Religion: crime against humanity

I was in a discussion recently which was, initially, discussing the problem of free will: a thorny issue for everyone. I'll leave that subject for another time, because I want to quote one of the people who mentioned a tangential issue:
'... a deterministic machine, and only a deterministic machine, can have free will. (Now it also needs consciousness, so it can't be just any machine).
A rock fails to qualify for free will by many criteria. It can't even think. It isn't even making a decision. Gravity is just pulling it closer to the nearest massive body.

I don't see programming as being contrary to free will, since people that are brain washed still have free will. And yes, there is a strong parallel between programming a computer and teaching a person to respond automatically to something, as what happens when people strictly make choices based on religious and other moral tenants [sic].'

It's this last statement that caught my attention. If we ignore his misuse of the word 'tenants' and replace it with 'tenets' (and the unnecessary 'what') he makes a reasonable point. Religious and moral ideologies are very similar to computer programming. I would, however, disagree with the suggestion that this programming is perfectly compatible with complete expression of free will.
The essence of religious ideologies is that a person feels forced, or chooses, to obey a large range of commandments in a number of different situations. These are imposed by a 'higher' authority and require no thought or consideration: just obedience. The choice, if the person truly did exercise it, rather than simply being programmed as a child or by long exposure, is still less of a choice than making a choice with every individual decision: the person has committed to one course of action which then governs a great deal of his life. Such a decision spares him the need to think; he can blindly follow his religious law safe in the knowledge that someone else has done the thinking for him.
I will address some consequences of this in another post, I think, but here I wonder if this is both right and good. The UN has declared that a person can not lose responsibility for his actions because they were dictated by a higher authority, a declaration implicit in the judgements about Nazi warcrimes, in which junior soldiers were punished for their roles despite having been ordered to do these things by senior officers. If this is current UN doctrine, why then do we tolerate (socially, not legally, which would be a different question) institutions such as the Catholic Church, which in particular represents a 'top-down' hierarchy of moral authority, in which the minions do the bidding of senior members, and are trained to do so unquestioningly in many instances.

Although I'm not trying to make a case for banning moral pronouncements, because that would infringe freedom of speech, and nor do I wish to legislate to attempt to control people's beliefs, I do find this contrast (one might almost say hypocrisy) startling. Imams and Catholic priests preach to their congregations in some places, I am told, as though their speech is divine revelation, and it is believed to be divinely inspired by some. A system in which an old man in Rome can tell millions of people that one cell is a human being and have them believe it is not only worrying, but actually has a noticeable effect on the country.
This example is the one of Catholic, Labour ministers in Britain attempting to change legislation on abortion in order to have it conform slightly more to Roman Catholic doctrine. Here we have people attempting to ruin the lives of some innocent young women, against all rational argument, because of the decree of a man who ought to have no say whatsoever in the running of a country of which he is not even a citizen.
If we contrast this to the Nazi soldiers who ruined (and took) the lives of innocent Jews, against all rational argument, because of the decree of a crazed loon, we can see two differences. First of all, their crazed loon was actually the leader of their country, with corresponding authority over it, and secondly, they were committed, as soldiers, to obedience, this being a vital part of soldiering.
The Catholic MPs, on the other hand, were committed to representing their constituents and were entrusted with the running of the country themselves: the man in Rome was not an elected official in Britain.

That we tolerate this corruption of our democracy and even praised these MPs for their principles demonstrates how widespread and how common this brainwashing is. We do not regard it as a shock, to be removed when seen, but in our cosy and comfortable world we have come to accept it as normal. We should not. People need to think about things, despite the powerful urge to rely on set beliefs and retire into lazy certainty, never to update or consider the beliefs again.