this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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Imagine if that person did all the same things they do, but without the label of "religion" being attached.
Charity? Awesome! Habitat for Humanity is an explicitly Christian organization and does great work. In my neighborhood, the local Lutheran and Quaker churches give out free food to the poor, and they don't sneak any Lutheran or Quaker cooties into it. If you're good to others because you think God wants you to be good to others, that still really does count as being good to others.
Prayer? Okay, take "religion" off of it and they're meditating, thinking, or talking to themselves. That's good. Unless they're thinking and talking about torturing their neighbors eternally, or something creepy like that. (But even then, better to keep those fantasies to yourself than to act them out in public.) Die Gedanken sind frei โ thoughts are free.
Going to worship services? Okay, they've got a weekly social event where they sing songs and listen to speeches. Sounds great, unless the songs are about "everyone outside this room is a terrible person and deserves to suffer forever" and the speeches are about hate politics. If they're about how wonderful it is to be nice to each other, or being brave and standing up against oppression, or something else that would be positive even without the label of "religion" on it, great!
Dietary rules? It's okay to have preferences, distinct cultures, cuisines, and so forth. For that matter: my family isn't Jewish, but when I was little, we ate kosher beef hot dogs, because my mom expected the rabbis would care about the meat being sanitary. (Unfortunately in retrospect, kosher slaughter is, shall we say, not clearly better than secular slaughter.)
What you said is all true, but you are ignoring the negative aspects of religion.
Religious influence, both on their followers and on government, is anti-science, misogynistic, and anti-LGBT.
Religions are funded like pyramid schemes, with the most desperate and vulnerable as their victims.
Religious indoctrination is child abuse.
Anti-science, misogyny, etc. are bad independently of whether they are done in the name of religion, or pseudoscience, or political ideology. Doing bad things in the name of religion is exactly as bad as doing them in the name of communism, or capitalism, or racial ideology, etc.
Anti-science, misogyny, etc may be bad independently of religion, but they aren't independent of religion. Religion is a source of these problems.
You can imagine a hypothetical religion that is simply a "social club" or whatever, but here in the real world religion comes with baggage.
Religion is why my cousin's children have never seen a doctor in their life. Religion is why my gay friend in high school tried to kill himself. Religious indoctrination has led to lifelong shame and trauma in many of my friends.
And this was just from a "moderate" sect of Christianity- the millions living under fundamentalist religion have it even worse.
Every terrible thing done under religion has been done without religion. None of them have happened without people (except for killing the different). Maybe people are the problem and religion is just one of many tools that can be used to harm other people. Tribalism exists in many forms, religion in its many flavors being just one of them.
Saying "maybe people are the problem" is reductive and unhelpful. But I agree with you broadly, religion is just a system or a tool, it can be used for good or evil.
To judge if religion is a good system or a bad one, we can use a cost benefit analysis. This is what we have been attempting to do in this thread.
But when it comes to sensitive subjects like religion, many people have a tendency to avoid, overlook, and deny the associated costs.
Saying "religion is the problem" when the problem crops up in many different areas regardless of which religions are present in an area or if religion isn't present at all makes it seem like you might be focusing on the wrong thing. Nationalism, religion, strong ideologies, groups with deep emotional bonds and a sense of insularity are all susceptible to the same things - charismatic leaders can easily direct their attention and they have a tendency towards directing their hostility towards groups that don't fit into their group.
So, tribalism. And if one tool won't work, or is removed completely from access, those who wish to use tribalism to mobilize a large group to help them achieve their goals will just use the next one that is available to them. The tools are rarely what are important to them, but the results. So I don't see how focusing on one tool, even a particularly well-suited tool, will solve the problem.
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion. -Steven Weinberg
Maoism did a lot of evil without any religion. Were all of its perpetrators bad people?
Yepperoni, thanks for putting this so succinctly.
I like this interpretation but last I checked the vegans aren't going to vote for a despot who will kill all non-vegans, and that they don't view the death of all non-vegans as a positive thing. (Most vegans I know are keenly aware they can only participate in veganism because of modern agricultural, distribution, and economic systems. They know veganism is an elitist choice that a lot of the world cannot make.)
I think that's the major difference here.
Sure. Voting for religious genocide is just as bad as voting for non-religious genocide: e.g. on the basis of nationalism, pseudoscience, or the like.
Agreed.
Wow, you sure did manage to slip in a bunch of self-serving misinformation about veganism for no fucking reason. Who are you actually trying to convince, I wonder. (I'm being sarcastic, I know perfectly well.)
I like this. You're good people.