"With or without religion.." Quote. Is Weinberg wrong?

[Alex K]

Where do you get that number???

From the word "if".

It's called a hypothetical.

Since it didn't come from a previous claim which you attempted to address or refute, you were obviously insinuating that it's somehow a probable number. Why else would you bring it up. It's the same rhetoric demagogues use to rile up the people without actually claiming anything.

If Deist Paladin were a child molester, that would be absolutely unacceptable and he should be locked up. Not saying he is, where did you get that idea, it's just a hypothetical, see?

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Well, Weinberg obviously is one of the quickest bulbs in the shed when it comes to physics, but I never found this one to be terribly convincing. First of all, all kinds of ideologies can make good people do bad things, it doesn't have to be religion, unless you define religion really loosely. What's more interesting here is the statistics - how likely are people in each group to do X - of course there are tons of correlations and confounding factors which render such studies meaningless very easily.

In philosophical discussions, I care about the truth of religious claims first and foremost, whereas their impact on society is important, but something different entirely if you ask me. Religion could be pure poison, but still be true. Weinberg's argument is not so much concerned with the veracity of religion, but instead primarily aims to attack the very common notion that religious faith is a virtue.

I don't think it is excessively loose to define religion as being any ideology which creates a cosmology out of whole cloth, and embodies within that cosmology an otherwise u supported promise of extravagant reward for actions that happen to serve the self-perpetuate ting interests of the ideology, as well as an matching and also otherwise unsupported promise of extravagant punishment for dismissing that cosmology.

Sounds like a reasonable definition, but that's not my point, is it.

One has to admit ideology which has these attributes has a uniquely strong power to twist the gullible and impressionably selfish towards actions harmful to all conventional sense of greater wellbeing for mankind, and mere gullibility and I pressionable selfishness would otherwise have not have, without this ideology, been likely to have led them to actions of comparable destructiveness.

The soviet communist and Nazi ideologies, to name two obvious ones, had a similar power, possibly because, even if they didn't establish a whole cosmology, they still incorporated some kind of utopia. In any case, they would only very loosely fit into the description of religion, which is why I wrote that criticism of Weinberg's quote.