(December 30, 2014 at 10:07 am)DeistPaladin Wrote: I have never believed that scrapping religion will somehow remove all evil from the world. Neither do I think that religion is the sole cause of evil. Without religion, evil people will still do evil things.
I don't even believe, contrary to the old saying, that religion is the only way to get good people to do evil things. There are economic and political ideologies that will do nicely.
Neither will a religion-free world be a completely rational one. Irrationality comes in many forms. I've met atheists who are government conspiracy theorists. I've met atheists who deny certain sciences like climate change. I've met atheists who are homophobes. I've met atheists that are sexist. Atheism does not preclude other forms of prejudice, such as racism, or irrationality, such as a belief in UFO abduction stories. I've met more than a few who are libertarians.
All that said, scraping religion will be a big step forward in both rationality and humanity. While you can get people to believe crazy things without it, religion does make it relatively easy. It's simple to get people to think immoral acts are moral if "God wills it". Belief that you're fighting a devil makes it possible to rationalize cruelty. Religion sanitizes inhumanity.
Religion also has no reality check the way political or economic ideologies do. Communism was abandoned when people realized the worker's paradise failed to materialize. Religion makes promises about what reward you'll get after you're dead.
Of the three most homophobic people I've known, one was a Christian and the other two were atheists. The Christian had it easy. "Oh, it's not me, it's God". The atheists had a harder job when confronted with their bigotry. One chose to go the backpedaling route, "um, not that there's anything wrong with that of course" after every gay joke or slur. The other chose to own it, which is a lot less persuasive than the when you have some celestial agent supposedly embodying all that is good prescribing the prejudice.
Abandoning religion will be a good step in the right direction.
Yes people will still do evil things, but that still does not make religion a valid way of viewing the nature of reality.
