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Good and Bad Religion

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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.)
 

andy b

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its not so much that religion is good or bad but more so man is good and bad.The harsh reality is that a percentage of humans like to hurt or browbeat other humans and will look for any excuse to do it be it race, religion, position of authority.
 
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prov1810

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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.
It's legitimate to judge religious people by standards held by pretty much everyone - virtues like honesty and kindness and so on. But religions also have their own virtues, like piety. For certain religious people, poverty and chastity are virtuous if they are an expression of devotion to God, but secular people might think this is deranged. Especially in the case of someone who experiences same-sex attraction but remains chaste in the belief that acting on these desires would be evil. Many secular people would say this is proof that religion is harmful. We say that faith is a virtue. The New Atheists call it ignorant and crazy. So we don't all have the same standard on what is good and bad.
 
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quatona

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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).
I tend towards the notion that it´s not (a) religion that motivates people to do what they do, but that religion is the projection surface for what people would do (or believe they should do), anyway.
Thus, I am not really interested in putting up with peoples´ religions or engaging in discussions in which the person opposite tells me "my religion tells me to..."; likewise I am not interested in the question whether a religion is good or bad. These are - psychologically speaking - redundant tangents, imo.
 
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Paradoxum

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You should write less for an initial post. :D

Religious people doing good things doesn't prove that religion doesn't cause badness. I'm sure Nazis were nice to people they liked, but Nazism still caused more evil than there would otherwise be. Many religious people might be generally nice, but unless they are rather liberal, it's likely they contribute to making the country a more unjust and unfree place.

From what I can tell most of the immorality of religion comes from true believers who want to force their ideals on others, or who come to conclusions based on premises that have no good justification. I don't think fakes cause as much harm. I also doubt there is a glass basement. People have killed and tortured in the name of religion.

Can you give examples of where you think tribalism of religion causes harm in a way that religion on its own wouldn't?

By the way, my general thinking is that falsity will lead to immorality. Religion has a strong tendency towards making people believe things (sometimes absurd) without good justification (the main problem being the lack of questioning of a book, person, group or tradition). Religion is also fairly common, so is something worth criticising for the sake of a better future.
 
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You should write less for an initial post. :D

You can say that again. I was surprised at how much vomit came up.

From what I can tell most of the immorality of religion comes from true believers who want to force their ideals on others, or who come to conclusions based on premises that have no good justification. I don't think fakes cause as much harm. I also doubt there is a glass basement. People have killed and tortured in the name of religion.

And I think it's exactly this desire to force religion onto others that's part of the tribal problem. IOW, no religions involve forcing things, hegemony-like, onto other people (with the exception, e.g., of extremist Islam). It's the insecurity involved in religious tribalism that causes people to force their religion onto others. By tribalism in this instance we can include minimizing the threat of other (ideological) influences by maximizing one's own influence to remove this threat.

Can you give examples of where you think tribalism of religion causes harm in a way that religion on its own wouldn't?

I don't think "religion on its own" is an intelligible statement when referring to harm. Religion is always defined by its particular beliefs, practices, and ideals; as such, speaking of "religion on its own" is like speaking of "culture on its own." An example would be a religion that involved cognitively and doctrinally holding that God is love and loves everyone, but particular individuals (who are tribalists) instrumentalize this doctrine by hegemonizing it over and against people who don't hold the same beliefs. What constitutes religious tribalism is the In-Out mentality and instrumentalization of any doctrine; it doesn't matter what the doctrine is. So when I say there's another variable called tribalism that gives religion a bad name, I'm saying that there's something above and beyond the religion itself (doctrine, beliefs, values) that corrupts the religion in the name of religion.

By the way, my general thinking is that falsity will lead to immorality. Religion has a strong tendency towards making people believe things (sometimes absurd) without good justification (the main problem being the lack of questioning of a book, person, group or tradition). Religion is also fairly common, so is something worth criticising for the sake of a better future.

I...don't know if I agree that falsity will lead to immorality. There are three big strands of ethics which are all popular and all involve people who can be labeled as good or bad: utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics. To say that falsity leads to immorality would mean that people who hold to two of these three conceptions of ethics are immoral.
 
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Received

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There is religion, which is constituted by its doctrine, which includes values, rules, and ideas. The fulfillment of a particular doctrine creates a type of person, who acts according to these values, rules, and ideas.

Relatively good or bad doctrines create relatively good or bad people. This is pertinent to my glass ceiling/basement analogy.

