You are making stuff up and you know it
First, when addressing a subject, you can’t encompass or address the views of every single person, so I’m going to be addressing the majority (call it a stereotype if you want, I prefer ‘main audience’). For those that are outliers, that’s what the comment section is for I guess.
Religion is not 100% useless, but I contend that we could get the same plus sides that religious people tout, without the down sides.
The good part of religion is usually touted as follows:
- Gives Morals
- Gives hope
- Gives joy/happiness
- Gives eternal life
- Makes the world a better place
Lets stop making stuff up. Religion does not give you morals. If that was true, I, being an atheist, would have no morals. Christians often say the bible gives morals. I hope not, because without going in to it, our world would be severely messed up if all morals came from the bible. They also often say “Well the crazy stuff is old testament/written by man/not written by god/doesn’t count because I say so/still counts because I like stoning people for no reason”. When you pick and choose, that is really you admitting that you are making stuff up. “Part A counts because it makes sense and is in line with today’s moral majority, Part B doesn’t count because it is no longer in line with what society thinks”. So while I will admit that some morals are influenced by religion, I think it is more that they are influenced by the large group of people you associate with, who happen to be your church, or the same religion as you. But for the most part, your cultural morals are not derived from religion, they get applied to your religious dogma so that everything is all in sync.
Hope is not solely the domain of religion. You can give people the will to live without promising them that an invisible person loves them and listens to their every thought and prayer even though all evidence is to the contrary. What if instead of spreading that message, you focused more on camaraderie and making people know that they can come to another human in times of need and they will get help. For that matter, (and I’m jumping ahead a little to #5) instead of tithing 10% to the church, why not save that to help out a friend in need. I think that would actually work better than making up stuff about a fake entity that always cares and has people’s best interests at heart (until he kills them based on his will).
Joy/happiness goes along with #2, but I’ll just quickly point out you can get joy and happiness from a lot of things other than religion. Booze is one that comes to mind. No that is not the best example, but not a single person out there can honestly say “I’ve gotten drunk and never had a great time”. Friends, money, helping others, etc. All these things make me happy without religious overtones.
Religion gives eternal life. Hmmm. I’m going to call this one a no contest because until you can show me one ounce of proof that religion gives eternal life, then I don’t need to refute it. Or we can play that game and I’ll make stuff up too. Farting in the car with the windows up gives everyone in the car eternal life, try it on your next road trip.
I think if you balance everything out, religion definitely does not make the world a better place. Religion is prone to corruption, brainwashing, violence, and suppression. It also ‘helps’ the world by forcing itself on others through missionary work. Here are a few examples of religion helping people: Priests getting in a position of trust and then molesting small children, then having his superiors just move him to another area so he can do it again. Religious wars such as the Crusades, the 30 years war, religious based terrorists attacks, etc. Televangelists, who don’t have to report income because they run ‘churches’, living like millionaires. Making women subservient and lower class than men. And so on.
If everyone who donated 10% of their money to a church, and at least 1 hour a week to attending church service, would put that money and time effort into helping society, I think we would achieve a much greater sense of ‘helping the world’ than religion does.