What is a bad religion? Are they all bad or only some? What differentiates? Have some outgrown badness?

The core of the question is really what is a bad faith? This is because religion cannot exist without faith. And by faith I mean the interpretation of the intangible (feelings, emotions. etc.) instead of the physically tangible. "Believe in order that you may understand" said St. Augustine but in reality religions don’t want you to understand, just believe.  Religions rely on the desire to believe that some set of circumstances exists so that they may have the leverage to promote themselves. Religions do not, so far as I can perceive, rely on the existence of empirical evidence. Are all faiths based on the unprovable and intangible?

Some adherents of some religions will point to certain historical facts to support the contention that their religion is based on fact and not on intangibles. While, for instance, there may be a record of a man called Jesus living and dying by crucifixion in Israel, that does not have anything to do with his being the son of God. Unlike Mohammed and his Koran Jesus never put pen to paper so we don’t know, except by handed down stories, if he ever made that claim. And while the claim that he was scourged and crucified may be backed up with some historical evidence thousands of political dissidents of that time were killed in the same manner as a lesson to those who would rebel. The only thing unique or unusual about his passing was how fast it was. The norm was to extend the death for days if possible to further impress upon the populace that rebelion was not a good way to go. The point in all this is that while historical events may support some of the surrounding events of religious beliefs, in the end the things most necessary for those religions to exist rely on faith, frequently faith in the words of a ‘revealer’.

A revealer is someone who claims to have been given a message or who claims to be related to or actually be God. In almost all cases the revealer’s words have been passed through numerous generations, translations from ancient languages and through the hands or many semi literate scribes working at the behest and direction of wealthy benefactors who had their own agenda. So how reliable are the words of any of these religions that we are expected to accept as the word of God?

For Christians (and maybe Jews too, I’m not that sure) the question is answered by invoking the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit guided the hand of the scribe so the words are beyond question. Unless you don’t have much confidence in spirits and goblins in which case you might have a hard time with an imaginary spirit floating around. It is also easy to find in all the major religions things they have in common including not stealing, raping, pillaging, etc. and want to believe because the messages generally have universal appeal.  What’s so bad about accepting the teachings of a religion that espouses those noble and appealing concepts?

Whether you are a Taoist, Islamist or Christian what you get along with your daily dose of be kind to your neighbor is a healthy ration of why your particular religion is THE ONE and all the others just don’t have a chance of getting you to heaven or nirvana or whatever else passes for the religious ultimate. And once you have humanity neatly divided up into the right believers and the wrong believers then you can begin to understand how the Jews could have been butchered by modern day predominantly Christian Germans, why the Turks could massacre 1.5 million  Armenians, why Hamas continues to butcher innocent Jewish women and children, why Poles in Kielce conducted a Pogrom in 1946, why Shiites and Sunnies murder each other with abandon and why the terrorists flew into the twin towers. In each and every case, all occurring in the last 100 years, or modern times, we can see religious faith taken too far.

Religions by themselves can be tools of society to retain orderliness and responsible conduct. But religions must come with the requisite faith and that faith is always just a hairs breadth away from the extremism that has recurred throughout history right into our time with unrelenting frequency and which always leads to death and destruction. It is my contention that there is no good faith, only bad faith waiting for right catalyst to become the next human tragedy.

Can society stay orderly and humane absent religions and their necessary faith? We all possess two wonderful God given attributes which, when used in conjunction with each other, offer us a way to have the society we need and desire with out resorting to blind faith. One is the brain with which we can each think our way through issues of societal order and see the prudence of treating our neighbors as we would wish to be treated. And we each have a conscience-a wonderful device that gives each of us, some more some less, a sense of right and wrong. To those who would say that a conscience is an intangible I would have it that there is tangible proof of it's existence. The best argument I can think of would in C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity which makes a great case for a God and a conscience before its irrefutable logic is derailed by a need for faith.

A God given Conscience and a brain allowed to think. All we need to remove from our humanity its greatest blight-blind faith.