Has religion been a net good or bad thing for humanity?

Yes, despite, not because of. I’ll always wonder what could have been. But don’t think it’s Christianity alone I have a beef with; that’s being too specific. It’s organized religion of just about any flavor. I see many similar drawbacks in the day-to-day practices of the Buddhists. Their sole advantage that I can tell is they generally don’t proselytize and so not being a Buddhist myself is not as big a deal as being a non-Christian amid a group of Christians.

Well, you are looking at things from the perspective of being able to stand on the shoulders of all those who came before us. To be sure, IMHO our modern, secular outlook is in the foothills of where human kind will eventually soar to new heights. But consider the road to get to where we are now. Without organized religion I seriously doubt we would have ever gotten here.

Take those Buddhists you mentioned…and the Taoists and Confusionists as well. Think of the number of innovations and additions to modern society that China has contributed throughout it’s long history. Consider the sheer amount of historical knowledge preserved by Chinese writings. Then consider…where did it come from? Why did it happen? What was the glue that held it together?

Same with Islam. Consider the number of innovations that we take for granted today that came from the followers of that religion. Consider the amount of knowledge that Islam preserved about ancient Rome and Greece that would otherwise have been lost in the downfall of those civilizations.

I’m not going to tell you it’s all been roses and cake. Religion, especially the more modern organized religions have most certainly been a mixed bag. They have sparked vicious wars and certainly caused a lot of harm. They have been times when they have been quite repressive, cruel and subjugating. Of course, HUMANS are that way…with or without religion to drive them.

But human history has been a progression of fits and starts that has brought us to…today. Where we can look back on history through our own filters and see all the faults, the wrongs, the evils, etc etc. However…we can do so, we have the perspective we do because we are standing on the shoulders of all those who came before us.

Again, while religion has certainly been a mixed bag, I think on balance it was essential to humans and human society, culture, civilization and growth…and essential to get us where we are today. The fact that it was essential pretty much says it was overall a good thing. Sort of like the early psudo-scientists and philosophers were essential to get us to the modern concept of the scientific method, to pave the way for physics, cosmology, chemistry, etc. Without that foundation, often steeped in mysticism, superstition, etc we wouldn’t BE here to debate the point.

-XT

There is something seriously wrong with your logic here. Modern society was formed in increments for various reasons, but religion is not among them. Modern religions came along only after “modern” agricultural society was formed. Religions (of the type that puts people in power) is always a luxury for society, by which I mean you can’t have priests, popes, chieftains, and shamans who do nothing to contribute tangibly to the survival of the group, without an economic surplus to support their existence. This is self evident–ivory towers cannot exist without a sufficient economic infrastructure.
Even if you are talking about prehistoric religions like totemism, again, they did no such thing as “bind larger groups of people together” any more than people were already bound together by instinct. Human are social animals, it was a matter of survival for prehistoric humans to band together.

Your next question especially shows your logical fallacy.
*“Can you show any examples from known history where large groups of people ever came together without some sort of religion?” *
Just because you observe Phenomenon A and Phenomenon B together does not mean the two have a causal relationship. Here is some reasoning that makes sense, and every historian agrees upon: “The rise of agricultural technology and knowledge allowed groups of people to have a huge surplus of food for the first time in history. While previous groups had to set their entire population to hunt and gather, now only a fraction of the population could produce enough food for the whole group by working the fields. This led to specialization in other areas, first in essential fields like woodworking or smithing, and gradually in less essential niches such as religion or art. Thus civilization arose.” Here is some reasoning that does not make sense: “Every society in the world has some form of religion…aha! Religion must have created society! I won’t explain exactly how, but religion is great and everything, it’s the glue that binds people together.”

You go on to apply this flawed logic to all the historical knowledge and innovation of Taoists and Confucianists and Islamists and whoever else. Yes, they had a religion. Yes they made great innovations. Now how did one cause the other? Wait, it didn’t. What brought those innovations about was clever thinking on the part of the individuals, nothing to do with their religion. The Chinese didn’t invent gunpowder by divine intervention, they did it through science.

Recognizing it’s only an opinion and not really based on a careful examination of the facts is fair enough.

