Leftism
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I'd argue even organized theism and even seemingly banal exercises of worship like heralding political leaders are a brain disease. "Strong men" are almost always bad men.
A lesser brain disease than monotheism for sure, but they are all fruit from the same poisoned tree.
Belief(*) in and of itself is detrimental to a persons perception of reality. It doesn't matter if it's Christianity, some other monotheism, budhism, the belief in Karma, rebirth, homeopathy, essential oils, nationalism, political tribalism or flat earth.
All these things exist as memes, as mind-viruses that can be transmitted and change, they are subject to evolution (survival of the most convincing/rememberable) and to competition. They all have another thing in common: they weaken your immune system (your critical thinking skills) and make you more susceptible to other infections.
(*)Belief: The state of being convinced of something that has been proven not to be in accordance to objective reality.
In the context of religion, I prefer the word "faith".
Faith is a neccessary emotional defense, and it's necessary to learn anything as well. Not all topics are self-evident, after all, especially when trusting others about social norms growing up.
Though faith should NEVER be a method of reasoning, and that's exactly what organized religion teaches.
In college I was taught that a belief = a good reason:
Good as in the traditional Greek sense that the end is either the truth or the flourishing of people, including any instruments that serve as a means to those ends;
Reason as in a cause originating in the mind that influences action or behavior.
So if you had a belief of something, you had a good reason to do something. Believing is good reasoning.
Obviously, you can easily devolve into moral relativism here, so I think the Aristotelian school can ground us again, favoring perception, deduction, and induction to get at "objective" reality, like you say.
The issue is when pundits and rhetoricians hijack these projects by basing them on religion or political party, using language and pseudo-logic that can appear as trustworthy to those easily convinced.
I like your description of ideas though. This sort of concept has been jostling around in my head for a few months. Appreciate the illustration!
The concept of civil/civic religion is I think what you're referring to there.
But yeah I think the idea of religion as this negative external influence doesn't address how it functions as a social system, like it doesn't explain very much.
I'm not sure what your last sentence means. Belief as a bare concept isn't the problem. The problem is when people get together and start reinforcing beliefs that are based in nothing but "faith".
Religion is bad because it teaches that faith is equivalent to or superior to knowledge. Just by the very act of institutionalizing faith-based beliefs, let alone all of the religions that DIRECTLY say faith is superior.
It's just that this knowledge/faith dichotomy isn't something that exists in our cognition, its an analytical framework to categorize, but in real life our minds don't operate like this. What's happening with both "knowledge" and "faith" beliefs in practice insofar as they impact human behavior isn't that different. "Faith" as religions define it is basically a social behavior that has a rational basis, ie "knowledge" can rationally describe why people practice "faith." The Marxian understanding of it is directly rooted to material conditions as well, as in the character faith embodies is contingent on material conditions.
A belief we could conceptualize as a civil religious one might be something like the "sovereign individual," and we could look at the Declaration of Independence as a foundational religious text.
Yes, it's not a dichotomy, that's why people so easily fall victim to using it inappropriately. It's why I said it's part of human experience (somewhere in this thread anyways).
No one can know everything. No one can answer an endless sequence of, "why?"'s. Everyone uses faith.
It's just some of us try to keep faith away from childish imaginations and moreso, "I think therefore I am.".