[cj]

"Intellectual black holes" help a lot of people, in that it gives them a sense of purpose, security, etc. Religion is comforting to those grieving death.

However, the danger comes when intellectual black holes are propagated within society and thus accepted as truth, resulting in arbitrary notions of whats right and wrong.

[kylemaxwell]

And it depends on the effect of the black hole, as you say. If my neighbor believes in flying saucers, hey no skin off my nose. But when enough of my neighbors believe it that they affect space policy, or my even just that one neighbor starts up a floodlight at night as a signal beacon and thus I can't sleep, now we have issues.

[wmat]

Off topic, but this comment describes how I feel about the Catholic School Board we have in Canada. Because of historical precedent, in Ontario we have two school systems, one that is secular and public, and one that is separate, for people of the Catholic faith. My problem lies in the public funding of this system. A good article about this was recently published in This Magazine: http://this.org/magazine/2011/06/09/abolish-catholic-schools...

[zwieback]

Growing up in Germany we had "Religion" as a first-class citizen in the curriculum, all the way through 13th grade. Where I grew up we were almost exactly 50% Protestant, 50% Catholic so we split up in those groups for our classes. You (your parents) could declare yourself non-religious and skip those classes but few did, even though almost nobody I knew said they believed in god. The Religion classes, which were part history, part ethics classes were actually one of my favorite subjects even though I can't remember ever in my life believing in a supreme being of any sort.

[lucasjung]

A lot of those effects are positive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55h1FO8V_3w

[ISeemToBeAVerb]

I agree. My pet peeve with this article is that it isn't pointed in the right direction.

So what if someone wants to believe ghosts or aliens exist? He's certainly correct in saying that it CAN be a problem when things get too intense, but that only happens in a relatively small number of cases.

The place where the BS meter needs to be pointed is squarely at the people who have influence over our social and political policies. THAT would be an interesting book, though far more difficult to write I'm sure.

[rwmj]

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre is one such book (aimed mainly at the damage caused by quack medical beliefs).