This is key. The thing I notice is that the same people who tend to scorn religion for believing things like creationism and the bible being the literal word of god are also very capable of embracing beliefs that have no real basis in fact and are, for the most part, based on a feeling. The same people that say faith lacks reason and logic, have their own beliefs based on faith, feeling, and personal preferences.

There are plenty of religious beliefs that are based on feeling and emotional attachment to tradition and teachings that have been passed on by some authority figure. The intellectual exercise of logic and reason are diminished to varying degrees because of emotional attachment to the outcome. " I want X to be true" or “I prefer to believe X is true” and the examination of any evidence is skewed by our emotions.

Non believers will look at believers and wonder “Why can’t you be more intellectually honest?” when they themselves display the same human tendency to cling to non fact based beliefs. Funny how that works ain’t it? Recognizing that in yourself maybe you can be more understanding and forgiving of that trait in others .

The frustrating part for believers is how casually non believers will look at religious and spiritual beliefs as silly or foolish, or evil, when if you look at it from a different perspective they are exhibiting the same traits.

The point being made in this thread is that apart from personal preference and a feeling, there is no way to honestly make a fair reasoned judgment about the OP. Wouldn’t you agree?

There are plenty of examples of bad and good. Is there any way to realistically measure them?

I think that’s the point people have been trying to make. Since there doesn’t seem to be any way to determine what directly or indirectly caused what there’s no way to really answer the OP. Your opinion isn’t any more fact based or valid than anyone else’s. Speculating about what might have been or how things might have gone without religion adds zero to any resolution of this question.

You’ve spoken of art and innovation. Do you suppose without religion mankind wouldn’t have any desire to control, manipulate, and dominate, his fellow man? You say the good things would have existed and possibly flourished without religion. What good is that argument in determining any answer when the opposite is also true? Would evil exist without religion? Could it have been even worse? It’s all useless uninformative speculation. Get it?

I understand what you are saying. But I am not trying to make my point entirely on opinion, and have come up with, if nothing else, solid reasoning. Someone claims religion is the glue of society but doesn’t say why–but there is a factual explanation for the formation of society that has little to do with religion. Or that without religion we wouldn’t have great art–the desire for and attraction to aesthetic beauty is demonstrably separate from religion. I think you understand that, but some people don’t, so that’s why I was a little hung up on those specifics.
Except for this part:

The claims that I’ve made are more firmly grounded in fact than not. Is it or is it not a fact that “The Chinese didn’t invent gunpowder by divine intervention, they did it through science”? Or that agriculture was quite obviously more responsible for the rise of civilization than religion? Granted, the very OP calls for a personal interpretation, but the fact that scientific advances (or any other human pursuit) do not require religion should be self evident and it baffles me that it isn’t to some.

When it comes down to it though, you are exactly right in saying this is the more pertinent question:

My opinion on this, one that I had already given a while back, can be summed up in two bullets.

  • All humans are fundamentally cut from the same evolutionary mold, plus or minus the expected variation among individuals–it’s what makes us one species. Man’s instinctual greed, desire for power, and capacity for evil does not necessarily change with or without religion.
  • Religion, by its very nature, demands blind faith from its followers. It is especially true of the big monotheistic religions, where a believer absolutely must know that he is right, that his god is the one and only. This kind of self assuredness and self righteousness, the idea that god has specifically chosen YOU to be his warrior on earth, gives fanatics a kind of power no other human institution can.
    Please point out anything in the above that you disagree with, but as long as I consider them to be true, it only follows that I consider religion a dangerous tool. To answer your question more directly, no, I don’t suppose that without religion man wouldn’t have any desire for evil. But without religion, man would have a heck of a time trying to justify any blatantly evil act to himself and others–while with, say christianity, it is only a matter of finding the right passage in the bible and knowing how to twist it.

I certainly don’t base my beliefs on base superstition. My “feeling” is based on quite a bit more than intuition. You’re taking the word too literally.

:dubious: If early religion was a ‘luxury’ that had ‘nothing to contribute’ why was it so pervasive? HOW did those economic surpluses come about? Did they spring magically out of the ground? Or did they come about because people banded together into larger groupings and were able to pass along key knowledge from generation to generation? Religion was the glue that bound those early societies together. If it wasn’t key to survival then we would have seen societies and civilizations that were completely religion free as they would have had a distinct survival advantage. But we don’t see that…in fact, I know of no society that was free from any kind of religion, be it nature or ancestor worship or the worship of a tribal god/gods. Why do you suppose that is?

