What's the harm?

A major argument put forward, mostly by politically correct and intellectually lazy people, in favour of superstitious beliefs religious or otherwise is to simply ask "what's the harm?" The harm is that sooner or later any delusional world view will influence a persons decisions and since the decision is made with an incomplete knowledge of reality the change will almost always be detrimental. This is really a very simple concept, the more informed a person is about a situation the better the odds their decision will be reasonable and without and unseen consequences. So in a far from comprehensive list here is a tiny selection of the harm caused by irrational beliefs.

A handful of homoeopathy related deaths, with links to the stories on each case.

Albinos killed (rarely humanely) for potion ingredients across Africa.

Endangered species around the world, sometimes the concoctions are actually harmful.
*apologies I lost a couple of links from this point due to accidentally using some character combinations that are involved in the scripts of this site and were causing problems, and I cant be bothered finding them again.

Several deaths from religious parents refusing medical care for their young children, and permanent disability (from the victims perspective)

The Catholic condom aids thing in Africa a Catholic article. This article shows why condoms are only having a limited effect (hint less than 5 condoms per year is not enough for sexually active people, the rest of the catholic case can be dismissed by pointing out condoms would need to increase peoples sexual partners more than ten times to spread aids as effectively as not using a condom.

A youtube video on all that MMR autism gibberish, also watch part 2 and check out his sources linked below the video.

Then lets not forget assorted terrorist attacks, mostly of a suicidal nature over the years, while not all are religious in nature every single one had a damaged view of reality. At the minute Muslim bombers are in fashion but a decade or so back it was (non suicide) Christians bickering in Ireland blowing stuff up, there was something in a Japanese subway many years ago too.... you get the picture.

Then there is suicide purely to hasten your own death such as the well publicised Heavens Gate incident.

Obviously these are a selection of more extreme examples but more minor issues are possible, if for example a child wants to become a doctor but rejects evolution they are unlikely to succeed because evolution is a vital part of the framework in understanding many illnesses. First if the childs dreams don't change they will be smashed, anything that reduces the number of doctors is bad. Or maybe you just hand over money to some sort of psychic(fraud), spiritualist(fake).

All that was a bit bleak so here's something to cheer everyone up.

The next time someone asks "what's the harm?" in believing a given falsehood, if you can think of any bad consequence answer them, if you can't eventually a believer will provide you with one.