What is religion good for?

Just to bump and add a little...I think religion is a nice balance between our ultimately illogical / alogical nature, our seeming need to find cause-effect relationships, and the fact that we work in groups (we're social).I'm pretty confident the first can be defended with scientific studies (at least, to the degree that the studies can be generalized). I don't have any knowledge (besides anecdotal) to support the second or third thoughts.Ben

Interesting... I've only just thumbed through it right now (and I'll definitely go back when I have a moment), but it seems there are grounds to question your conclusions:

1. Just because religion is a problem now doesn't mean it wasn't a critical part of how we got here. The question remains what the role of religion was in previous times, in previous cultures, and if the role it played was essential.
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   An example of this is Japan. Ignoring the role of religion in Japan, the culture is extremely homogeneous. That cultural pressure itself provides coherence. Something in the past provided the view that homogenaity is important; what was it? It very well could have been religion, which played a critical role in Japan's past. Also could have been localist governments and the whole feudal system they had going on there. I don't know. The paper doesn't address it at all. It needs to be investigated before we make sweeping generalizations.
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2. Religion doesn't necessarily have to be playing a role in coherence of a society; but that doesn't mean it doesn't (in untested cultures) or didn't (in previous cultures). You imply that because it's not as good as other methods now, that it doesn't serve any role in coherence of a society. The coherence may be worse (by the measurements in the paper), but it may still be providing coherence.
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   That means, in the areas where religion is strong, the article doesn't imply that there's no coherence; it just says that the coherence is worse (by the measurements they give) than other mechanisms of coherence. Your statement seems to imply that religion provides no, or negative coherence. It's not clear from the data; the data also support the hypothesis that religion provides coherence, but the coherence is not as good as other types in today's industrialized world.
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3. Confounding factors--there's too many possibilities to list. I didn't see them address ANY. Do we really think that religious belief doesn't correlate with other important behavioral factors that might invalidate their findings?
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its the highly creationist parts of America that are strongly correlated with various societal ills.
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Sad to hear. And definitely an interesting article. But it's still a long way from the generalization you're giving here.

This is silly. Human experience is dependent on much more than just fundamental biological constraints. Society / culture are huge factors in our behavior and development.Surely culture changes. Do you think that 18th century Japanese culture has any fundamental differences compared to now? How about compared to 2000 years ago? How about compared to 20,000 years ago?Do you think religion was a factor for the pilgrims who first came to America? How about 1000 years before that? How about 20,000 years before that? Culture, Crash. It's all about culture.Here's another good example of how cultural changes dictate how things may be cohesive or may be divisive: nationalism. Do you think nationalism brought a country together after 9/11? Do you think anything has changed since then? I would suggest that nationalism was a big bonding factor around 9/11, but now is turning into a divisive force. Really fast change.Culture changes. Needs change. Knowledge changes. The role of religion changes. Not if everybody's a believer. Not if believers are stronger from their faith and are able to co-exist with non-believers.Maybe how religion works is dependent on population size of a culture. Paper didn't investigate it, and you're dismissing the possibility without considering it. Maybe religion works really well for tribal-sized cultures. A good place to examine might be in some African nations then. What are the cultural mechanisms used to keep a tribe together as a cohesive unit?Even if religion provides ceremonies; music; leaders--then as far as these items are providing cohesion, religion is too. People aren't as autonomous as you're wanting to make them out to be. It's a chicken-egg situation only if the correlating factor is causally connected to religious belief. If it's only incidentally related, then it means religion has nothing to do with the correlation.For example, let's say that test scores (crimes) correlates with skin color (religion). Let's also say that skin color (religion) also correlates with income (unknown factor X). According to you, it's a "chicken-egg" situation between test scores and skin color. What I'm saying is there's a 3rd external cause--income--that relates the skin color (religion) and test scores (crime). Thus, skin color (religion) has nothing to do with test scores (crime); it's an incidental correlation. It's possible to have one without the other.There's so many things religion could correlate with; simple ones that have no causal connection but rather incidental, such as geographical location. You can't make the conclusions you want to unless you rigorously explore these scenarios.

It doesn't matter if something else MIGHT have worked just as well; if religion is what provided social cohesion for a group of people in the past, then religion provided that benefit.I don't think the supernatural part is necessarily important either. But if religion is what provided social cohesion, then that was a good aspect of religion. Heck, evein if religion COULD provide social cohesion, it's a good aspect of religion.