Is religion good for us?

Religion's place in human society is a bit more complicated than a simple label of "good" or "evil" would allow.For one thing, religion has done more good than you give it credit for. I would even speculate that religion has historically been a necessity in human history, allowing for social grouping, the propogation of ethical systems, etc. While we certainly consider many of the ethical systems and social guidelines of religions to be anachronistic today, in many cases they were very progressive at their inception. Mosty also served as a codified set of laws, beyond simple ethics, by which a society can run. Religion can still serve that purpose, and does in many cases - the problem is not so simplistic because not all religions or even followers of a specific religion grant the same degree of social harm or benefit. Most forms of modern Christianity, as an example, often encourages sympathy and charity for the less fortunate, even if the results are often less than optimal.The major negative of religion is actually not on your list at all - in fact your list consists only of symptoms of the on real problem: religion does not significantly change, because it is not at its core a rational approach to determinign the real state of the Universe.Religion (organized or otherwise) primarily consists of humanity's attempts to answer the so-called "big questions" of life in a world where we simply don't (or didn't) have any evidence from which to draw a rational conclusion. Think about the level of knowledge of the average Grek philosopher, for example, and you find that they knew virtually nothing. They were no less intelligent than you or I, but we have the benefit of a few thousand years of cumulative investigations that tey were not privy to. They had no idea what, beyond their own personal will, made their own hands move. They had no idea why blood was so important, only that if you lost enough you would die. They didn't know what the Sun was, or the moon, or the stars.Religion purports to fill in some of those gaps in knowledge with what would have been speculation, a possible explanation to a given mysterious phenomenon that was consistent with what little was understood at the time, but in the absence of evidence. The Sun, then, was Apollo's fiery chariot wheel as he drove across the sky. Often times, the given explanations to mysterious phenomenon were mysterious themselves, but served to stop curiosity and thereby halt further investigation.Essentially, when faced with an unknown with no immediate method for examinign the territory, religion simply draws its own map. The religion then claims that its map is more accurate than any other maps, and we sow the seeds for trouble when two conflicting religions meet...or we become better able to investigate the real territory and find that the old map wasnt actually accurate at all.This is the major problem of religion - the claim that the facts are already known, and a reisistance to conflicting ideas regardless of their source. A rational person would want to believe that x exists if they found themselves in a Universe where x does actually exist, and would not want to believe in x if they found themselves in a Universe where x does not exist. A rational mind lets reality dictate belief, because our beliefs are rather ineffective at dictating reality. A rational mind seeks to investigate reality so that its beliefs can be changed to match - because an unchanged belief never becomes more accurate.The methodology of religious faith means that the belief set is either right or wrong, and that's that. It is difficult and sometimes impossible to change religious dogma. Official Mormon Church dogma still states, as an example, that Native Americans were descended from a tribe of Jews from the Middle East, and that their skin pigmentation was altered due to a curse from God, even though genetic and archeological evidence compeltely falsifies such a belief - reality and Mormon dogma are at odds, yet the Church still endorses that falsified claim. In doing so, it harms society with the racist claim that skin pigmentation is related to favor from God (a popular belief in Joseph Smith's time) and the propagation of known falsehoods as truth. This same basic behavior can be traced to most if not all of the negative aspects of religion that you mentioned.A rational invesitgation of reality requires a much more mutable mindset. A given belief may be perfectly rational today, and tomorrow you may acquire new evidence that forces you to radically change or even discard that belief. This is the view that is strengthening in the world today, even amongst the nominally religious, and often in direct contradiction of the teachings of the self-identified religion. The reality that homosexuality does not actually harm society and that homosexual people are still people just like our other friends, neighbors, and family members, for example, is overcoming historical biases even among Christians whose own text calls homosexuality an "abomination" and calls for their execution.Those societies that do not constrain themselves so strongly to religious teachings tend to have happier, wealthier, and more educated citizens than those societies who still cling to religion as infallible truth.I would say that religion as a whole represents a flawed and outdated method of thought, where beliefs become stagnant and very often conflict with reality. I would say that it's less than optimal in the grand scheme of things, that it provides less potential benefit and significantly more harm than would be found in a world without religion, but is not necessarily "evil." The growing trend for people to allow their own beliefs to conflict with the literal teachings of their faith is slowly serving to negate the stagnation of ethical, intellectual and scientific progress represented by people like the Dover school board or Fred Phelps. The inherent conflicts between various religions, and between those religions and reality, can and have caused massive harm...but the fact that such massively harmful events as 9/11 or the Holocoust are the exceptions rather than the rule, and that by and large people of multiple beliefs are able to get along without violence or religious oppression in many nations, suggests that religion today is rather like a loaded rifle on a table: you probably don't need it, you might use it to shoot your neighbor, but you could also use it to hunt food for your family, even if it would probably be better to just go to the grocery store.

