Religion is the Denial of Reality

Science adjusts its views based on what is observed, wrote Tim Minchin, while "faith is the denial of observation, so that a belief can be preserved." 

Consider what happens when faith is used as the horse that drags the cart of science around behind it. If we use religion as our basis for understanding things, and science only for discovering things but not their meanings, then any discovery of chemical imbalances in the human brain would lead Christians, not to the conclusion that they are wrong to see the mentally handicapped as witches in league with Lucifer, but quite the very opposite. 

On the contrary, those Christians would find that such imbalances were caused by, and thus the surest proof of, that person's willingness to sell their soul to the devil, so they could enjoy all of the dark benefits of becoming a witch. The chemical imbalances, then, would simply be the byproduct of a corrupted or altogether absent soul.

In fact, for centuries science was used in precisely this way by the majority of Christians in the world to support the claim that slavery was a system sanctioned by an almighty God, not only because the Bible tells us so, and in so many ways, but because it makes sense that those deemed to be inferior should be, much to the benefit of all, ruled by those who deem themselves to be superior. Never mind that it is only those who define themselves as the latter that have any say in who is defined as the former. 

After all, humans in general hold themselves to be far superior in every way to all the animals of the earth, and perhaps for no other reason than that we are even more ignorant of them than we are of ourselves. So it should be no surprise to anyone then, especially when our religions convince us we are made in the image of an infallible God, that we should perceive ourselves in the same light.

And with our God like perception, which we feel is equally made in the image of God's perception - although it may be flawed at birth by original sin, it was set aright by the purifying waters of baptism - we feel quite comfortable with our conclusions that some of us are more like angles while others are no better than the animals. Of course, it is always those who see themselves as the highest angels of all, that end up treating all the rest even more poorly than animals treat each other, in the same way that all those who think they are so deserving of heaven are so often perceived by those they hope only to inspire, to be worse than the devil himself. 

For if we are indeed made in the image of a God, then there is certainly no reason to think our own perceptions of each others "souls" are ever purely human - something so easily manipulated, limited and subjective, and rife with a toxic cocktail of ignorance, superstitions and biases - rather than as objective and reliable as God's holy word.  

 Thanks to the miracle of religion, as such, which has been long trusted to lead human understanding from out of the bondage of human ignorance and superstition, we managed to create a taxonomy of everything in the universe that - through the hocus pocus of anyone simply professing "I believe!" - miraculously transforms our ignorance of others into an enlightened sense of ourselves.  And to maintain this "belief" about ourselves, we would willingly murder the whole world, out of a devoted love and worship of that sacred ego we call "God."