Hi clo,
It isn't religion. It's dogmatism. Plenty of religious folks are quite sensible. Plenty of dogmatic believers of whatever you wish have created problems for everyone.
It is more-or-less the same set of folks in America who have a tendency to view their Christianity fundamentally, who view muscular individualism as the over-arching virtue, who are unbending in their economics regardless of the environment in which they find themselves, whose politics is based on iron principles and what they believe they read in the Constitution, whose law is inspired by punishment rather than happiness or recovery, whose patriotism wraps them in a flag of pure virtue and lets them treat human beings from other countries as enemies and strangers, and whose wars assert their country's interest to the exclusion of all else.
The common theme is an approach to life in which simple truths are established by some literal means and then those truths are adhered to against the whole world and regardless of experience. The hypothesis must be true. The dogma demands it. Back to Ayn Rand. Back to Genesis. The failure of the financial system cannot have occurred due to insufficient regulation.
These same folks treat those who disagree with them, not as participants in a conversation with whom one tries to synthesize a pluralist path forwards or to whom one might concede a point, but as principle-free, unpatriotic, wishy-washy sinners. They literally will disdain or hate those who disagree precisely because they don't share in the dogmatists' particular set of ideals.
So this is a group of like-minded people for whom purity tests make sense, whose members can pledge themselves for all time to reducing taxes, who will try to introduce creationism into the classroom by any means, who see the Constitution as a machine to distribute their ideals rather than as a mechanism for forcing compromise on government. They will relentlessly attempt to force their views on society. And, like other notable dogmatists, they will use the ends they aim to achieve as justification for the means by which they look to achieve it. Of course it is okay to hold the whole world economy to ransom to get a small reduction in US government expenditure. Of course it is okay to kill abortion doctors in furtherance of the protection of life. Of course it is okay to infiltrate the text books used for teaching evolution even if what you plan to replace it with is junk science, so as to preserve poor old Adam and Eve in their garden.
Indeed, this is why science is so troubling for such people. It builds its truths out of the massive foundation of numerous tested facts. It evolves when experience demands it. It cares not a whit for a hypothesis unless it can withstand disproof. If, and only if, a hypothesis appears to work and to withstand all criticism does it become scientific law. Laws based on testing and experience rather than theory and supposition.
But one thing troubles true believers even more than science. And this is the fact that the world does not simply have a North pole of all that is good, and a South pole for all that is evil, but it actually has temperate zones in between and these are the places where life actually flourishes. It isn't that religion is a bad thing or that individualism is not a useful attribute or that allowing people to keep most of their income is detrimental all of the time. But virtues are done best when, over time, they are made dilute with other ones that compete for air. Freedom is constrained by law. Markets are restricted by regulation. Muscular individualism is given more opportunity when it is watered by the public good. An economy functions more efficiently with some portion of government involvement and this portion may be greater or lesser depending on conditions. Societies change over time. Pluralism of belief requires flexibility and accommodation rather than rigidity and exclusion.
There is an infinite number of questions and human beings can answer few of them. Excluding competing ideas because they don't conform with one's own hypothesis about the constitution of virtue is a certain way to preclude the answers we may need to find.
One thing I guess must be true. That human brains have evolved a tendency to see black and white, but not grey so much. Maybe this was necessary in the ancient forest and on the plains of Africa whence we originate. I think of dogmatism as a statement of our limitations as a species. Homo not so sapiens.
We should be humble in the face of the universe. Truth is not simple. It is complex. And we must always keep searching for it. And rather than blocking every other pathway with our dogmatic principles, we should be trying to figure the best paths forwards for ourselves, wheresoever those paths lead and whenever contingency permits us to have a choice.
"I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."
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