Psychiatrists/psychologists, where are all the studies on the mental harm caused by religion?

Question

Not a day goes by where I don't hear about some harmful act committed by a religious nut, and I'm not talking about the ones overseas. Obviously it drives a lot of people crazy. So who has researched it?

Answer 1

People who make their way in life without religion are in the minority, so I bet you get a lot of flak with this question. But it's a GREAT question.

First, countless aspects of everyday life contradict aspects of peoples' religious beliefs. If they refuse to deal with these contradictions, some part of their brains will try to resolve them anyway. It’s what the brain does. If one part of your brain persists in trying to resolve the contradictions while another holds to the belief, the believing part could become disassociated from the reasoning part. Truly! You’d be risking your own peace of mind, or worse: your sanity. Your thoughts and actions could become dissociated from reality.

Just as important, if there’s no God, there’s no immortal soul. All you’ll ever have is your experience of life before death. Your commitment to the idea of a hereafter and your dismissal of aspects of reality that contradict your belief could cut you off from much of your here-and-now awareness of this world. You’d risk diminishing the greatest thing of value that you’ll ever have—your experience of life itself.

True believers say that whether there’s a God or not, it’s wise to believe in Him, because if there’s a God, your belief will give you reassurance throughout your life and your belief will guarantee your salvation. If it turns out that there is no God, you’ll never know it, because your existence will cease at death. Either way, you can't lose; and you stand to gain eternal life.

In truth, the benefits are not so one-sided in favor of belief after all. One definition of "crazy" is persisting in believing that something is real when it's not. When my uncle goes shopping, he prays for God to find him a convenient parking space. Is he crazy? Most people would say no, but...

Answer 2

You logic is pretty spurious here. There are six billion people on this planet. Even if every day one have them happens to commit a violent act and he happens to do it for religious reasons, given the huge majority of religious people that would make religion one of the safest things around.

Let me draw a parallel example. Scarcely a year goes by where someone (or many people) fails to die from video games. Either he plays for days without food and water, or flips out and decides that it's real and he has to kill someone because of the game. Does this mean we should ban video games as a socially malignant influence? The same kind of thing happened with role-playing games a while ago, and there was a call to ban those. And copy-cat crimes based on movies are not uncommon at all. Do all these things corrupt the minds of people and force them to do abominable acts?

Or would it be more accurate to say that some people just have messed up minds? Even those groups who have tried to refrain from every possible negative influence have crimes and even murders.

To make matters worse, you completely ignore the possibility that you have cause and effect reversed. Perhaps even if there is a connection between homicide and religion, it is homocidal people who adopt religion rather than religion that creates homocidal maniacs. Perhaps it is the case that religion makes people MORE sane, which is why madmen seek it out with their last vestige of social conscience.

Your 'obvious' connection is, I think, more of the nature of jumping to a conclusion than an actual link to any kind of pathology. Unless you can establish something more concrete than this, I fail to see why anyone should expend time and energy studying it.

From what I can see on the web, most of the people who claim to have already conducted research on the matter enter the study with an axe to grind one way or the other, proving nothing but their own pre-existing prejudice. What a waste of time.