Another danger posed by religion

Those of us who oppose religion are often criticized for undermining the comfort religious beliefs can provide, especially in times of loss.  If it helps a grieving person to believe that the relative they lost has gone to a better place, who are we to take that away from them?

Whether it's a good or bad thing to feel comforted by a false belief is, I suppose, a philosophical question about which reasonable people can differ.  But there's a more concrete problem here which is anything but philosophical -- one I recently experienced myself.

When people are sure a particular belief is true, they are likely to make decisions on the basis of that belief -- and if the belief is false, the decisions may be dangerously wrong.  To repeat an analogy I've used before, it might be very comforting and reassuring to me to believe that I had a million dollars in the bank.  But if I started making spending decisions on the basis of that belief, I'd eventually get into trouble.  Religious beliefs are even more dangerous because they tend to be about such fundamental things, such as the existence of an afterlife.

When my mother died in December, one of the consequent afflictions I suffered was a tremendous loss of purpose.  For nine years, my life had essentially revolved around her needs and problems.  Even in the last two and a half years, when the help she needed with day-to-day living became more than I could cope with on my own and I had to move her to a care facility, I still visited her every day, shopped for a lot of supplies, monitored how she was being cared for and took it up with the management if something seemed amiss, etc.  The sudden disappearance of such a huge and long-standing responsibility was almost more than my mind could adjust to.  I was haunted by dreams and visions that she was in some kind of afterlife, afraid and confused and still in need of my help -- that I should follow her there, just in case, to continue doing the duty which had dominated my life for almost a decade.

Those feelings have passed, of course.  It's been seven months now, and I've had time to adjust to a very different existence.  But if I had really believed in an afterlife?  Really believed that those dreams and images represented some kind of reality?  I honestly believe it's very possible I would have done it -- throwing my life away for a delusion.

As for the present, while I've never believed in the Christian concept of Heaven, I am obviously aware of it.  Again, if I believed I could see her again as she was before her mind started to deteriorate, visiting for tea and chatting about this and that -- well, I would feel tempted.  It's a pleasant thing to imagine, but if it became a belief, it would be dangerous.

Well, you might wonder, if this is a serious issue, why don't we see lots of suicides among religious people?  For one thing, some religions have a taboo on suicide -- their inventors probably realized that the promise of Heaven might tempt too many of their sheep to abandon what was, before modern times, a fairly miserable existence for most.  More important, most people in the West no longer believe very fervently.  Most people who have recently lost a relative don't behave as they would if they truly believed that the person had gone somewhere better and happier -- they mourn, they do not celebrate.  I strongly suspect that in earlier times, people in a similar position -- especially after the death of a child, a very common event in pre-modern times -- may well have taken refuge in behavior which was not technically suicide (thus evading the taboo) but achieved the same result -- neglect of health, less care to avoid dangerous situations, etc.  And those who are true believers sometimes do atrocious things, not even out of mourning, but simply to get to Heaven as soon as possible -- the obvious case being Islamist suicide bombers.  The 9/11 hijackers certainly believed they would be welcomed into Heaven for their actions, sacrificing their lives in the fight against the enemies of God.  In ancient times, some religions required servants and slaves to be killed when a ruler died, so that they could continue to serve him in the next world.

Even in the modern West, suicide and excessive risk-taking are surprisingly common.  While such behavior is obviously the product of a variety of factors, how many of those people were swayed by a belief that another existence was, or at least might be, awaiting them "on the other side"?  Without such beliefs, many of them might still be alive.

I am not taking a moral stand against suicide.  Self-destruction is a decision a mature and self-aware adult has the right to make.  Some people are in situations where they can make a sober and rational decision that life is not worth going on with, even if they don't believe in an afterlife.  But in such a case, at least that person is deciding based on actual facts, not on a delusion.

Religion imposes many unnecessary costs on its adherents in terms of quality of life; this video reviews some examples.  Yet it's the part of religion some people most eagerly defend as valuable -- the concept of the afterlife -- that is potentially among the most dangerous.