Ah…so, something that is pretty much universal (and worldwide, crossing every culture) is simply a ‘causal relationship’ ehe? Your powers of reasoning are truly a marvel! Agriculture arose magically from the ground it seems. It had nothing to do with larger groups of people binding together around a common goal…like, say, a common religious belief system. I’m sure all those people in those early settlements came together to produce your surplus simply because they loved their fellow man and wanted to for the greater good…and maybe because it seemed like a fun thing to do at the time.

As for me saying religion is wonderful…you didn’t actually read what I wrote, did you?

Oh wait…it did! Because it’s the REASON those folks banded together in the first place and then stayed together to build all those wonderful thingies. You seem to be laboring under the misconception that those folks all came together to do all those great things and then developed these worthless religions out of the surplus. The religions are what brought them together to HAVE those surpluses! There would have been none of those innovations without those civilizations…and those civilizations wouldn’t have existed without the common thread that was their shared religious belief. No, it wasn’t ‘divine intervention’…it was simply the fact that they had a common belief system that brought them together and held them together.

However, I’m willing to listen to your words of wisdom if you think there is another explanation for why peoples came together to form clans and tribes, settlements, to build cities and monuments, to start agriculture and all that other fun stuff. I’m well aware that those things happened (but thanks for the history 101 bit…while it was unnecessary for me perhaps someone else didn’t know what was in the first chapter)…but WHY did they happen? You don’t say. Just that they magically happened and then out of the surplus those parasitic religious types some how leached on…or something. If religion had no bearing on survival (which you claim), why was it pretty much universal in human societies from wandering hunter gatherers to early settlements, to kingdoms and empires?

-XT

What I said was, you’re basing it on emotion rather than an examination of the evidence. Your emotions and personal preference are skewing how you interpret the evidence. If a believer claims that they had a spiritual experience and they “feel” that means god loves them you wouldn’t consider than real evidence. Your gut feeling is no more or less valid wouldn’t you say?

There are numerous examples of the good bad that we could credit to religion. Since there is no way to make an accurate assessment and measure the two sides fairly then the question becomes unanswerable correct? You have your opinion based on certain details and others disagree. Neither opinion is more valid than the other, and both are skewed to some degree by personal experience and preference.

I’m not arguing you are wrong. You’ve already admitted it’s just an opinion. I just would like non believers to recognize those moments when they lack logic and reason and make an emotional plea instead.

Believers have those “well isn’t it perfectly obvious” arguments about creation and intelligent design which they assume are reasonable. Non believers don’t agree that it is obvious or reasonable but will make a “well isn’t it perfectly obvious” argument and feel that they are being reasonable and logical when in fact they’re not. Emotion and personal preference has skewed their thinking and they are reluctant to acknowledge it, the same as believers.

You are being free-wheeling with your bias, creating a situation that supports an insupportable assertion. No one is saying that being Catholic makes a person predisposed to Science. That strawman don’t hunt. :wink: The point is that the evidence does not support the idea that the church held back scientific advancement. That’s all. The rest of what you say is just muted invective against churchiness and is irrelevant. What you describe about the church is the same of any ruling class in all of history. Yes, the people who had the wealth to afford free time were the one’s doing the thinking. Yeah, like every other time in history including today.

In short, you are not saying anything that describes the church in any fundamental and unique way that separates it from another sort of ruling class. You just happen to have a bug against religion, so you give it special consideration. As though the plebes in Rome were doing much more than surviving, or the proles of today in most of the world are doing much more than surviving.

You say this despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Again, the enemy of reason is the one that will not change their bias despite the evidence. There is plenty of evidence that the Catholic church actively maintained the intellectual tradition of Europe. So all this bullshit of ‘despite’ is simply factually incorrect, and will remain so, no matter how many people share the bias.

This is ahistorical. Society for thousands of years has cohered around religion. Trying to revise it so that isn’t so, is well, counterfactual. Sorry.

Religion is precisely the engagement of cohesion. Religion makes an active effort to cohere society around a common principle. To argue that the active attempt at cohesion is irrelevant to cohesion is just silly.

