Why religion sucks

This isn't somebody who is any great authority on religion, but he does have some very interesting views. I don't agree with all of them, but I was struck by the accuracy of his comments on religion. From Dave Gunn:

The awful part of people “believing in something” is that they rarely keep it at that. Very few people are merely theistic: they have to prescribe to an organized religion, go to buildings dedicated to cultist worship and indoctrination, send their kids to private schools that teach only their religious point of view, have their deity on our currency, have it on their cars, have their books in every hotel room, try to get prayer in schools, omit lyrics from songs by John Lennon when they’re sung at baseball games, stand outside of Planned Parenthood and yell at women, lobby against homosexuality, place little propaganda pamphlets at every payphone around the country, et cetera, et cetera. If you want to believe in some vague higher power and keep it to yourself, go for it. But let’s be honest: most believers aren’t doing that. And, again, even if you aren’t directly part of some of the examples I just listed, you are complicit in this insanity just by being one of the majority who hasn’t overcome this outdated belief in archaic mythology. 

There’s nothing wrong with hope. But religious people aren’t just hoping; they believe they’re knowing with all certainty. Most people who worship and believe not only think they’re right and that their book/deity is 100% infallible, but they believe wholeheartedly that everyone else is 100% wrong. This is where hope becomes faith, which is literally believing in something without reason. It’s this social acceptance of ignorant bliss and lack of reasoning that has in many ways stunted our growth and evolution not only as a society but as a species. It puts planes through buildings, causes attempted genocides on certain groups of people, gets people killed over who they’re in love with, scares women into having babies they aren’t prepared for, traumatizes kids like me into fearfully obeying, gets children molested by priests and those priests protected, keeps Africans without contraceptive and rife with HIV, gets an entire population of people enslaved based on color, has people more concerned with predicted last days rather than the today and tomorrow. The list of atrocities committed in the name of religion goes on and on. 

In a world with such a vast amount of complex beauty and information to explain that beauty without devaluing it, we as a species have long-since surpassed the necessity for fairy tales and beliefs in invisible higher powers. We should be worshiping something more tangible and involved in our everyday lives, like nature or science or each other. Until religion and naive, irrational beliefs like that in gods have been erased, we will continue to stand still as a people. more

He's obviously thought about this a lot.