Danes: Religion Bad

44% say that religion makes the world a worse place.

Wow. Tough question. I think it's pretty clear that the threat of divine punishment and the promise of reward keeps lots of folks in line... Whether that outweighs the misery that religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam cause, I really couldn't say...

Currently I've been thinking about how aversion to the excesses of religion drives people to cartoon materialism/physicalism/naturalism... That's bad, IMHO. I mean, seems to me that a fairly unreflective physicalism is the dogma of most atheists I know outside of philosophy; even the suggestion that the universe might have mind-like aspects (in some attenuated sense of 'mind') that aren't reducible to things like neuronal activity will often get you branded as a loon. Which seems reprehensibly dogmatic to me. Though I'm not sure how much of the blame for that we can hang on religion...

Religion is also bad because at least most and at most all of them are false; and having false beliefs is bad, even if it has good consequences.

Christianity, for example, though, also motivates people to do a lot of good things...so that's good...

How to add it all up and get an overall total score for religion, however, is not at all clear to me.