Does religion corrupt morality?

[Pyrrho]

I don't think religion, in and of itself "corrupts" a person's morality. I think if a person has a bad heart, they will use whatever they can as an excuse to act wrongly. Not because "religion made them do it", but because they are not good people. Bad seeds come from all walks of life. The religious ones will use religion to excuse their actions, the non religious ones will use something else. Just mho. :-)

I think the point is that religions (the ones we have around nowadays, anyway) include ideas that we might find immoral or bad.  So someone might 'use religion to excuse their actions', but if justification for that action can be found in the scriptures or dogma of the religion, then that doesn't just let the religion off the hook.  

It's hard to say that all religions are absolutely corrupting to morality point blank, because I could possibly conceive of a religion that has a dogma of secular humanism and enlightenment values, and I suppose that would be morally 'good'.  But I think that any sort of morality proposed loses all...validity? when someone attaches some sort of decree or absolute authority to it.  For example, a religion can have a moral precept that we consider to be 'good', but if the justification for that moral precept is something like 'because that's what god says' or 'that's just the way it is', then it loses any sense of a real, rational establishment.  And if there's such thing as a religion that doesn't use the supernatural or authoritarian...then I find it indistinguishable from just another school of philosophy.

All religion is evil because it all goes against being reasonable.  If one is reasonable, one is not religious.  Not being reasonable means one will do something bad, though not necessarily in a predictable way.  Some religions are worse than others, but they all have a corrupting influence in that they entail being unreasonable.