Well I feel like it's long past time I tackle this topic. It is something that took me a long time to think through and understand. It is something that I feel holds humanity back in too many ways/shapes/forms to easily quantify. Time to blow open the closet and say it...religions of all type are the end of humanity. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, you name it, it hurts humanity in the overall goal to advance. And for the easier labeling later in the rant, all religions shall be called by their real name, cults.

First of all, all religions involve the repression of knowledge; most use the label of faith to hide the attack on knowledge. Faith means believing in something no matter how absurd, illogical, or just plain stupid something is. It allows a cult to attack any and all knowledge that goes against its core beliefs. Faith allows a cult to repress logic and knowledge. Cults attack knowledge because knowledge means the cults are exposed for what they truly are and no longer filfill their function. The largest attack on humanity from cults appears in how they attack knowledge to keep their way of life.

As for way of life, cults represent something that creates a tradition. Even if the tradition created is modern at the time, the cult will keep the same traditions for awhile, preventing movement forward. My favorite example of this comes from the biggest, most damgerous cult of all, Christianity, specifically the Roman Catholic strain. Most of society, including many religious people of the strick variety conceeded that the sun was the center of the universe back around, 1700. A few hundred years after it was discovered, but it still came out and people accepted it slowly but surely. Granted it took lots of time for many people to accept the new theory, but people slowly took in the new theory and used it to increase science. More people took the knowledge and used it as something commonplace. Hell, we used it to get man to the moon and such. The Roman Catholic Church decided to get up to modernity in 1996 by accepting that the sun was the center of the universe. This rejection of knowledge for acceptance of a belief just shows how society finds itself consistantly hampered by society. And that keeps me constantly disregarding that any and all christians view the world as only 6,000 years old. But that is just another example of how the cult called christianity rejects logic, scientific fact, and anything else humanity has learned to keep the old traditions alive that only hamper humanity's future.

Speaking of future, all cults keep themselves rooted in their traditions; they have a hard time accepting what is new and what comes around from humanity's quest for more and better things. By definition most cults have a set of beliefs they adher to that seldom change, with the core belief always anchored to the center. This core belief keeps the small advances society makes from catching on and moving on slowly. Overall, religion has hindered man and kept centuries of progress from occuring. Cults only keep society back and hinder it. More on this when I actually get some sleep and can coherently keep on a rant for more than a few paragraphs, I feel like I need to write more, when I have the energy.