Why religion should not vanish

[Thumpalumpacus]

1. Charity: Like them or loathe them organized religion has a massive input into the fields of aid work, healthcare and education. Regardless as to what they teach the movements values nonetheless empowers and inspires individuals to give up their money towards a more productive cause. Instead of buying a new PC game, little Timmy the devout Christian might give his pocket money to fund some Kenyan girls education.

Given the wealth that they extract from the laity, they'd goddamned well better hand some back. And quite frankly, their charity often comes with deadly repercussions, as in Africa, where the Catholic Church actively campaigned against condoms as they handed out their food.

2. Crime prevention: Several religions use rather dubious standards as to what constitutes a crime but belief in the concept of an eternal judgement is quite a useful trait to be adopted by the public. You can't have a camera in every home but Allah/Krishna/Osiris sees all, and the threat of divine retribution while not off putting to all believers will certainly dissuade some from committing crimes.

The overwhelming majority of convicts in American prisons are religionists. They are overrepresented in terms of propportion, too, while atheists are underrepresented.

3. Ethics: While some standards of ethics propagated by some religions can be described as barbaric at best the general core base (don't steal, don't kill, don't rape) are more or less universal. Let's be frank, most of humanity is pretty dense and either can't understand or won't use the finer points of philosophical schools such as Stoicism or Taoism to form a code of ethics. Religion takes all the hassle out of it, and spoon feeds a code of conduct to believers. Supposing this code can be tweaked to a more modern standard as the Episcopalians have done rather successfully (i,e: They believe in Jesus but also think it's cool to be gay now) it does seem to be the most effective method of instilling a sense of morality.

One would expect religionists to behave in a moral manner, then; but that is so clearly not the case that this point is rendered vapid.

4. Common cause: With perhaps an exception to the Pagan Roman Empire who chose to integrate foreign religions and cultures with their own one of the most successful methods in history to unite people together for a common cause is to join them under the banner of God. Faith is a transcendental quality, and can lead to humans forgetting about divides such as culture, language or race and focus on a quality shared amongst all of them, their faith. The Crusades, The Islamic conquests, the Reconquista and the Third Reich are all examples of where faith (or a cult of personality) have gathered people of various types together to accomplish a goal that would have otherwise been impossible. Certainly, these examples were all martial in their goals but what is to prevent the Pope or an Ayatollah calling for a "Crusade" against illness, or a "war" against poverty? This is a power that could be channeled into more constructive ends.

The fact that this sort of power is invariably used to spread evil undermines your argument over the ability of faith to impart moral and ethical purity.

I could list more, but I think this should get the ball rolling. Even if God does not exist, I think there is much merit to encouraging the idea of faith and of the existence of a deity.

As Voltaire once said, if God didn't exist we'd have to invent him.

I don't think he cottoned much to subjectivism, but so what? We each define our own lives and our own moralities. That some do it in the framework of religion doesn't mean that it cannot be done in its absence.