Is the belief in God ultimately harmful to society?

[John Dibble]

I would say yes, provided the believers actually think that whatever god or gods they believe in want them to perform certain actions and act certain ways. Sure, that could include good things as well as bad, but it gets people to act based on the commands of a specious authority which they are generally encouraged not to question rather than thinking about what actions they should take and determining them based on sound reason and logic. Even if the particular instruction happens to be a good one, it sets a bad precedent and could affect how they think and act in a bad way down the line.

With deists and anyone else who believes in gods but don't think they have been instructed in a specific manner, any harm is largely negligible as it will normally at most affect only the life of the believer in some minimal fashion and not significantly affect others. There's still potential for consequences, but I think it is far less.

[John Dibble]

This is a slightly tangential to the OP, but do you really think that humans are a reasonable and logical species though? I certainly haven't seen much evidence of this from groups of believers and non believers alike.  I don't think this is any sort of excuse or get out of jail free card for hatred preached or practiced mind you but I think it is an important prima facie jumping off point for discussions like this.  So then is it really religion that is the suspect or that we are just kind of hard wired to be prats to each other and ourselves.

I don't think there's a simple yes or no answer to this question. Individual capabilities will of course vary, but I think as a species we have the potential to be reasonable and logical. Potential is the key word, and there are a number of factors that can help or hinder that. I think that strict dogmas, be they religious or otherwise, are a hindrance to that potential since they usually discourage questioning and critical thinking in lieu of blind obedience. Eliminating those dogmas is part of what I think will cultivate our potential and allow us to move forward as a species.

[John Dibble]

If your question involved organized religion as opposed to belief in God- I would possibly agree with your conclusion...as it is belief in God has had a largely positive impact in the world.

You can't really separate the two. People organize, and if people believe in the same God they will organize. People who commit evil acts in the name of their God don't do so because they are organized, they do it because their beliefs make them feel justified in doing it. Being organized just makes them more efficient.

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You act as if living in fear is a good thing.

[John Dibble]

First- I think organized religion is the cause of conflicts between peoples, not belief in God...Allah and God are the same- Mohammed and Jesus Christ are not

Allah as taught in the Koran and God as taught in the Bible are not the same, and as such their believers will behave differently.

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If fear of punishment is the only thing keeping you from violence then you are not a good person and it is nothing to be proud of. If fear of judgement is all that makes you generous then you are shallow and it is nothing to be proud of. Self-centered fear is not the basis of true kindness or generosity.

[John Dibble]

You didn't answer my question...if some one was to commit and act of violence and didn't because of fear of judgment- is that a good thing? And regardless of the reason- isn't fear of judgment causing one to be more generous a good thing? I agree that if done only for this reason, the person is not truly better...all of us are guilty of this thinking at one point or another, but if it influences the person's behavior and therefore the way they treat others- it's impossible to deny it's a good thing

It's good that someone wouldn't do a bad thing, but it's not something to be proud of. It's not something that is to be lauded. Also keep in mind that fear of judgment can keep people from doing the right thing when the situation calls for it, or it could even make them do bad things - you are dealing with a double edged-sword. Fear is not a good basis for moral behavior or a civil society.

[John Dibble]

I'd agree if the fear was from govt cameras or big brother or camps...but this is a personal belief that we will be judged by our actions here.

Are you saying that the government isn't judging your actions with those things? What's the difference between that and a being that is watching you all the time in order to determine whether or not to punish you?

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You keep trying to point this out, but as I said it's a double edged sword. What about someone who might want to back out of a suicide bombing, but carries on because he's afraid if he backs out Allah will judge him as a coward?

[John Dibble]

I bolded the core section. I note that while Flint - who is a Trotskyite! - does point out how religion can be used for harm, it was also a major step forward in culture and ethics. Not that the anti-theistic will ever admit it.

I think it's much more of a mixed bag than you make it out to be.

While religions often codified ethics, this wasn't necessarily the introduction of ethics - rather I would surmise that it usually would be codifying the in-group's general sense of values that already existed. By officially codifying morals, you might help with group unity, but on the other hand you establish a dogma that may inhibit further ethical advancement. Questioning whether or not the holy doctrines of your group's religion could land you into significant trouble - after all, who are you to question the divine will of the gods? Who are you to question Pharaoh's right to rule over us? Who are you to question our right to sacrifice this child to the gods? Social pressure or even violent force was, and in many places still is to varying degrees, used to coerce people to conform to religious morality.

Furthermore, I'd say that the "Golden Rule" is not really the basis for many major religions in history, at least not when it comes to out-groups. The religion might encourage fair treatment of the members of your in-group, but outsiders could be treated quite badly - hardly the Golden Rule.

In terms of culture, again I think there's a mixed bag. On the plus side religious institutions helped spur engineering feats, as they wished to build bigger and more impressive temples and monuments. On the other hand, it could be argued that art might have been restricted. Not necessarily in terms of actual restrictions, but in that the bulk of the artists were encouraged to make religious art rather than allowing open creativity. In some cases though religions have actually restricted some types of art such as dance or music, arguably a blow to culture.