The list exists as an oversimplification. It's rather like trying to analyze the individual adaptations of an organism as "good" or "bad" - what are we comparing it to?For example, one of the primary effects of religious indoctrination today is the propagation of moral instruction. Now, you or I would argue that the moral instruction offered by religious dogma is less than optimal, it's not the best possible system, but it is better than no moral instruction at all. On top of that, it's extremely varied - the ethics I learned from my parents as a young Presbyterian would be different from the ethics taught by, say, Fred Phelps, and we'd call them both "religious."I'd rather have someone learn "love thy neighbor" from religious indoctrination, even at the risk of possibly including some of the nonsense (not all Christians buy the whole "homosexuality is an abomination" thing, for example), than have that person receive no early moral instruction at all, or to have outright negative moral instruction. It could possibly be argued that an innate sense of empathy could serve the same goal while bypassing the possibility of the potential negative side effects, but I'm not sure that's really the case. Ideally, I'd like to see children taught from a relatively young age about various systems of ethics, and how to rationally decide which course of action is the best possible in any circumstance under each system - as well as exposing the flaws inherent in some systems, such as Authoritarianism.Do you see what I mean? You can;t wrap this one up and say "religion does all of this bad stuff in exchange for some warm fuzzies." It does serve some objectively positive functions - it's simply the case that for the most part those positive functions tend to be not quite as good as other possible solutions. And that's without even touching the fact that there are thousands of extant religions, each of which occupies its own space on the benefit/harm spectrum for each individual topic that's up for consideration.Because religious thought exemplifies a method of thinking that is significantly inferior to more rational approaches, I think it;'s perfectly fair to say that religion is less than optimal and carries a high risk of very significant pitfalls.But I feel very uncomfortable labeling all religion as "evil" and thus lumping theocratic mass-murdering terrorists in with some Wiccan lady from New York who does little more than pray privately over some multicolored candles. Neither may be optimal, both may be irrational, but one is most certainly evil while the other is much closer to harmless.

