Is religion good for us?

Even as easy answers go, the word religion seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting here.There's certainly a religious aspect to the way young men are radicalized in the Middle East. But ignoring all the political resentment, cultural ideas about manhood and rebellion, and economic vested interests in the phenomenon of modern terrorism is just way too self-serving. Religion in American history is such a vast subject that simply blaming right-wing numbnuttery on religion is turning a blind eye to the function of religion in such episodes as abolition, the Social Gospel, the civil rights struggle, and women's suffrage. And if you're going to make it sound like the terms radical and muslim go together, you're pretending the docile, Westernized form of Islam practiced in the USA either doesn't exist or isn't True Islam.

I agree with Jon that we can say exactly that. We just can't convict.Not every matter is supposed to be approached like a criminal trial. As a society, we think it's preferable to acquit a guilty person than convict an innocent one. However, skepticism only protects us from making a type-1 error (accepting a false null hypothesis). There are plenty of cases where we act on little or no real evidence to avoid making a type-2 error (rejecting a true null hypothesis). We leave buildings when we hear a fire alarm instead of waiting for the sight of open flames; we take the kid to the emergency room when he falls off his bike instead of holding out until there's proof of bone breakage; and no offense, but we believe what pop science books tell us about the scientific consensus rather than reviewing the raw data first hand.