Although spiritual traditions can give answers to important human needs, I am not claiming that religious life was better or is better overall compared to secular life. Religions have produced, and some of them still produce, enormous harm, such as persecution, mass killings, rigid hierarchy, and exclusion. Let’s explore some of the ways these traditions can go wrong.
Dogma
Some traditions impose dogmatic answers as absolute truth that must be believed. They forbid honest doubt and revision in light of new ethical and scientific understandings.
Rigid adherence to the past
Reverence for lineage can harden into rigidity, treating “the way it’s always been done” as sacrosanct. This resists development even when change is genuinely needed.
False perception of superiority
Some religions and cultures teach that only members of their group have the one true correct faith while people of all other groups are “heretics” and “infidels”. Some religions arrogantly teach that members of the religion are “the chosen people”, chosen directly by God, and so they are superior to people of other religions and to non-religious people.
Coercion
Dogma and perception of superiority lead to coercion. Some religions have used coercion to enforce belief and adherence, rather than rely on persuasion and respecting people’s free choice. Some performed violent “inquisitions” to determine whether people are faithful enough.
While some religions encourage missionaries to present their beliefs in an attempt to convince people to convert to the religion but through respectful persuasion, there have also been missionaries who proselytized, i.e. aggressively or persistently trying to persuade someone to change their religious, political, or ideological beliefs to match the persuader’s. These zealous attempt to recruit people often used pressure and manipulation. Or worse: threats of violence.
The scriptures of some religions explicitly command that “infidels” — those who do not follow the religion’s commandments — should be forced to convert, or killed if they refuse. Some religions have had an explicit aim to convert all of humanity by force and establish a worldwide government that operates according to the religion’s strict laws,
Coercion also operates within the group. Group cohesion can calcify into tribalism, treating adherence as membership and deviation as betrayal, exposing dissenters to exclusion or outright oppression and persecution. Those who wish to leave a religion may face disownment, ostracism, or even death for the “crime” of “apostasy”. Voicing honest doubts about the religion’s beliefs, or even joking about them, can be branded “blasphemy” and punished severely, in some cases inciting acts of violence against the “offenders.”
This climate of coercion feeds religious intolerance toward other faiths: persecution of religious minorities, setting fire to places of worship of other religions, and the destruction of centuries-old religious artifacts and holy sites simply because they belong to a different religion.
All this coercion and violence is antithetical to Wellism’s respect for each person’s self-sovereignty, and the human right of freedom of conscious and freedom of/from religion
Fundamentalism and zealotry
Within a religious tradition, some adherents slide from ordinary devotion into fundamentalism and zealotry: an unwavering conviction that their interpretation is the sole truth, a very strict and rigid adherence to it, and a willingness to act on it at any cost. Zealots prioritize doctrinal purity over compassion, becoming willing to harm others, or even sacrifice their own lives, in the name of the cause — turning people into perpetrators of extremism and violence.
Religious wars and violence
Many of the wars fought throughout history were fueled, at least in part, by religious motives — from the Crusades to the Thirty Years’ War to numerous conflicts still raging today. The zealotry and intolerance described above did not stay confined to individuals or communities: once wielded by rulers and institutions, they escalated into full-scale warfare, with each side convinced that its cause was sanctioned by the divine.
Hollow or rigid practices
Rituals can become rote and hollow, performed out of automatic habit and adherence to tradition rather than meaningful engagement. They can also be coercively imposed rather than freely chosen, stripping them of their transformative potential. Even for believers in a religion, the attitude towards the practices may become strict and rigid, stifling self-inquiry, free thinking, and innovation.
Also rites of passage can be imposed on someone regardless of whether they fit that person’s actual experience or beliefs. What should affirm a life transition can instead feel coercive or alienating.
Conformity
Belonging can curdle into groupthink, where conformity is prized over honest disagreement. It can also produce in-group/out-group hostility, excluding or demonizing those who don’t belong.
Restricting love, relationships, and marriage
Some religions forbid marrying someone of a different religion, or forbid romantic relationships and marriage between two loving, consenting adults simply because they are of the same sex. And even such absurdities as forbidding caste endogamy, or forbidding a person of a certain family name from marrying a divorced person. These rules override the free choice of consenting adults over their own relationships and lives, in direct conflict with the self-sovereignty that Wellism holds central.
Violation of human rights
Some religions instruct parents to mutilate the bodies of infants or kids because that’s what is “commended” in the religion’s scriptures. Even otherwise-ethical people sometimes participate in such acts of barbarity simply because of adhering to a tradition. This is in direct violation of the child’s human right of sovereignty on their own body. Sometimes these procedures are even done by physicians, and by doing so, they violate their Hippocratic oath “First, do no harm”.