The real enemy of reason are not just religions, but the real enemy is any belief-system or ideology that claims to have found the only possible way of thinking.
Any fanatically enough held system of beliefs can breed intolerance towards all other possible ways thinking, as these intolerance-breeding belief-systems all too often claim that there can only be one allowed and tolerated model of life and behavior in general.
This inbuilt intolerance was not a similar problem in societies where there was only one allowed religion and state-supported religions wholly controlled monolithic societies.
The problem with intolerant belief-systems is however greatly intensified in situations where the believers of different intolerant belief-systems need to come more and more to contact with people with different belief-systems and also permanently live side-by-side.
After over 3000 years of gradually intensifying globalization the price paid for intolerance has become greater and greater, as it becomes more and more a hinder for development in the society.
Modern societies simply must adjust themselves to the fact that all their members do not think alike. Societies still enforcing this kind of intolerance are in a clear inbuilt disadvantage, as the development of a society is inevitably handicapped.
The example of many underdeveloped Islamic countries shows how extreme these consequences can be.
A famous quote says "In a society where all people think alike, there is not much thinking done". A successful modern society just needs freedom of thought to breed the level of innovation that drives the society forwards.
The case of communism also clearly shows that also a political ideology can develop into a de facto religion.
This occurs quite inevitably if a ideology is accepted as the only possible and allowed way of thinking in a society.
A ideology like religion can however also be developed into a quite reasonable tool for furthering traditions and to become a building block of civil and tolerant society.
This process has already happened in the Lutheran state churches of the most of the Western Europe and Scandinavia.
A major problem however remains, as all of the Abrahamic religions do still contain the seeds of even extreme intolerance, even if the current majority versions have universally grown out of them.
They are still present in the old bronze-age core dogmas of the religions, which are retained for reasons of upholding a "divine" tradition, even if it is not put to practice anymore.
This intolerance is inbuilt in Abrahamic religions largely because to succeed in a contested religious marketplace a emerging religion just must be extremely intolerant toward other religions.
The original acquiring position of power needs to have this feature in a religion which is not originally born out of the needs of machinery of the state.
A religion can grow and mature out of this original state of intolerance, as the case of western Lutheran state churches does show.
The core problem however is that the message of intolerance is still there and readily available in the old-fashioned core dogmas of these religions.
Inevitably all of the revivalist factions wanting to return to the real, original faith do take advantage of this message of intolerance to further their own goals.
This has happened in Christianity, in Islam and in Judaism. Many of the state-sponsored or majority versions of these faiths have grown to became even reasonably tolerant, as the needs of a modern society just demand this kind of tolerance.
However most of the extremist factions of all of these Abrahamic faiths have taken great pains to keep the original message of extreme intolerance in the core of their message and they do breed intolerance and hatred in societies where a very central need of society would be tolerance.
The well-being of modern societies is very much dependent on how a great role these intolerant versions of faith can acquire in society.
In United States they breed discontent and hatred and in the end erode the basis of the consensus-society.
In Israel they endanger the very existence of that state in being the major source of continued hatred and bigotry towards the Arabs and are also a major cause for the inability to reach a peaceful solution in Palestine.
Among the followers of Islam they breed hatred and fear that in the end endangers the well-being of all Muslim communities all over the world.
The core problem is that the intolerance-breeding parts of these belief-systems have outgrown their usability.
Accordingly most majority versions of these religions have quietly dropped the original intolerant parts from their message.
However, as their original message was carefully designed to fill some very central psychological needs in humans, also these intolerance-breeding versions of religions do unfortunately live on, even if they have become extremely obsolete and in fact a heavy liability for the human race.
See original post here.
