Religion is full of people commiting self harm!

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Self harm is supposed to be very bad, mainly because a person is deliberately injuring themselves due to a number of mental, emotional, psychological problems and/or substance. It can lead to things like severe scarring, infections, or accidental death. And yet many religions have at least some kind of self-harm as a ritual. Fasting, self-mutilation, self-flogging... I've even seen people on TV have themselves nailed to a crucifix. They would be taken down from it when the pain got too severe, which was usually in only a few minutes. Personally I think just having my palms impaled by big metal spikes would be too painful.

So why is self-harm bad when it's not done because of religion, but perfectly acceptable when it is? Deliberately torturing yourself should always be a bad thing.

That isn’t even counting circumcision.

Don't forget snake handling.

I think that the vast majority of people who belong to most religious groups would actually say that self-harm is bad whether it's done for religious purposes or not. Just because you see somebody from a certain minority doing a certain thing on TV doesn't mean that it's considered acceptable by most people who belong to that minority.

I would not say very many religious groups do self harm. Fasting is not as harmful now because they changed it so that you can eat but just not full meals.

Shiite Muslims have a festival called Ashura. That's the one where they beat themselves to a bloody pulp with swords and chains in the street. I've seen the pictures. They're pretty gross.

The Jains have a ritual called Santhara. That's when an elderly person, ready to give up his or her body to free their karma-reduced soul, starve themselves to "death." I say "death" because Jainism views the body as just a transport vehicle for the all-important soul, so when the body dies, the living soul is released, thus death is not seen as final but merely a transmorgrification, if you will.

Hopefully most of this stuff is confined to the lunatic fringe. I think when religions do this sort of thing it all comes down to a guy in a big hat who's getting off on it in some way.