Traditions and Religious Practices That Should Be Banned as Humanity Progresses
Humanity has inherited thousands of traditions.
Some contain extraordinary art, philosophy, community, music, architecture, celebration and wisdom. Others originated in societies where children had few rights, women could be treated as property, caste determined opportunity, slavery was normal, medicine was primitive, and religious authority was rarely accountable.
Age does not make a practice ethical.
A tradition may be ancient and still be cruel. A practice may be sacred to one generation and intolerable to the next.
Human progress therefore requires a distinction that is surprisingly simple:
Protect belief. Protect culture. Protect voluntary ritual. Prohibit demonstrable harm.
The state should not decide which gods are true or which theology is correct. It should intervene when conduct crosses ordinary boundaries of bodily autonomy, consent, childhood protection, equality, liberty or public safety.
1. Rituals involving non-consensual bodily injury
No religious justification should permit one person to permanently injure another person who has not freely and competently consented.
Practices involving mutilation, branding, burning, cutting, forced starvation, dangerous restraint, poisoning or comparable physical injury should therefore be governed by the same standards that apply outside religion.
A temple, shrine, church, mosque, monastery, cult, family tradition or spiritual teacher should not become a legal exemption from bodily autonomy.
Sacredness cannot function as immunity from assault.
2. Forced and child marriage
Marriage requires meaningful consent.
A child cannot meaningfully negotiate the enormous legal, sexual, reproductive, financial and psychological consequences of marriage with an adult.
Neither religion nor tradition should provide an exception.
Forced marriage between adults should likewise be prohibited where threats, confinement, financial coercion, violence, confiscation of documents or severe family pressure destroy genuine consent.
3. Ritual sexual exploitation
Any religious practice in which spiritual authority is used to obtain sexual access deserves intense scrutiny.
Statements such as:
“God requires this.”
“Your guru needs this.”
“Sex with me will purify you.”
“Refusing will bring divine punishment.”
cannot transform exploitation into consent.
Sexual activity involving minors, trafficking, coercion or abuse of dependency should be prosecuted regardless of religious terminology.
4. Human sacrifice and ritual killing
This should be obvious, yet the principle matters:
No supernatural claim gives anyone ownership over another human life.
Human sacrifice, ritual murder, honour killing, witch-hunting and killings justified by accusations of possession, sorcery, apostasy or supernatural contamination belong outside lawful civilisation.
5. Witch-hunting and exorcisms involving violence
People experiencing epilepsy, psychosis, neurological illness, trauma, dissociation or other distress have historically been interpreted as possessed, cursed or bewitched.
People remain free to pray for someone who welcomes prayer.
The legal boundary should arise when an alleged exorcism involves beating, burning, starvation, confinement, forced ingestion, sexual assault, deprivation of medical treatment or other abuse.
Calling violence an exorcism does not make it medicine.
6. Caste-based exclusion and hereditary degradation
Culture cannot justify treating human beings as intrinsically polluted, inferior or socially untouchable because of their birth.
Practices enforcing hereditary segregation, exclusion from public facilities, occupational bondage or discriminatory denial of education and services should have no protection merely because someone describes them as traditional.
History can be studied without being reenacted.
7. Religious practices enforcing slavery or bonded labour
Any institution claiming ownership or coercive control over another person’s labour should face ordinary labour and anti-trafficking law.
That includes arrangements disguised through spiritual language.
Service voluntarily undertaken by an adult is one thing.
Being unable to leave is another.
8. Dangerous denial of medical care to children
Adults generally deserve substantial freedom in deciding what happens to their own bodies.
Children require stronger protection.
Parents should not be permitted to allow a child to die or suffer serious preventable injury when effective medical treatment is reasonably available merely because a religious authority prohibits treatment.
Parents can teach children their religion.
They should not possess unlimited authority over their children’s survival.
9. Rituals involving severe animal cruelty
The fact that an act has been performed for centuries does not automatically resolve the ethical question.
Religious practices involving animals should therefore be governed by transparent animal-welfare standards concerning unnecessary suffering, confinement, mutilation, transportation and killing.
The relevant question should not be:
“How old is this tradition?”
It should be:
“What suffering does this practice cause, and is that suffering legally justified?”
The same standard should apply consistently to religious and secular conduct.
