Sometimes people I know say to me “Why are you so hard on religious people? Why must you hassle? What harm does it do?” and from time to time I even find myself saying things like “Who cares if the guy that pumps my gas thinks the world is only 3000 years ago? Does it really matter? He wasn’t going to be publishing any papers on geophysics anyway.”
Then I read articles like this one:
A Wainuiomata woman was killed during her family’s attempt to exorcise a Maori curse, with the mother of two drowning in a lounge as up to 40 relatives watched.
..and this one …
Jehovah’s Witness mother dies after refusing blood transfusion
A 22-year-old mother died just hours after giving birth to twins because doctors were forbidden from giving her a blood transfusion as a Jehovah’s Witness. … Peter Welsh, the couple’s best man when they married two years ago, told the Sun: “We can’t believe she died in childbirth in this day and age, with all the technology there is.”
She didn’t die because of a lack of technology. She died, pointlessly, and preventatively, because she believed in bullshit. The maori woman drowned, while her family fucking LOOKED ON, because they all were taught that nonsensical fairy tales were truth.
Where’s the harm? There, gentle readers, is the fucking harm.