Read the new book questioning how religion affects our mood

In Dangerous Illusions: How Religion Deprives Us Of Happiness, author Vitaly Malkin suggests it may be restricting our thinking

Vitaly Malkin is behind the book Dangerous Illusions: How Religion Deprives Us Of Happiness (Karen Assayag/Hans Lucas)

We live in an age where radical scientific and technological progress helps us to be more independent and self-reliant, to connect with other people and expand our ideas. But a new book suggests that religion denies us the chance to enjoy our advancing society, because it represses pleasure and makes us suffer.

In Dangerous Illusions: How Religion Deprives Us Of Happiness, Vitaly Malkin claims religion has a devastating effect on the morals of individuals and society as a whole. Read this book, the Russian author, philanthropist, businessman and investor says, and be free of centuries of restrictive ways of thinking.

In it, he suggests that something thousands of years older than Facebook and smartphones is holding us back from achieving self-fulfilment and everyday contentment: religion. In fact, Malkin claims, religion — and our commitment to living under its illusions — poses the biggest danger to our society and mental states. Based on nearly a decade of research, Dangerous Illusions calls for a radical shift in our thinking; that reason and religion cannot co-exist, and that mankind will only be happy if we shake off the illusions of religion to live a life more rooted in the present.

Instead of living mindfully in the moment, he says, we find ourselves adhering to the irrational demands of religion. In his richly illustrated book, Malkin asks what benefit these offer us. Suffering and evil, pleasure and asceticism, sex and celibacy are all investigated through the views of Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

The author, whose interest in philosophy and the history of religion arose while engaged in philanthropic activities and travelling the world, argues that religion and social utopias interfere with our freedom of expression and thought. It imposes on us the absolutist criteria of good and evil, the promise of an afterlife and the prospect of a perfect future, he says.

But, he says, there’s a contradiction: we are reaping the rewards of the progress of recent decades, and have experienced changes more radical than previous centuries, yet we still blindly follow religion. Dangerous Illusions calls for the human race to throw off religion in favour of reason and common sense that befit a society as advanced as ours. If we don’t, claims Malkin, we risk losing our secular values, and he suggests that if only we recognised that humanity is living under dangerous illusions, we could live more freely — and happily.

Dangerous Illusions, by Vitaly Malkin, is published on 14 June by Arcadia Books. Visit dangerous-illusions.com