Indeed - basic morality stemming from empathy and a desire to continue to socialize tends to give rise to some of the very basics, for the same reasons we see basic ethical behavior in other social animals.As I said, the question is what you're comparing against, because this is not a question that can be boiled down to a binary good/evil distinction. Each member of each sect of each religion is going to be slightly different. A maybe greater than B, but that doesn't mean that A is the best possible choice, or that B is the worst. Honestly, when dealing with generalities like your OP, it's extremely difficult to find where "not the best" starts to fade into "evil."If you asked me about a specific set of religious beliefs, I could answer better. But when the subject of discussion varies as widely as religion in general...you may as well ask whether people as a whole are "good" or "evil." It;s not a question that can be honestly answered that way - human beings are not as "good" as they possibly could be, but there is so much variety in human behavior and even in defining what constitutes "good" and "evil" themselves that it's not a question that can be answered as phrased.Remember, morality is subjective. The relative "good" and "bad" of any specific course of action can be determined to be different by separate individuals based on what specific moral system they're using. To a Christian who truly believes in a literally true Bible, obviously one religion would qualify as completely "good," while all other choices would be identified as "evil"...and what's more, if we assume for the sake of argument that the Bible is literally true, then the Christian would be right.Who cares? Instinctual human thought is hopelessly flawed anyway. More important is who is doing the hijacking, and whether the learned sense of right and wrong is superior to the instinctual one, and then whether the learned system is the best possible. Personally, I wouldn't trust a toddler's instinctual sense of right and wrong to make my real-life moral decisions.If we were to restrict ourselves to discussing specific religions, we could go into better detail. I would agree that the Abrahamic faiths tend to use guilt and the criminalization of harmless basic human instincts like fantasizing about the attractive woman across the street to gain a measure of control while offering no social benefit and in fact setting the stage for significant individual and social ills from all of that repression.Not all religions, of course, do any such thing. The Wiccan moral instruction, to continue that example, basically consists of "do whatever you want as long as you don't harm anyone else, because whatever you do good or ill will come back to you sevenfold." There's no control, or even an authority to take advantage of it if there were.I can do a harm/benefit analysis on a specific individual's specific beliefs. I cannot do the same across all religions, except to say that irrationality will always be less preferable than rationality, and that appealing to tradition is always less optimal than adjusting to new information when appropriate.

My instincts remain similar, but I most certainly do not listen to them - especially as they pertain to morality. I try to analyze moral problems in terms of net harm or benefit, while my instinctual reaction is based on emotional impact rather than more rational things like numbers.For instance, rationally I can say that Iraq and Afghanistan are ethically worse than 9/11 simply because of the number of civilians killed and the total harm done to secondary victims, while my emotional reaction still tells me that 9/11 was horrible because it affected me more personally and was scarier.It goes beyond ethics as well. I don't trust my instinctual, emotional reactions to anything. To continue with 9/11 as an example, international terrorism is extremely scary and emotionally carries a huge impact...but I consider it one of the least important problems facing the world today, considering that things like smoking, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, cancer, or even driving cause orders of magnitude more death and harm every year than acts of terrorism.

While I agree that religion exemplifies a specific void of critical thinking, the fact is that human beings are not always consistent in their application of intelligence. Most people compartmentalize their beliefs quite well, to the point that they can simultaneously believe in their particular religion, and still behave like mostly-rational individuals in their everyday life. The deist who accepts everything that science discovers, who demands evidence to believe any claim except for his chosen belief in a deity, is not being too terribly harmful.There most certainly are religious beliefs that are "closer to harmless" than others. I don't think you would claim that RAZD, for example, as a science-believing deist is harmful to remotely the same degree as some fundamentalist Christian who shoots a doctor for performing abortions, or a group of Muslim extremists who burn down a school because it teaches to girls. I certainly think that RAZD's beliefs are irrational, I can't see how they actually do any real harm to anyone at all (except himself and Straggler, as the two continue to wage verbal warfare and cause what I'm sure are multitudes of frustration headaches).A lack of rationality is not harmful in and of itself. It can simply lead to harm. The fact is that for most religious people, their irrational beliefs are simply tacked-on to and separate from their more rational daily outlook. A purely rational world is preferable to a partially irrational one because it eliminates that specific potential for harm, but I can believe that my imaginary friend Fred actually exists all I want without actually causing any harm.Religion is not the sole source of irrationality. In a world without religion, we would still have wars, still have poverty, still have bigotry. Racism, homophobia, and other bigotry cross all religious views. Humanity naturally gravitates toward tribalism - religion is one way in which we separate ourselves, but it's not the only way. Soccer hooligans don't need much more than differently colored uniforms to cause a violent riot. Many religious people are completely tolerant of others - Martin Luther King Jr was of course one of the largest civil rights figures in modern history, and he was a Reverend.The basic problems behind poverty, wars, disease and bigotry are given excuses by somereligions, but removing religion from the equation would not solve the problems. Multitudes of sociological studies have shown that man will behave inhumanly towards man without reason. People who are "different" from the majority will be singled out and persecuted, and those differences can include religion, but also include skin color, social status, sexual orientation or gender, or even the support of the wrong sports team."A person can be smart. People are scared, stupid animals and you know it."Again - religion is not the optimal solution. Ideally, all human beings would behave rationally at all times, including not only discarding religion, but also discarding irrational separations between races and genders and so on. But that doesn't mean that religion can be identified, in general, as "evil."Remember - many people choose a set of irrational beliefs because they agree with the positive ethical message they carry.This doesn't even touch on the fact that most "believers" don;t actually believe, but rather believe that they believe, while still anticipating events as if their belief were false. But that's a subject for another thread.

