While I agree with your list of religious negatives you are missing the elephant in the room, namely the attitude of organized religion towards nonbelievers.Belinda wrote:Religious myths are historically false but sometimes express themes that are true enough. The same can be said for any important literature or other art form.
Religious organisations are good in the sense that man often cannot act unless the actions are orchestrated by leaders of the community of belief and practise. Therefore religions in their heyday could get people to do good as well as bad.
Religious organisations are bad when they idolise money, ritual, hypocrisy, persons, things, institutions, and beliefs. Idolatry makes people stupidly set in their ways.
-- Updated October 16th, 2015, 1:16 pm to add the following --
Again, I agree with your post but would be remiss not to point towards a different, very large draw of organized religion, namely the declaration of superiority of the flock above heathens. "We're going to eternal salvation, you guys, OTOH are going to hellfire and damnation, so it doesn't matter if we take your land and put you guys: A) to death, or B) into slavery or C) onto reservations." Whoohoo.Lucylu wrote:Philosophy is essentially more 'vanilla' and mature than religion though, and humans do like excitement. As I was saying recently, in another thread, the trouble with being pure and good is that its boring. So, perhaps society will always desire the drama of faith, as it just seems much more visceral and intoxicating than reading philosophy texts. Plus, if you think about it, religion has built in social meet ups and parties to take a break from the more sombre parts so you get excitement without the need for any physical exertion.LuckyR wrote:Thus the societal superiority of philosophy to organized religion. All the benefits of the "love of god" you mntioned without the convert the heathens (which comes out of the hellfire and damnation part).
I sometimes wonder too, if religion was created just because people didn't have tele or electricity or the printing press! Can you imagine how boring it must have been if your only entertainment was each other and story telling. Its no wonder the stories got bigger and bigger, until they were literally 'out of this world'. A lot of dark, miserable nights to fill.