Religion is bad

First of all, thank you for hosting this debate, I've always wanted to debate this issue from either side. That being said I am personally agnostic and have a dislike for most organized religions; however, this personal distaste that you and I share for religion does not warrant a blanket statement that religion is bad. "Any social construct that promotes and exalts willful ignorance puts its members in a reproductive disadvantage to the rest of humanity." Why is this bad? At the current state of humanity, we are not in danger of going extinct due to a lack of reproduction, following this argument further we can then say that a lack of reproduction is actually good for humanity as it would prevent overcrowding and mis-allocations of resources. Your next points about whether or not religion should have faded out by now are immaterial to determining the goodness or badness of religion. Just because something may be outdated, doesn't make it bad. "In these religions the idea of faith, the act of canceling reason in order to believe in something, has been viewed as a positive attribute to its members and thus the idea has been forced onto them from an early age. This actually stops the process resulting in de-evolution and societal advancement comes to a halt and results in a strict culture based around ideas that can not be proven but are acknowledged as 'facts.'" There are several things wrong with your argument here. First, not all religions force themselves on people whether it be as a child or as an adult. This may be true about Christianity and Islam, the world's biggest missionary religions, but it is not true about Buddhism, Taoism, which focus on enlightening the mind. Furthermore, you assume in your next statement that progress is a good thing. I disagree with your implied assumption. Progress is neither good nor bad as it has both positive and negative effects on everything. With progress comes more advanced killing machinery and the prospect of a weapon that could annihilate everybody. If religion results in a devolution of advancement as you claim, this could be considered good in some aspects. As far as a strict culture based on "facts," there were cultures that do this with or without religion. Look at Soviet Russia, they were clearly an atheist country but went on "facts" that were dictated and wrong. Moreover, the "facts" assumed by most religions are much less strict than the Russians had and generally constitute the framework of the social contract that Locke discussed. Living in a world where free thought is discouraged may seem bad from the outside looking in; however, some people prefer to live a simpler life. "Religions is nothing more than a crude form of oligarchy which imposes social structures and rules around thoughts which trigger emotions. These forays are unfortunate in that they are are based on fictional premises, and therefore are meaningless and incomprehensible in the world of reality." You still haven't outright said why they were bad. Meaningless things are not bad. You made a blanket statement in the title of the debate that said "Religion is bad" and you have yet to provide any evidence that it is "bad" in terms of an all encompassing view of "bad." Escape to a world that is not reality is not bad. Many people are in a position where thinking about the prospects of the afterlife is the only comfort that they have. Most religions are against suicide therefore this person will continue to do their part in society until they die of natural causes. Religion keeps them going as a cog in the machinery of society, therefore cannot be considered bad. While this is a very jaded view of life, I feel it is appropriate to take a candid look at religion for the purposes of this debate. Yes there are things that religion does that to us may seem bad, but to the people who are involved with their religion it is not bad. You have to prove that all aspects of religion are bad since you didn't qualify for what religions are bad for in your opening statement. The most important thing about religion is it gives a lot of people comfort with their lives, and this is something so invaluable to many who don't have much.