Does religion corrupt morality?

[FatAndFaithless]

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.

I think I'll have to disagree with you there.  Nobody is 100% reasonable about everything all the time, and you can have a fantastically moral, pleasant, intelligent, and progressive person who simply believes in a god.  I don't find anything inherently 'bad' about someone holding a theistic belief at all, it all depends on the attendant beliefs/actions/statements.  I mean shit, to bring up kind of the negative-Godwin example, was MLK Jr. an 'unreasonable' person, because he was religious?  I'm not a fan of any sort of absolutist terms, and saying that 'you can't be a reasonable person if you're religious' seems a bit too far reaching for me.