I always hear about the millions of lives lost over religion, no doubt this is true but has anyone ever tried to estimate how many lives may have been saved because of a belief in God? Could religion at least theoretically have resulted in a large net saving of lives. I never see this aspect mentioned.
Religion has served as a good and easy excuse for finding differences between group A and group B, so that group A can kill group B. Minus religion, they would have found something else.
Personally, I fault religions more with impeding social and technological growth, but even there that was probably mostly the ruling class choosing to support religions (or interpretations of those religions) that allowed their family to maintain rule for long periods of time. Preventing a middle class from developing was critical, so backing religions that emphasized poverty and farming + a small, divine ruling class + fidelity is a pretty good setup for the ruling class. But, minus religion, they just would have turned to philosophy or outright theft and murder. One suspects that religions were largely enforced by theft and murder anyways, because secretly the deep belief of religious teachings is probably far smaller than most people admit.
But anyways, I’m sure that someone has tried to calculate a number of deaths caused by religion. But it’s probably more reasonable to chalk those numbers up to hormones, ignorance, and nepotism.
Religion in the Middle Ages told everyone that bathing was sinful and wrong. This lead to poor hygiene and deplorably filthy living conditions which was a major factor in causing The Black Death, which killed 75 million people, as well as numerous other plagues throughout history.
So you believe that it has killed more than it has saved?
How many lives do you think religion has saved?
Hard to say, no one keeps track of that
How on earth could anyone be expected to arrive at a definition (never mind a measure) of lives saved by religion? And why? The point is the contrast between the claims made for religion and the things that are done it’s name. To assume that statistics would settle the question is verging on the territory of “Kill them all - God will know his own”.
On the other hand Religion, while wrong about it, has often encouraged high birth rates as many of the worst are against birth control and abortion. so they have caused far more to be born than if there was no religion. The world would be a better place with no religion, it is worth sacrificing the mild ones to get rid of all the awful ones.
There are plenty of women who don’t have abortions because religion says not to. There are hospitals and doctors who exist solely because religion told them to. Multiple food charities are chartered with a religious mission in mind. So there’s no shortage of examples of times when religious beliefs have saved lives.
Or, to put it a bit more directly: Minus religion, they would have had to invent it.
Oh wait, that’s probably exactly what happened.
Are we back to the old lie the college professors put out - “Religion has caused more wars than anything else”.
As was stated before religion has been used as an excuse for war but rarely is the sole purpose. In many cases I feel it has tempered some wars. The Christmas truce of 1914 came close to stopping that war.
Newspapers record the unusual events. Newspapers tell the story of insane people who commit murder because “God told me to kill the fags” because it is a rare event. Newspapers rarely tell the story of rich people who fund a children’s ward in a hospital because “god told me to do it.” Why not? because it is an ordinary event that happens often.
Religion has, on the whole, done more good than bad, but the good is rarely reported.
Monks complained about bathing during the middle ages, but most people didn’t listen. Bathing was really popular back then. They bathed less than we do, but that was mostly bexause, when you don’t have a hot and cold running water tap and have to haul water into a tub yourself, that’s not the amount of work you want to be doing daily. Still, most cities had both public and private bathhouses, and one of the rules of noble hospitality in a lot of medieval Europe was that the host should offer the guest a bath.
Bathing got less popular because of the Black Death, because all sorts of public gathering places got less common.
buddha_david:
Maybe you need to use the work “religion” more restrictively. Judaism demands hand-washing on many occasions daily, and in fact, this made Jews a lot healthier than the surrounding non-Jewish populations during the time of the Black Death.
…which of course, lent credence to the anti-Semites’ accusations that the Black Death was a Jewish plot, leading to death by mob violences, so it might, in the end, have been a wash (heh, heh) as far as body-count goes.
I tend to replace the word “religion” with “belief system” because it neutralizes the metaphysical factor and focusses more on how people let what they believe determine their actions, whether or not that belief is in something true. More recently for example, the belief that Iraq had access to weapons of mass destruction for example led to the deaths of hundreds of thousand Iraqi citizens for no other reason than the US believed they were dangerous. I always wondered, if Iraq had WMA’s, why on earth didn’t they use them to defend themselves? Of course it didn’t really matter as long as the American people believed they did. This error is clear in retrospect, even for Americans, that you have to be careful when you act on what you believe rather than what can be proven. And so it is with Religion as it is with any belief system.
Do you think we should get rid of all belief systems while we’re at it? Are there any belief systems worth holding onto in your opinion?
If we are going to apply strict rules for when religion is blamed, then we should equally strict rules for when it is credited. How exactly has religion saved lives, that cannot also be credited to scientific knowledge and/or the kindness of humans themselves?
If you think about it that technically just increases the death toll, since those people wouldn’t have been alive in the first place in order to die later.
Well belief systems based on myths and legends are the ones I would like to see ended. They have been very harmful to humanity and the world. What is the actual definition of a belief system though?
I would think we could have a moral code that was not tied to a God or Gods.
I don’t think God has a lot to do with it personally. You can have a belief system that is dangerous without any religion at all. For example, some people believe that capitalism is the answer to al our economic problems, but then we also end up with people who will die because they can’t keep up. The belief in the unerring nature of any -ism is also a dangerous mythology. Most absolute -isms present just as many problems as they solve. Personally, I see no problem with religion, provided it is treated as a mythology to fuel the imagination. The mythology of Santa Claus for example helps to reminds us of the importance of family and giving to one another. But it may also encourage too much focus on capitalism with all the emphasis on getting gifts. Blessings and curses.