Because I just don't buy the idea that religion intrinsically causes badness. This much is disproven by a single instance of anyone affiliated with religion who does good things. Clearly, people have done terrible things motivated by religion; people have done wonderful things motivated by religion. And people have done things only loosely associated with religion, where religion is nothing but a weak correlate and other variables are the main reasons for goodness (or badness).
What makes a religion good or bad? Ostensibly, it has to do with the ideals, beliefs, and principles each religion holds as true. Religion creates not only a glass ceiling in terms of how good a cohort of people can be, but also a glass basement in terms of how bad it's capable of being. So we have Evanegelical Christians who tend to be very nice, loving, prayin'-for-ya people, but who are down with Neoconservatism and therefore indirectly have the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani innocent civilians on their hands. Or they support charities that are harsh against homosexuals.
To me, the question of a religion's (and by this I mean the very denominational flavor of a specific religion, not just the world religion itself) worth is basically whether the glass ceiling wins out against the glass basement. We can even imagine a little utilitarian math, marking out how high the ceiling goes above the horizon as +1, +2, +3, etc., as high as any measure of comprehensive goodness can give us; and do the same with the basement: -1, -2, -3, etc. The worth of a religion -- and ultimately whether all religious systems add up to anything "good" or "bad" -- is a matter of whether there still is a positive integer at the end of the day.
But, that said, I'm not sure that if we were to take each and every of the thousands of religious systems as they're actually acted out and put them in a giant container and calculated them according to an aggregate glass ceiling or basement -- I'm not sure if the product would be positive. I think religion, adding all religious systems together, draws up a negative, albeit a slight one. The more interesting question is whether the shining stars of religion (those systems and institutions that bring about very positive changes in the world) can be allowed to exist because of the blackness brought on by the bad systems and institutions. Which leads me to a different variable.
There's a completely different variable that I don't think is often taken into account when we're asking whether religion, all flavors considered, is good or bad. This is the tendency to instrumentalize any aspect of religion, either for the sake of self or (more popularly) for the sake of tribalism. This technically isn't exclusive to religion, but more broadly can apply with any belief. Take a dude who says he's down with philosophical altruism. In theory he's about transcending the self, being selfless, things like that. But in real life he's an egoist (even an egotist), and uses his claims to altruism as a means to giving himself the appearance of being a really good, selfless guy, which brings its advantages in the form of admiration. Or culturally take a person who claims to really like one band, but really could care less for it, listening solely for the sake of fitting in and hopefully getting laid at the mad parties the listeners tend to throw. Both of these are instances of instrumentalizing something not really believed in for the sake of something else (admiration, getting laid, etc.).
Now with the tribal part. One author whose name I've forgotten once compared memes (or cultural replicators, or for our sake just culture) to the sense of smell rats use to identify one another. Take one rat (beloved by its peers) from its nest, dab it with the smell of another rats' nest, and return the rat again to its nest. His own group eats him alive. Why? Because he doesn't smell like the other rats. Conclusion: when we go away from home for a while and come back smelling of other values and beliefs (both of which basically create culture), we're eaten alive or excluded by those who previously were with it.
It's the values and beliefs (culture) that create unity or disunity among people. And the instrumentalizing/tribal problem of religion comes into play when people use whatever principles, beliefs, tenets, whatever as the instruments of their own cultural identification. Take Duck Dynasty: here you have all sorts of people in a hissy fit over homosexuality and the Bible in general who actually practice the ideals they identify with about as much as an alcoholic practices sobriety (once every few weeks at most, maybe on Christmas and Easter). Or take the utterly absurd Chick-Fil-A day that thousands of Americans participated in as a sort of "screw you" to that other group of people's support for marriage equality. Tribal city!
What if it were the case that a huge section of bad religion is attributable to people who really don't live out their religion (although they might show all sorts of displays of religiosity), but instead adhere to their religion solely for the sake of cultural identification? I think a lot of bad religion is due to this instrumentalization of religion. You have a glass ceiling, a glass basement, and a degree of cultural identification, which is at the expense of authentically believing the things associated with your religion.
Don't I think that religion and cultural identification are the same thing? No. I think religion, or any belief, involves the necessity of going beyond what the group considers toward living with individual accountability. This goes for any belief, including collectivist beliefs (a person has to choose on an individual level to participate as a part of a collective). A person might start constrained by the cultural with his religion, as with an innocent Southern Baptist boy who chides the heathen masses not of his cultural-religious identification (smelly values, smelly behaviors). But ultimately a person matures to the point to where he has to choose his own culture, and this very possibility for choosing is what makes a person an individual, what it means to be an individual. That which goes beyond the (cultural) collective, the herd -- that is the realm of true individualism. (Note that this isn't at all to say that the individual doesn't have a culture.)