10. Coercive conversion and coercive retention
Freedom of religion means very little unless it includes four freedoms:
The freedom to believe. The freedom to disbelieve. The freedom to convert. The freedom to leave.
Conversion obtained through violence, unlawful threats, confinement or comparable coercion should be prohibited.
But the principle must operate in both directions.
Preventing someone from leaving a religion through violence, threats, forced marriage, social imprisonment or other unlawful coercion is equally incompatible with religious freedom.
There should be no legal prison called faith.
11. Religious confinement and forced isolation
Adults may voluntarily join monasteries, communes, ashrams or other intentional religious communities.
They must also remain legally capable of leaving them.
Confiscating passports, preventing communication with relatives, physically blocking departure, withholding someone’s property as leverage or using threats to prevent exit crosses the boundary between community and captivity.
The right to enter must be accompanied by the right to exit.
12. Dangerous ordeals presented as tests of faith
Walking across harmless ceremonial spaces is one thing.
Forcing people into fire, poisonous substances, dangerous fasting, extreme temperatures, suffocation, hazardous handling of animals or other potentially lethal ordeals is another.
Adults can voluntarily undertake considerable risks in life. But organizers should not escape safety obligations merely by describing predictable physical danger as divine testing.
13. Violence against people accused of blasphemy, apostasy or sacrilege
Ideas do not possess bodies.
Humans do.
Criticising Krishna, Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, Shiva, Kali, the Buddha, scripture, atheism or any other religious or philosophical proposition should never justify mob violence or private punishment.
A civilisation confident in its ideas does not need to physically destroy its critics.
14. Religious humiliation of menstruating women
Menstruation is biology, not moral contamination.
Practices that involve private voluntary observances are different from systems that materially exclude, confine, endanger or degrade women because ordinary biological processes supposedly make them impure.
Human dignity should outrank inherited superstition.
15. Branding children with permanent religious identities
Children inevitably inherit culture from their families. Completely preventing that would be neither realistic nor desirable.
But societies should be cautious about treating a child’s inherited religion as an irreversible contract.
A child born to Hindu parents is not obligated to remain Hindu.
A child born to Muslim parents is not obligated to remain Muslim.
A child born to Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Sikh, Jain or atheist parents possesses the same future intellectual freedom.
Parents may introduce a worldview.
They should not own the adult mind that eventually emerges.
The Standard Should Be Harm, Not Religious Popularity
There is an important danger here.
Governments themselves can become oppressive while claiming to reform religion.
A government hostile to a minority could simply redefine harmless rituals as dangerous and prohibit them selectively. That would replace religious authoritarianism with state authoritarianism.
Therefore bans should satisfy demanding tests.
There should be identifiable harm or a serious risk of harm. Restrictions should be necessary and proportionate. Comparable secular conduct should be treated similarly. Independent courts should be able to review government decisions. Minority religions should receive the same protections as majority religions.
And merely finding something offensive, irrational, strange or theologically wrong should not be enough to prohibit it.
What Should Not Be Banned
Human progress does not require sterilising civilisation.
Prayer should remain.
Pilgrimage should remain.
Meditation should remain.
Festivals should remain.
Religious clothing should remain.
Temples, churches, mosques, synagogues, monasteries and shrines should remain wherever communities want them.
People should remain free to fast voluntarily, worship unusual gods, reject every god, become monks, become atheists, change religions, invent philosophies and believe things their neighbours consider ridiculous.
Freedom includes the freedom to be unconventional.
What civilisation should progressively eliminate is coercion disguised as tradition and harm disguised as holiness.
The Civilisational Upgrade
Perhaps humanity needs a simple rule for inherited customs:
Tradition deserves preservation only while human beings retain the freedom to question it, refuse it and leave it.
Every generation inherits civilisation unfinished.
Our ancestors abolished or challenged institutions that earlier societies considered completely normal. Future generations will almost certainly look at some practices considered ordinary today and wonder why we tolerated them.
Progress does not require hatred of our ancestors.
It requires refusing to inherit their mistakes unquestioningly.
Keep the music.
Keep the architecture.
Keep the stories.
Keep the philosophy.
Keep the festivals.
Keep whatever gives people meaning without taking freedom from someone else.
But when a tradition requires a victim in order to survive, humanity should choose the victim.
No tradition is older than human dignity. No scripture is above bodily autonomy. No religious authority is above accountability. And no god should require the suspension of another human being’s fundamental rights.
