American slavery was underwritten by theology. Southern churches and theologians cited scripture to defend human bondage, fracture denominations, and moralize brutality. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded explicitly to preserve the right to own enslaved people..

This is the recurring lesson of history: “certainty” paired with power does not produce virtue — it produces enforcement.

Modern Examples: The Same Logic, New Targets

The mechanisms have not changed. Only the language has softened.

Book Bans and “Religious Obscenity” Laws (United States, 2021–present)
Across multiple U.S. states, books addressing race, gender, and sexuality have been removed from schools and libraries under laws explicitly framed around “protecting children” and “community values.” In practice, these bans overwhelmingly target LGBTQ+ narratives and discussions of systemic racism. Florida’s HB 1467 and Texas’s HB 900 rely heavily on religiously informed definitions of obscenity rather than educational merit or demonstrable harm.

Reproductive Law After Dobbs v. Jackson (2022)
The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade was celebrated explicitly by religious advocacy groups as a theological victory. The resulting state laws often make no exceptions for rape, incest, or non-viable pregnancies — even when they endanger the patient’s life. Medical associations have documented increased maternal morbidity and delayed emergency care as a direct result. These laws are not grounded in medical ethics or public health outcomes, but in religious conceptions of fetal personhood. If you don’t think The Right to Life movement is based in religion, you are not thinking it through.

Anti-LGBTQ Legislation and “Religious Freedom” (U.S. & abroad)
From bans on gender-affirming care to laws restricting discussion of sexual orientation in schools, modern anti-gay and anti-trans policies are routinely defended on religious grounds. Uganda’s 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act — which includes life imprisonment penalties — was heavily influenced by American evangelical lobbying. Even in the U.S., “religious liberty” is increasingly used to justify discrimination in housing, healthcare, and employment.

Climate Denial and Dominion Theology.
A significant portion of climate change denial in the U.S. is tied to religious beliefs that frame environmental stewardship as irrelevant or secondary to human “dominion” over Earth. Surveys show white evangelical Christians are among the least likely demographic groups to accept climate science, with some leaders explicitly arguing that environmental collapse is either divinely ordained or irrelevant in light of the end times.

These are not dusty historical footnotes. They reveal a structure that repeats whenever belief is treated as untouchable and authority as sacred.

The danger is not belief itself. Humans crave meaning. The danger is “certainty” that refuses accountability. When a system claims access to “absolute truth”, it no longer needs to justify harm. Suffering becomes acceptable if it serves obedience.

Religion’s greatest emotional appeal has always been certainty:

• Someone is in charge
• There IS a plan
• Chaos is temporary
• Death is explained

That comfort is real. But comfort is not evidence.

Religion didn’t prepare us for mystery. It replaced mystery with obedience.

Learning, questioning, and revising our beliefs are how we reduce harm and expand understanding. When systems punish those acts, they are not protecting morality — they are protecting control.

History shows us this plainly. Every time authority declared inquiry forbidden, it was eventually proven wrong — and people paid the price while it took centuries to admit it.

The real tragedy is not that we believed comforting stories. It’s that we were taught obedience instead of curiosity — and then told that was virtue.

Final Accounting

Religion in power does not fail accidentally. It succeeds exactly as designed.

Ever notice how a large segment of American culture treats education with suspicion and knowledge as a threat? That reflex isn’t accidental. It’s an inheritance—left over from a Christian tradition that trained people to distrust inquiry and sanctify obedience. It was never our role to learn. It was our role to be instructed—then to comply. Historic Christianity made this explicit: the Bible was kept in Latin not to preserve truth, but to restrict access to it.

It demands certainty where humility is required, obedience where ethics should live, and silence where questions threaten control. It does not ask whether harm is reduced—only whether authority is preserved. When suffering follows, it is waved away as divine necessity, moral discipline, or collateral damage in service of “truth.” American Christian nationalism doesn’t merely blur religion and government—it fuses them. It is an experiment in theocracy, with “God’s will” offered as a substitute for law.

Every generation is told this time is different. This time the belief is purer. This time the power will be restrained. History answers with a laugh and a body count.

The pattern never changes: curiosity is criminalized, dissent is moralized as evil, and cruelty is recast as virtue—until reality finally intrudes and the institution quietly revises its position, centuries too late, over the graves of those it punished for being right.

Religion does not need to be malicious to be dangerous. It only needs to be certain.

And certainty—when insulated from evidence, accountability, and human cost—is not faith.

It is the oldest authoritarian technology we have.