Religious tribalism is the instrumentalization and hegemonization of a doctrine, which can be good or bad (or varying levels inbetween). Religious tribalism corrupts religion by appearing to be religion but really being an expression of power above and beyond religion (that is, its doctrines). That is, religious tribalism corrupts religion in the name of religion.

Therefore, if we take religious tribalism into account (which appears very much to be religion speaking, although it isn't, given its instrumentalization and hegemonization of a particular religion's doctrine), religion as something negative to a society is much less so the case, given the prevalence of religious tribalism.
 
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ThinkForYourself

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And I think it's exactly this desire to force religion onto others that's part of the tribal problem. IOW, no religions involve forcing things, hegemony-like, onto other people (with the exception, e.g., of extremist Islam).
...

If a religion isn't forced onto people, it dies and turns into mythology.

Those who wrote the bible realized this.
 
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Albion

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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.
You have your socio-politically defined idea of goodness, but I submit that goodness isn't subjective. It can be understood in an absolute sense, and that relates to the nature of God--if there is a God. If there is no God, then of course nothing is intrinsically good or bad.
 
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quatona

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I don´t aim for perfection (and looking at "things" I really don´t know how to arrive at the conclusion that they do). To me, perfection is an entirely abstract concept (pretending the possibility of a static, contextless reality) that takes the life out of life. Plus, it´s boring. :)

It´s basically the state prior to creation: A perfect entity sitting there in the middle of nothing - with nothing to interact with, with nothing to do except for enjoying his own perfection (btw. every entity in that situation would have to be called "perfect"). Even God got bored of that. So he created drama.
 
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prov1810

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It´s basically the state prior to creation: A perfect entity sitting there in the middle of nothing - with nothing to interact with, with nothing to do except for enjoying his own perfection (btw. every entity in that situation would have to be called "perfect"). Even God got bored of that. So he created drama.
Christians believe that God is a trinity of persons, eternally loved and loving. Nothing was lacking. An entity who gets bored is not perfect, he's ignorant and weak. Humanity has produced uncountable thousands of joyful solitary monastics so I think a god can manage it. No one needs entertainment. We imagine that we have a lot of needs until we discover that one can simply be happy.
 
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quatona

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Christians believe that God is a trinity of persons, eternally loved and loving.
Whatever that might mean.
Nothing was lacking. An entity who gets bored is not perfect, he's ignorant and weak.
If nothing was lacking and if he/they aren´t/weren´t bored creation was totally unmotivated.
This what you´d need to riddle me: If everything was perfect and nobody was bored - why create imperfection and drama, which actually just means creating a problem so that it can be solved, exactly that behaviour which is born from boredom?
Humanity has produced uncountable thousands of joyful solitary monastics so I think a god can manage it.
The result indicates something else.
 
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KCfromNC

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You have your socio-politically defined idea of goodness, but I submit that goodness isn't subjective. It can be understood in an absolute sense, and that relates to the nature of God--if there is a God. If there is no God, then of course nothing is intrinsically good or bad.

No, you're wrong.

Now we've both made baseless assertions with nothing to back them up. Why is yours any more convincing than mine?
 
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ianb321red

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No, you're wrong.

Now we've both made baseless assertions with nothing to back them up. Why is yours any more convincing than mine?

Because the argument from morality is not a baseless assertion and it can be backed up - therefore considerably more weighty than "you're wrong"..
 
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quatona

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Because the argument from morality is not a baseless assertion
The "argument from morality" for or against what?
Has it been presented in this thread?
What´s its basis, and could lay the argument out for us, please?
and it can be backed up
Feel free to do so.
 
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ianb321red

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ianb321red

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The "argument from morality" for or against what?
Has it been presented in this thread?

Yes, it has.

Post #9 is arguing that morality can only be understood in an ultimate objective or absolute sense.
This is the basic 'jist' of the moral argument for the existence of god...
 
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Albion

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Yes, it has.

Post #9 is arguing that morality can only be understood in an ultimate objective or absolute sense.
This is the basic 'jist' of the moral argument for the existence of god...

As the author of "Post #9" perhaps I should clarify that I didn't offer my point as a proof of the existence of God.
 
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ianb321red

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As the author of "Post #9" perhaps I should clarify that I didn't offer my point as a proof of the existence of God.

Yes, I understood that - but I was making the point that your reference to absolute morality wasn't a baseless remark since it had a foundation in a more generally accepted philosophical sense...
 
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