Yes, you may be right. Can you think of concrete examples of the bad of religion not covered by attribution to power, the church, or misguided oppressive hermeneutics?Eduk wrote: ↑November 29th, 2018, 3:07 pm Ktz. Aren't you in danger of being wise after the event with your examples of the good of religion?
For me it would be more nuanced to talk about the percentage future benefits of religion versus other philosophical frameworks.
For me unreasonable beliefs will always be statistically less likely to give 'good' results than reasonable beliefs. Even if it is trivial to cherry pick examples in the past where the opposite was true.
I chose the specific illustrative cases because I feel they are examples where religion created a pathway to certain positive outcomes that would not have been possible without the committal nature of faith and absolute belief, which can be provided by the established construct of religion. So I think not just the percentage of good versus bad to be important, but the range and depth of possible outcomes.
Ultimately, I care more about what people do than why they do it. To me, actions, not professed ideals or belief, are closer to real instances of truth. Ideas like restorative justice are close to my heart, that provide concrete evaluation and reparation of harms committed with an emphasis on improving future outcomes. Correspondingly, if someone performs moral duty for religious reasons I give them as much credit if they perform the same duty for secular reasons. But I feel that the construct of blind faith can be more binding than intellectual understanding. In extremely challenging circumstances, when the person can be in a compromised situation of limited willpower and intense suffering, I would predict that faith in an anthropomorphized higher power to confer a more practical reserve of strength than intellectual commitments to secular variations of morality.Also where religious ideas of morality and secular ideas of morality overlap surely they stop being unique to religion? At this point can we not question whether they are indeed religious in origin?
There are positive side benefits to the somewhat odd and dogmatic regular practices of religion as well. Science is catching up here, but for example prayer can be a practical path to regular introspection and self-directed goal-oriented behavior. Meditation and the clearing of the mind is being validated by science for positive effects as well -- it's reasonably well understood now, but this is a practice thousands of years old that has provided these benefits the entire time prior to scientific validation.