I suppose it depends on the way you consume it, or it consumes you. If you use it to question your own actions rather than those of others it can be self fulfilling; but once you apply it to the real world rather than the spiritual things become dogmatic.
For example when you have a church declare contraception to be a sin in God's eyes by a group of men who have no idea what they are talking about you start to have problems. I cannot find any passage in the bible talking about condoms, yet I can find daily proof of millions dying from ignorance, overpopulation, malnutrition and disease. "Go forth and multiply" may be alright when you are in a clan of forty people but when you have seven billion enough is enough already. It's fine to state god's law when you don't suffer the consequences.
When one religion states its preeminence over all cults because and determines them to be enemies of god thing tends to be messy. The "god is on our side" is one hell of a presumption whilst motivational it may not be good military tactics.
When you use religion as a shield to hide your own intolerance, bigotry, sexism, and racism whilst ignoring the rest of the text or actions of it heroes, you begin to lack intellectual honesty. When you interpret one phrase that appears to give you preeminence over all things you begin to get intellectually lazy. There are indeed warnings of such behavior for example:
Matthew 7:3
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
When you blame every disaster on god, or every hardship god's will you may well be right but you also negate any possibility of change and the ingenuity that perhaps was "god" given to protect you and others. The Bible [and other such texts] may well have been a good survival guide for an ancient tribe, but if you believe god created us then "adaptability and intelligence" should also be useful survival tools.
One could also argue that it is not religion itself that makes you lazy but your own weakness, and those that attempt to use such simplification as going against god's word. We have the ability to think, we should do so. Throwing rules and regulations around without context are indeed intellectually lazy and the failure to adapt guaranteed to bring severe disappointment and will probably also be life threatening.
In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.
Buddha
There are seven billion people and there are seven billion individual beliefs and each one may be held to be true; it is bringing them together that requires intelligence and our survival as a species depends upon this knowledge.
If you believe in a god perhaps you were given enough intelligence to accept others on face value rather than hiding behind the one verse that gives comfort to your shortcomings?
Note: The diarist is an atheist and a Buddhist.