What makes a religion good or bad? Ostensibly, it has to do with the ideals, beliefs, and principles each religion holds as true. Religion creates not only a glass ceiling in terms of how good a cohort of people can be, but also a glass basement in terms of how bad it's capable of being. So we have Evanegelical Christians who tend to be very nice, loving, prayin'-for-ya people, but who are down with Neoconservatism and therefore indirectly have the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani innocent civilians on their hands. Or they support charities that are harsh against homosexuals.
To me, the question of a religion's (and by this I mean the very denominational flavor of a specific religion, not just the world religion itself) worth is basically whether the glass ceiling wins out against the glass basement. We can even imagine a little utilitarian math, marking out how high the ceiling goes above the horizon as +1, +2, +3, etc., as high as any measure of comprehensive goodness can give us; and do the same with the basement: -1, -2, -3, etc. The worth of a religion -- and ultimately whether all religious systems add up to anything "good" or "bad" -- is a matter of whether there still is a positive integer at the end of the day.
But, that said, I'm not sure that if we were to take each and every of the thousands of religious systems as they're actually acted out and put them in a giant container and calculated them according to an aggregate glass ceiling or basement -- I'm not sure if the product would be positive. I think religion, adding all religious systems together, draws up a negative, albeit a slight one. The more interesting question is whether the shining stars of religion (those systems and institutions that bring about very positive changes in the world) can be allowed to exist because of the blackness brought on by the bad systems and institutions. Which leads me to a different variable.
There's a completely different variable that I don't think is often taken into account when we're asking whether religion, all flavors considered, is good or bad. This is the tendency to instrumentalize any aspect of religion, either for the sake of self or (more popularly) for the sake of tribalism. This technically isn't exclusive to religion, but more broadly can apply with any belief. Take a dude who says he's down with philosophical altruism. In theory he's about transcending the self, being selfless, things like that. But in real life he's an egoist (even an egotist), and uses his claims to altruism as a means to giving himself the appearance of being a really good, selfless guy, which brings its advantages in the form of admiration. Or culturally take a person who claims to really like one band, but really could care less for it, listening solely for the sake of fitting in and hopefully getting laid at the mad parties the listeners tend to throw. Both of these are instances of instrumentalizing something not really believed in for the sake of something else (admiration, getting laid, etc.).
Now with the tribal part. One author whose name I've forgotten once compared memes (or cultural replicators, or for our sake just culture) to the sense of smell rats use to identify one another. Take one rat (beloved by its peers) from its nest, dab it with the smell of another rats' nest, and return the rat again to its nest. His own group eats him alive. Why? Because he doesn't smell like the other rats. Conclusion: when we go away from home for a while and come back smelling of other values and beliefs (both of which basically create culture), we're eaten alive or excluded by those who previously were with it.
It's the values and beliefs (culture) that create unity or disunity among people. And the instrumentalizing/tribal problem of religion comes into play when people use whatever principles, beliefs, tenets, whatever as the instruments of their own cultural identification. Take Duck Dynasty: here you have all sorts of people in a hissy fit over homosexuality and the Bible in general who actually practice the ideals they identify with about as much as an alcoholic practices sobriety (once every few weeks at most, maybe on Christmas and Easter). Or take the utterly absurd Chick-Fil-A day that thousands of Americans participated in as a sort of "screw you" to that other group of people's support for marriage equality. Tribal city!
What if it were the case that a huge section of bad religion is attributable to people who really don't live out their religion (although they might show all sorts of displays of religiosity), but instead adhere to their religion solely for the sake of cultural identification? I think a lot of bad religion is due to this instrumentalization of religion. You have a glass ceiling, a glass basement, and a degree of cultural identification, which is at the expense of authentically believing the things associated with your religion.
Don't I think that religion and cultural identification are the same thing? No. I think religion, or any belief, involves the necessity of going beyond what the group considers toward living with individual accountability. This goes for any belief, including collectivist beliefs (a person has to choose on an individual level to participate as a part of a collective). A person might start constrained by the cultural with his religion, as with an innocent Southern Baptist boy who chides the heathen masses not of his cultural-religious identification (smelly values, smelly behaviors). But ultimately a person matures to the point to where he has to choose his own culture, and this very possibility for choosing is what makes a person an individual, what it means to be an individual. That which goes beyond the (cultural) collective, the herd -- that is the realm of true individualism. (Note that this isn't at all to say that the individual doesn't have a culture.)