Does religion do more good than bad?

[trenton]

I have a story to share.

When I was in the hospital, there was bible study group. It was there to help people suffering through a crisis and having a mental breakdown. One of the patients was a woman who recently lost her son and daughter. I participated in the bible study. It was easy for me to apply what I learned from other spiritual books and actualized.org to the study. This woman was grateful to have met someone like me. I don't believe in any formal religion, but I recognize that religion can be used to save lives because of the psychological benefits when combined with a good intellectual understanding of spirituality.

A drawback is that if a person gets locked into an ideology it can prevent them from holding God as an experience. This has various consequences like religious zealotry.

A commonly sited negative of religion is that it motivates wars and genocides. Although there were some religious wars, there were not as many as you think. The true motive for most wars were economic, territorial, and geopolitical. In many cases religion is used as propaganda like in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It makes it seem like there are more religious wars than there really are because of the war time propaganda.

One of the causes of the collapse of religion is the sex scandals. Treating lust as an objective sin backfires horribly. In fact some people become mass shooters because they wanted to kill the women who tempted them. At the moment religion is far from destigmatizing sex. It is starting to happen by allowing priests to marry. This is a start of healthy sex being allowed. In the future I expect religion to evolve so that most of these backfiring mechanisms are resolved.

Religious extremism partially motivated the attempted coup on January sixth. Presently Christianity is locked at a low level of development. It leads to literal interpretations of the bible being fused with racist and nationalist ideologies. The prophesies of Donald Trump getting reinstated rallied extremists to attack the capital.

Considering the dangers of religious extremism, I think at the moment religion does more bad than good. However, I expect that religion will continue to evolve until most of the problems are ironed out. Maybe in the future religion will do more good than bad.

What do you think?

[sholomar]

I do believe it does more good than harm.  People rebelled against religion for the same reason they rebel against any authoritarian or rigid ideology: They don't want to be told what to do and how to live their lives. We are biologically wired to want to rebel against the establishment after enough time (and often for good reasons.) Still, religious values install a sense of discipline that is sorely lacking from modern culture where we chase heavy hedonism. Granted the highers up in religions are just like the higher ups anywhere... they often violate the rules they set for others because they can, but that's human nature. Most human beings are hypocrites from my observation... the values they say they have don't match their actions, which is to be expected given our evolutionary wiring produces strong drives and cravings that are hard to resist.

All religion, all government, all civilizations, have been about taming that animal within us. Without discomfort we don't grow. If we just do whatever our impulses drive us to do, how our DNA evolved us to behave, we are basically animals.

I also think many people's opinions on this forum are biased by the sources of information they access and use for their factual basis. They tend to be in their leftist echo chambers so they don't see how the average religious person really is... mostly tolerant, not racist, just normal people who happen to have been raised with a belief system and use the Church as more of a social gathering place than a place to promote some heavy handed cult filled with hate and judgment, which is certainly NOT what modern Christianity is in the west.  When you try to access as many broad sources of information as possible you start to see the mainstream media is feeding the people narratives, which they are. Hollywood in particular loves to push the "evil racist right wing nationalist" narrative heavily.  Doesn't matter what nation you live in, your ruling class are feeding you bullshit to at least some degree. That's what people with power do. It's human nature... aside from the fact human beings tend to crave drama and conflict as a source of excitement, so finding some "enemy" that needs to be slain to create the so called perfect society barks right up the alley of what drives human DNA, and the human ego.

Edited August 21, 2023 by sholomar