It depends entirely on how the irrationality expresses itself, and how much of a person's everyday life is guided by irrationality. The vast majority of religious people I've known were just as rational as the average Atheist outside of their specific religious beliefs, and they usually tend to adhere to more modern versions of morality (discarding such antiquated notions as stoning rebellious children or burning witches and homosexuals).I think you're getting caught in a positive-reinforcement trap - those religious people who do cause harm with their irrationality are the ones we tend to actually hear about and come into contact with. We forget that the vast majority by far of everyone else we come into contact with is also religious, and for them, a bit of irrationality does very little real harm.My imaginary friend example isn't such a remote one as you suggest. For many religious people, religion is something "tacked on" to reality, an additional consideration that doesn't really change what they would have done anyway if they weren't believers.You're right that for the most part we're on the same page, though - we would both prefer all people to be perfectly rational at all times, as that would seem to be the ideal solution with the best benefit/harm ratio. I don't think religion is a source at all. I think religion is a symptom.The human mind left to its own devices (read: not educated) is not very rational. That is the core problem, and one we aren't likely to solve in the near future. Currently, the best we can do is to spread education about the cognitive defects inherent in human thought, and the more rational methods of making decisions. That's unfortunately slow. Even with education, we still tend to "feel" that topics of great emotional impact are of greater importance even if more people are affected by a more boring issue; we tend to consider something to be more likely if we hear about it more often, regardless of actual statistics; etc. It feels strange to use the word "choose" to me as well, but the fact is, many people do choose their religion. I find it difficult now to comprehend the act of consciously deciding to find a set of beliefs credible, as opposed to being forced to acknowledge the probability that a given individual claim is true or false based on available evidence. I can;t "choose" to believe in Yahweh or Thor any more than I can "choose" to believe that the sky is actually green.Some people, however, do. And while your point about childhood indoctrination is certainly valid, if you talk to an adult who was indoctrinated as a child, very frequently you come down to such things as "I choose to believe this, because otherwise I'll go to Hell," or "I choose to believe this, because otherwise life isn't worth living," or "I choose to believe this because otherwise I'd lose all sense of morality and become a murderous psychopathic rapist." We are solidly in agreement that the most preferable world would not include religion, and would instead include a great deal more education in logic and critical thinking from an early age.But as it relates to the OP, I simply cannot classify every possibility that is less beneficial than the absolute optimal solution to be "evil." Religion is a symptom of the irrationality that naturally comes with the human mind unless education and effort are taken to curb our instincts.Again I would use my analogy of a loaded rifle on a table: you probably don't need it at all, you might shoot your neighbor with it(intentionally or otherwise), and while you could use it for the good purpose of hunting food for your family, it's generally better to just buy food from the grocery store.Religion isn't really necessary. It can and has been used to cause great harm, both intentionally and unintentionally. It can and has also been used to great benefit, spreading what were for a time progressive moral systems and codifying laws so that permanent societies could form, and still today drive a great deal of humanitarian aid...but it would be better if people just cared about humanitarianism without the additional baggage of religion.

