Overall, and all things considered..is religion good or bad?

All things considered do you regard religion as a good or bad thing?

I'm not at a religious person at all, but I think it's a great thing. I feel that some people need it and it helps people cope. I'm fine with it as long as people respect what others believe and pretty much leave eachother alone in the respects of not forcing something on them or trying to stealth convert them. What do you think?

I mean this in general too, throughout history. regarding both individuals and society as a whole. would the world be more sad without it? would we be more advnaced without it?

and yeah, i'm aware that it's not possible for religion not to exist do to the way humans naturally think.

 

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I want an 'other' option

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People use religion as an excuse to support things they know are bad (the crusades are a good example). If it wasn't for religion these bad deads would have found some other scapegoat of a reason.

 

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maybe, maybe not...

 

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I'm with Persol on this one

Another option should be included:

I think that religion has been used by people in a position of power to do both good and evil.

 

Re: I'm with Persol on this one

the problem is that religion lends itself really well to do evil. Because of the nature of its content

 

I'm in agreement, the religion itself doesnt do the bad or good stuff, its the people.....

also not all of the religions fit into the same group.....some are much more peaceful than others

 

overall i think it's a mixed bag. some good, some bad. it really depends on the people practicing the religion.

 

What is good and what is bad???

Some religion might say it's good that women are surpressed, but another might say it's bad. So who's to judge?

 

many people voted that religon has done more bad than good. Anyone who voted that care to offer up some proof?

 

Re: I'm with Persol on this one

I would agree with this, but is there any human institution that hasn't been used in just this way?

"Is religion good or bad?" is a question that is simply too vague and general to have any reasonable answer. What means one by "religion", anyway? Different interpretations of different religions can be used by different people to do different things. Some of these things are good and some of these things are bad, but none of them can be pinned on "religion in general".

Asking whether (ceteris paribus) religion has been responsible for more good or more bad over the course of human history is perhaps a more coherent question, but not a more interesting one to ask, given the virtual impossibility of disentangling religious and secular customs and attitudes in so many cultures.

 

Well, there's the Old Testament, for starters.

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re: Old Testament

This should be interesting.

So the OT is proof of religion having done more bad than good is it? That's odd.

Some people think of the accounts described in the OT as barbaric. I agree there are some strange and gruesome themes that wander in and out of these Biblical accounts. I can't fathom how that might offer up proof of a "bad" religion.

Isn't it somewhat lopsided to categorize a religion as "bad", in this particular case Christianity, based on an incomplete picture? The Christian Bible after all is not complete without the NT. The overall message is something far from bad.

Ultimately I wonder if some people would prefer to live in a society guided by some type of paganistic law? Lose that basketball game and the high priest cuts out your still beating heart.:bugeye:

I'm not sayin...I'm just sayin.

 

It figures that more people said that religion has done more bad than good, than people who said that religion has done more good than bad. The narrow-mindedness of that opinion is this: obviously one can infer that people believe the greatest evil religion has done is cause war. But the fact is this: Many religions, like Christianity, but not including ones like Islam, do not promote war, but promote pacifism. If Any members of such pacifist religions fight members of other religions, <i>religion is not the most core cause of the war.</i> The fact is, it is the hatred of those people, which contradicts their own religions, that causes the war. Not the religion. Now of course it can be argued that the hatred comes from intolerance to other religions, which is of course resultant from the existance of different religions; However, it is still the fault of the people, because of the fact that they are going against the teachings of their own religion.
Now, in the case of religions like Islam that instruct followers to go on holy war...that is blameable. But discount the blame of pacfist religions, and that takes a great deal of bad out of what religion has done. Some food for thought
However I did vote 50/50

 

Up until recent history, there has been no definitive answer to questions like "is the world flat". There was no acceptable "truth" to virtually anything that involved a broader context than the society that we would find ourselves immediately involved with. I think it's kind of like asking overall, is government good or bad? It's a resultant tool of societal evolution. It's apparently exactly what happens when you get a bunch of humans together and watch them try to explain the universe, shaped by the advances of science in the sense that science keeps shifting the questions around over the history of conscious humans. It's a socially evolved tool for society, fullfilling a whole bunch of stuff that most humans need and don't have the means to find elsewhere.

At least that's my rant for today.

 

Unable to compute

The painful part of this consideration is its magnitude: How do we model the counterpoint?

Religions are often rightly derided in the modern day; many religious outlooks call for faith to fly in the face of factual knowledge. In history, though, religious faith often played a vital role in binding societies together. It is fair to say that in the current working model, none of us would necessarily be sitting here typing these words into our computers without religion.

Necessarily--a key word.

Because what makes it a painful consideration is when we look at history and attempt to figure the result if we remove the influence of Christianity from Europe, of Islam from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Hinduism from India, &c.

Religion touches many aspects of human life. There is, obviously, some connection between the fancies of God and the psychological manifestation of the evolutionary drive in human beings. The Ontological Proof, symbolically, at least, explores this relationship. Civilizations rose and depended economically on notions of gods. In a practical function, religious sentiment often served to hold a community together when no objective reason could explain the cohesion.