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Christianity was also prominent in support of keeping slavery. The Old Testament quite clearly allows and regulates slavery - it tells you who you can enslave, how long you can enslave them, how much you are allowed to beat them, etc. - and the New Testament does not offer an outright condemnation of it. You can interpret some passages as anti-slavery, but there isn't any outright command to not own slaves. This allowed for the pro-slavery side to justify their enslavement of others using the same book that the abolitionists used to condemn it.

Personally I think secular morality influenced how many of the abolitionist Christians interpreted those New Testament passages, rather than it being a movement of purely Christian origin, due to the introduction of freedom of religion which allowed for greater questioning and personal flexibility within religion.

[John Dibble]

Err...the 'mixed bag' element is mentioned twice in the bolded section of the quote - the second half of the third sentence, and the fourth sentence. I don't see how I'm not mentioning it's a mixed bag - actually, I'm making it more of a mixed bag than you and your fellow anti-theists are in this thread, given your hostility towards it.

And I said that is was more of a mixed bag than you are making it out to be. I think you're giving more credit than is due.

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This part came just before the quoted section in my first post. Note the universal aspect - the idea that there are things that don't just apply to the 'in-group', but to outsiders as well.[/quote]

There are common things that societies need to run that religions typically incorporate, but again these notions would have had to have been in force already. It's not like religion introduced the concept that murdering your neighbor is not acceptable behavior in a group. No tribe would have even gotten to the point of developing a coherent religion if they didn't have that.

But it is a simple matter of fact that many religions treat outsiders differently, and that's usually because the outsiders don't hold the same 'universal' truths or morality.

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If you lived under the religion of ancient Egypt, questioning the Pharaoh's right to rule wouldn't likely earn you any friends and likely would have been lethal. In other religions of course they'd just likely have the answer that the religion in question is just wrong. The problems aren't in the "universal" basic things that would have largely come before religion that pretty much everyone has always agreed upon, the problem are a lot of the things that aren't universal that many religions bring along with them.

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Do you not understand what an in-group is? In-groups aren't about who is popular or who is the underdog. To an individual, their in-group is just the group they consider their self to be a part of, nothing more. If someone is a Christian then they are part of the Christian in-group, and members of another religion are in an out-group. (how "out" they are to an individual might vary of course, depending on factors like nationality, ethnicity, culture, past interactions, etc.) So of course pagans and Jews regarded Christians as an out-group, because Christians weren't part of their religious group, but the Christians would have viewed them as out-groups as well.

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I didn't say the Golden Rule is invalid. I'm saying that many religious principles don't follow the Golden Rule to begin with. The Old Testament is full of rules and stories where people are treated quite horribly for poor reasons, for instance. I'm not talking about adherents not adhering correctly, I'm talking about adherents doing exactly what their religion tells them to when what is being done is bad.

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If religion wasn't part of the picture, people would just find something else to mark out groups. [/quote]

I don't claimed all social divides and conflicts arose from religion. My position is that it creates extra divides which leads to more conflicts. I think the whole Israel/Jerusalem situation is a good example of this - without the religious component a good deal of the reason for fighting and hostility would be lost.

[John Dibble]

I don't claimed all social divides and conflicts arose from religion. My position is that it creates extra divides which leads to more conflicts. I think the whole Israel/Jerusalem situation is a good example of this - without the religious component a good deal of the reason for fighting and hostility would be lost.

Bunk.  You have an ethnic group which wanted reestablish an ethnic homeland after close to two millennia of it not being in existence and another ethnic group which feels that they were already there.  There is no reason to believe that the two groups would be any more amicable if there was no such thing as religion.

Would the first ethnic group have even wanted to reestablish their ethnic homeland in that specific place without their religious belief? Would the Nazis have even been able to prompt the hatred for them that enabled the Holocaust to happen if not for centuries of Christian anti-semitism, giving them additional reason to seek a homeland of their own? Would they even have continued to exist as a separate ethnic group in the first place without their religious beliefs, or would they have been more likely to interbreed and integrate with the native cultures after migrating?

For the other side, certainly the Palestinians would have reason to be pissed when a bunch of outsiders come in and claim their land. But what about the ethnic groups in the surrounding region? Do they really care about the Palestinians, or is it that they can't stand that the Jews have taken the Holy Land?

Religion isn't the only problem in the conflict, but the religious difference don't exactly help.

[John Dibble]

You can point to examples of ethnic groups remaining distinctive because of the influence of religion and you can point to examples of such groups amalgamating under said influence.  So without religion, maybe it would have been a different ethnic group trying to reclaim a different their homeland after suffering from genocide in the Second Pan-Terran War.

And again I stated that not all divides are caused by religion. I simply used that one specific example to point out where it makes the divides worse.

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Seeing as my goal is to point out the bad that religion does, I don't see why I'm obligated to point out the supposed good it does, especially in consideration of the fact that the audience is already largely aware of it. It's not my job to make the other side's case for them.

Furthermore I don't particularly see much point in doing that because I don't think there's any real good religion does that can't be accomplished by secular means for secular reasons.

[John Dibble]

The question that was posed in the OP was not whether secularism can achieve the same good as religion.  It was whether religion is harmful, and that question cannot be honestly answered without giving full consideration to both the beneficial and harmful effects of religion as it is practiced in human societies.

Said consideration can and has been made by the other side. Such is the format of debate - I don't expect the theists to make arguments for my side.