Then why am I and other atheists (who make up a measurable proportion of the population nowadays) not murderous rampaging psychopathic rapists? Why don't I steal? Why do I speak up for oppressed minorities? Why do I try to help my neighbors when I'm able, and give to charities? The Japanese were not atheist for the most part. Traditional Japanese religion (Shinto, I beleive, but I could be wrong) did in fact recognize a deity. He was the Emperor, very much like how the Egyptians considered their Pharaohs to be living gods.The cause wasn't the presence or lack of religion, or even religious differences. It was a problem of cultural separations and war, which typically results in the dehumanization of enemy nations. The Nazis were not atheist - they were Christian. The entire Nazi movement, particularly the antisemitism, was taken directly from Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant movement and author of On the Jews and their Lies. The belt buckle of the Nazi military uniform was inscribed with the words (translated) "God with us." Hitler himself in his many political speeches and in his book Mein Kampf repeatedly referred to the Christian god. The Italian Gestapo were similar - most were Catholic. I can at least give you that these were atheist.But oddly enough, after their highly immoral governments acted to remove religion, the people of Russia and China still did not revert to murderous rampaging psychopathic rapists and thieves. If morality were so absolutely necessary in order for morality to exist at all, we would anticipate that after religion had been removed from these societies, they would collapse due to the total breakdown of social order, or we would at the very least observe a corresponding increase in amoral behavior. Yet we did not observe anty such thing - Russian and Chinese people without religion seem to have been just as ethical as they were with religion.More examples lie in modern Europe, where religion is losing its grip and atheism is on a steep rise. In the Scandinavian nations, atheists represent a significant portion of the population...yet they have some of the best social programs for caring for the sick and poor and elderly of all nations, as well as some of the lowest rates of violent crime.Religion is not necessary for morality to exist. When religion is removed from a society or an individual, moral behavior remains. This isn't opinion, it is easily observable fact.Christianity can be good for you, yes. But Christianity can also be very bad, and it can never be as good for you as some of the alternatives.

Rather amusingly, I've been perhaps the largest defender of religion in this thread, and I've specifically said multiple times that religion in general is not necessarily "evil." I most certainly have not advocated the forcible removal of religion. I don;t think I have the ability to decide on matters of faith for anyone other than myself - I can only express my own judgment based on the factual costs and benefits of religion in human history. I fully support the basic human right to believe or disbelieve according to the dictates of one's own conscience. The analogy didn't include anyone else at the table. You completely and totally missed the entire point, despite the fact that I spelled it out right below the analogy. And you're continuing your easily disproved "morality is impossible without religion" mantra. Stop that - it's been disproved so many times it's really no longer amusing. Once again, I've been perhaps the largest defender of religion in this thread.It would seem that you are a troll, that you don;t seek to engage in debate, but rather to find an atheist post and call it ridiculous without actually referring to the content.

That wasn;t where Ringo was going with that, and you know it.Ringo is entirely correct - irrationality is not necessarily harmful. If you and I hold identical beliefs except that I also believe that there is an invisible dragon in my garage, my set of beliefs is still no more or less harmful than yours.And again, this isn't an outlandish example. If you and I hold identical beliefs, except that I also believe that God caused the Universe to exist, and that Jesus died for my sins, and that there is an afterlife, and that I should be good to people, then my beliefs are no more or less harmful than yours.Irrational religious beliefs are only one potential source of harm. When resources are spent building churches and printing Bibles rather than feeding the hungry and providing shelter for the homeless, then we start to enter into the arena of harm (obviously that's simply the mildest example of harm; I think Inquisitions and Crusades and Holocausts are more than obvious enough to not require debate).When an irrational belief is not causing harm, then it is the moral equivalent of color preference - or cereal preference, as Ringo was trying to point out. It's not "evil" to say "...and God caused all of that," even if it is irrational. I'd be rather hesitant to use the word "couldn't." In fact, I'd wager that if we held an experiment where we gave both you and Buz the same critical thinking problem that was in no way related to science, morality, or religion (say a logic puzzle for example), there is a fair chance you'd both arrive at the same solution.The ability to think critically is not so much the problem as the universal application of that skill - you can't have any "sacred cows."Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.