A few weeks ago I finished a book by Richard Dawkins called The God Delusion. It's a fantastic book which covers scientific explanations for religion's existence and it also argues that religion isn't necessary for morality and that religion is actually more harmful than good, especially for children. I highly recommend it!
Also a few weeks ago my husband and I watched the 2015 film with Will Smith called "Concussion". In it, Will Smith plays the real-life neurologist Dr. Bennet Omalu who in 2002 discovered that chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative disease that affects boxers which is brought on by concussions, also affects NFL players. That movie inspired me to research concussions in the NFL, and I found three documentaries, all done recently: "The United States of Football" (2013), "League of Denial: the NFL's Concussion Crisis" (2013) and "Head Games: The Global
Concussion Crisis" (2014) (which covered football, rugby, soccer, and
ice hockey). These documentaries show that concussions are a very serious problem and
hardly anyone wants to address it or believe it. Over the past two days or
so I've also been watching some videos online featuring Richard Dawkins,
Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, all of whom are not only atheists
but they go a step
further and are actually anti-theism advocates. After finishing The God Delusion
I've almost constantly been mulling over the question of "what harm does religion do on a
personal level?" Not just the obvious problems that come with Islam,
but also with other more benign religions like modern Christianity. Is there harm
on an individual level in being a moderate in whatever religion you
belong to? And I think the football concussion example is actually a
very good example with which I can answer this question about religion.
From a scientific
point of view, one of the harms of believing in religion, even moderately, is
that religion trains you to disregard any information, any
evidence, any ideas that contradict your religion. It teaches you to
look at evidence and reason and logic right in front of you and reject
them if they don't fit within your religion's current world view, and this is absolutely true for the LDS Church. As I was watching
these football documentaries, the leaders at the NFL and even the
biased scientists who did studies on concussions but who were on the NFL
payroll, looked at the evidence of concussions causing CTE and neurodegenerative diseases in ex-NFL players, and they flat-out
rejected it. They saw the evidence physically right in front of them and
they completely disregarded it without for one second considering its
validity. And in watching those video clips, I was strongly reminded of
many religious people who do the same thing: they see evidence right in
front of them that their religion is untrue or harmful and they reject that evidence because they don't want to
believe it.
After watching these concussion documentaries my impulse was to
tell my friends on Facebook about it, to say "Hey you guys, you won't
believe what I just found out!" because, like Bennet Omalu, I thought people would want
to know about it. But as I thought more about the reactions Omalu received—disbelief, rejection, and even hostility—as well as remembering
people's reactions to what Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins say about
religion, I realized that average people don't want to hear it because they don't want to believe it's
true. Too many people who love football don't want to be shown evidence
that the sport they love actually causes brain damage and horrible
life-threatening outcomes for the players years after they retire. They just don't want
to know about it. And it's the same with too many religious people: they're happy with their religion and they don't want to hear evidence
that the religion they love and their God who "loves" them cause harm
to others and even to themselves and that their religion holds them back intellectually and it stunts their critical thinking. For many fans of football, they are
more loyal to football and to their team than they are to their
religion. They watch football games as faithfully or more faithfully than they attend
church. Football is their religion (and for too many places like
Nebraska, football is also the only entertaining thing to do). And the harm of
growing up in religion is that you're growing up being taught to reject
evidence that goes against your current beliefs, even if the evidence is given in an effort to help people's
well-being.
The attitude for both religion and contact sports is, "Why
are you attacking this? You don't like it but others do, so why are you
trying to take away their happiness? No, I don't care about your
evidence, I care about my sport/religion that makes me happy and I don't
want it to change. Leave it alone."
But I'm not sure
I can leave it alone. I don't go out looking for problems, but when
problems do come to my attention and it's something I care about, I
don't want to ignore it. I've spent too many years ignoring and
refusing to see evidence because of my religious upbringing, and I'm no
longer going to dismiss evidence before I evaluate it.
I started being bothered by
football last year when I watched the Super Bowl on TV: someone got a
serious concussion, and that was the ONLY play the broadcasters did not replay. They replayed all the other plays in the entire game, but
they never replayed the play that caused the concussion. Right then I
knew the NFL and the broadcasters wanted to hide the concussion, to
pretend it never happened and to make viewers forget about it. Players
and fans know the risks to other parts of the body like the shoulders
and knees, but for the most part they don't know that the nature of the game
of American football is a danger to the players' brain at all levels of
play but especially to children who play tackle football. I
recently heard a sports commentator say that you can't take the danger
out of football, and he's right. There are no rules in American football that you can create to
keep the players' brain safe because it's impossible without completely
destroying the game itself. Soccer is easier because all you have to do
is say no headbutting the ball; the game of soccer is still very
playable as it is without the option to headbutt the ball. But rugby
and American football are different, and what these documentaries have
done is to show people that concussions are much more common and much
more serious than players and fans are led to believe. The NFL knows
it, but until only about two years ago they denied it because they want to keep their billion-dollar
business alive and raking in the money from fans and advertisers and the military (here's a short but informative video about how the military is involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaW7cOJUt1A ). And
religions like the LDS Church and the Catholic Church want to keep
people in the dark about many things because they also want to keep
raking in the money and maintaining control over their members and their
public image.
For the past two years or so I've been an atheist. I used to think I was an agnostic, but in The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins addresses the difference between agnosticism and atheism, and I realized by his definition I'm an atheist, and I'm okay with that. It's only until recently, perhaps two months ago, that I've started leaning toward anti-theism, the view that religion is not only unnecessary for human existence and human morality but there's a good chance that we as a species would be better off if we rejected religion with all its superstitions and myths, and embraced modern science instead. Last week one of my friends linked a news article on Facebook that told about a life-sized ark (of the Noah variety) that was completed in Kentucky in July of this past year. According to this article, it took over $100 million to make! https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/07/10/bill-nye-visited-a-noahs-ark-he-doesnt-believe-should-exist/ What a huge waste of money!! Think of what that money could do if it was given to scientific research facilities, like the ones that are studying CTE in NFL players. I can't get over what a huge waste of money that ark is, and that it's a huge tourist trap that spreads false science. (Also, if you want to watch the debate that the article talked about between Bill Nye and Ken Ham from 2014, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvO3zJaNBjs It's worth the time, especially to see the sharp contrast between modern science and modern Christianity in America.)
So American football is one example of what I believe is a harm of a religious upbringing: being trained to reject evidence that may be unpleasant to hear but if listened to can improve the well-being of contact sports players. And this is one of the reasons why I will never return to the LDS Church specifically, but also to religion in general: religion brainwashes people into believing that their religion is the only true one, and that not even science can provide a good answer to life's questions about our world or ourselves, but oh, our specific religion has the answers for everything we need to know, and for the things we don't know that's because God decided it wasn't necessary for our salvation. No, I will never rejoin an organization that teaches and trains its members to look at evidence right in front of them and reject it without a second thought if it doesn't mesh with the teachings of that religion. The practice in religion of rejecting evidence also spills over into other areas of life, and in my opinion the public's reaction to and denial of concussions is a good example.
(And I finally decided to pitch these documentaries on Facebook. Important issues like this need to get out there, and I realized that not everyone will reject the message even if they like contact sports; there are people out there who care more about the well-being of players than their romanticized view of the sport and their personal attachment to it).