Ways that religion brought cohesion:

  1. It provided a personal narrative for a tribe. (Even small family bush tribes had personal mythologies aka religion)
  2. It provided infrastructure to maintain the personal narrative that it could be passed on to future generations.
  3. It provided a moral impetus for maintaining cohesion amongst the group
  4. As society became more complex, religions started building priesthoods and temples. The priests maintained the temples, maintained literate knowledge. The temples provided a venue around which the community could gather. A community center.
  5. The religious grouping provided a counter-point against secular rulers. IE, the Priest-Shaman against the Warrior-Chieftain, so that two different castes could wield power, an early form of checks and balances.
  6. Religion provided a legitimizing force for such things as marriages, bringing the act of marriage under a single aegis, so that all marriages were legitimized by the same center of tradition.
  7. The larger world religions later on in life, like Christianity and Islam provided a method for creating cohesion on an even larger scale, as they crossed the boundaries of genetic kinship groups. Providing a more ‘universal’ mythology that people could become a part of, beyond a shared lineage.
  8. Priests made it their job to maintain cohesion between the various body-politics. They made a concerted effort to create social cohesion.

To argue that religion had no part in maintaining cohesion is to not understand the role of religion in history, at all.

I haven’t seen anyopne argue that religion is clearly a plus for mankind but perhaps I missed it. What I’ve seen is people reacting to the standard obvious arguments about why it’s bad and evil. Those arguments simply don’t hold up. I don’t see where anyone claimed we wouldn’t have great art without religion. What I pointed out several posts ago was that the question in the OP relates to actual history rather than speculated history. So, that particular argument of yours isn’t all that well reasoned.

Once again, I pointed out posts ago that divine intervention does not relate to the question posited by the OP. It’s a question about the actual history of religion and not a statement about whether or not god exists.

Let’s take Occum for a specific example. How much or how little did his being a relgious man affect his coming up with Occums razor? We have no way of knowing. Speculation is not an answer.
Yes scientific advances do not require religion but I repeat, THAT IS NOT THE QUESTION AT HAND. That fact does not answer the question at hand in any way, so it’s not really a well reasoned or logical argument.

Except that I never said that.

Here you’re lumping all religion in to the blind faith variety. Not accurate, logical or reasonable. The OP was about all religion not just the kind you dislike the most.

There are numerous examples of men justifying evil acts that have nothing to do with religion. There’s not much logic here either.

The desire to do good or evil springs from within the person and we use different vehicles to act on our impulses and desires. Religion is one vehicle that has been used for both. Governments too. Would you blame science for all the deaths caused by bigger and better weapons? If we didn’t have the internal combustion engine we likely wouldn’t be at war with Iraq. Is science partly to blame? No, it’s how people have used science right? It’s been used for good and evil.

Don’t mistake your emotional distaste for religion for solid reasoning.

Exactly. Trying to talk about early civilization without the context of their religion is attempting to put the cart before the horse.

This reminds me of a discussion I had with a die hard vegetarian once. This person claimed that humans would be so much better off today if only we had never partaken of the evils of meat consumption. I told her that there would BE no humans as we know them today if our ancient ancestors had never eaten meat (and gotten all of the benefits of more protean, as well as developed tools and tactics needed for hunting) as we would still be scrounging about on the plains of Africa and providing higher predators with snacks (if those early species were even still about today). The point was totally lost on her.

I think that many here are unable to set aside their atheistic distaste for religion to put religion in it’s proper context wrt human history, and instead want to try and only address the negative aspects in a modern context…and even then they have a somewhat skewed perspective based more on a non-historic portrayal of religions like Christianity, Islam, etc. For example, think how everyone ‘knows’ that Galileo and his discoveries were suppressed by the Catholic church.

-XT

Well I pray that one day they come across something that causes them to question their blind faith.

And being an agnostic myself I can only hope for the best. :slight_smile:

-XT

What’s funny to me is that your vegetarian friend doesn’t know that animals have been killed in droves to get them to stop eating our crops. :wink:

But good luck in the hoping. :slight_smile:

William of Ockham didn’t create the razor, it was merely named after him, several centuries after his death. Do you read your own cites before you use them?