The consideration is further complicated by my personal belief that "religion" is somehow intrinsic to human nature. Christianity can die off, Islam can disappear in a nuclear cloud, and the Buddhists can disappear into caves forever, but baseball fans will always believe that holding their breath at just the right moment somehow affects the outcome of the game; children will eternally fear the mysterious shadows of evil creatures that are not really there; lovers will forever exaggerate the significance of their passions. I'm not sure superstition can be thoroughly stamped out of humanity; it seems a necessary part of the psyche. And, being cooperative beasts such as we are, the notion of organized superstition--e.g. religion--seems to be something that will plague us until the end of time.

After all, when we slay the gods, what next? How many generations will wrangle and sweat and weep and bleed over economic theories? Human moral demands will meet again on this battlefield as competing paradigms square off to the discord of vastly-differing presumptions.

And when we figure economy, what of love and pride and the differentiations that cause our hearts to break?

The headache becomes, simply, that one is not necessarily capable of mapping out the factors, having removed religion from the mix. What would the pageant of history look like?

It may be that the joy of life derives its legitimacy from a concept that we would call religious. After all--can you imagine a human species that is wholly objective? Do we aspire to become the Borg?

Reading the responses it strikes me that in the Bible God became angry with the people when they attempted to build a tower to heaven. Knocking down the tower at Babel, God scattered the people and set their tongues differently so that it would be harder to scheme as such. Among its shallower lessons the myth suggests why God has differentiated languages among people. But in the same vein, I look at diverse religions and wonder if there is a myth that properly asks why God would differentiate languages, but leave only one common route to scheme. When it comes to making a pile of rocks, you only need so much pantomime. Thus we might suggest that not only did God scatter the languages, but also the ways in which people are to return to Him. Just the daily myth wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a henley, wrapped up for smoking ....

:m:,
Tiassa

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I would think "more good", since it served (poorly) to militate against the effects of self interest and xenophobia.

 

Hmm... I was thinking this might be an interesting question: Has religion had a greater impact on humanity at the personal or societal level?

Regardless I almost entirely agree with Tiassa the issue, but I don't necessarily think the goodness in life is "religious" by nature. I do see his point however.

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My personal problem with religion at the present is that well, in all current forms that I'm aware of.. I think its usefull life is at an end. I find it to be antiquated by science. Religions used to be (and still are I suppose) the "acceptable" answer to the big big questions, now most of them have been answered and we realize that maybe some of them don't make sense. I do find the opportunity to be alive at the beginning of its dissipation, a time when it will clash with science... possibly to a melting point, most interesting. IMHO, this is by FAR the most interesting time to be alive in the history of our species. Simply amazing.

 

"I want an 'other' option
People use religion as an excuse to support things they know are bad (the crusades are a good example)."


To a certain extent, I agree. Religion is prescribed, to a certain extent, according to the will(s) of other human beings. Our conscience is not prescribed according to any person's will. It is prescribed according to God's will and our own personal understanding of right and wrong. If we act against our own conscience, even in the name of religion, we act against God's will.

 

Re: re: Old Testament

The accounts described in the OT are barbaric, and the OT is pretty much the foundation of the Judeo-Christian religions, is it not? The deity described therein was nothing but a hateful, vengeful, bloodthirsty, jealous, misogynistic, bipolar tyrant.

The NT built on the themes introduced in the OT. The NT may have softened those themes to some degree, but still the basic idea of the NT is that the god of the OT sired a son with a human girl for the purpose of sending him to die a torturous death to pay for all the "sins" of those who would allow him to make this gruesome payment on their behalf. The son, who said that he came to uphold all of the OT laws, would rule over those who accepted him as their scapegoat, and slay the remainder (who would then burn in a fiery lake for all of eternity).

I'm sorry, but I'm having a great deal of trouble finding the good in any of this.

I am Pagan, and I haven't cut anyone's heart out recently; nor has any other Pagan I know of. If you're speaking of Pagans who lived thousands of years ago, that might have been true. But look at what every group did thousands of years ago - we were all much more brutal then. Even the OT had laws about sacrificing humans (see Leviticus 27:28-29, and note the phrase, "both of man and beast")! And the NT suggests that people cut off certain body parts for the kingdom of heaven's sake :bugeye: (see Matthew 19:12)!

But if you want to discuss religious brutality, we don't have to go back nearly so far in history to find some pretty horrendous examples of Christian atrocities, so just remember that when you want to bring up ancient Pagan history.

 

I'm not following your arguement

Yeah, so what? How does this description of Yahweh bolster your contention that the OT is proof of religion having done more harm than good?

I'm having a great deal of trouble finding any connection between your somewhat predisposed opinion of the Christian Gospels (which are NT) and your contention that the OT is proof of religion having done more bad than good.

I enjoyed your interpretation of those Bible passages but I don't agree with them.

Sacrificing humans? I'll have to take that one under advisement but I would say immediately without any reference to scholarly interpretations that if this is your viewpoint, it is in direct conflict of the great command, thou shalt not murder.

In the Matthew citation you are stretching again. Jesus' remarks about celibacy in MT 19:12 were directed towards his disciples. Jesus replied that some of them might be better off not marrying because of the magnitude of their calling and the difficulty involved in finding compatible spouses who would share their commitment. Look at MT 18:9.....logically there should be a multitude of Christians running around with gouged out eyes if they all followed the scriptures literally. Regardless of any arguements on these points, they don't add a thing to your original contention because this is from the NT.

Actually, all I wanted to know was how the OT is proof of what you claim it is. I brought up pagan law in a very generic sense, had I known you were riding a broomstick* to work I would not have mentioned it

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*(that was a joke, please take it that way)