This country is virtually carpeted in churches and awash in
preachers of various stripes. But, despite volumes, mountains, torrents of
preaching and reading and writing about religion, God, morality--proper human
conduct--it's not clear that we have even the tiniest bit less lying, cheating,
corruption, and even killing.
Human greed and lust impel men to lie, cheat, and murder for
the sake of obtaining money, power, position, and sex.
Most people have a conscience--I say "most people"
because it is clear that some criminals simply have no conscience whatsoever--but
a person can do another person wrong and then confess, and then he is told,
"Say twenty Hail Marys," and this institution of the confessional
lets him or her shed all feelings of guilt whatsoever. It is said that some
Mafiosi would murder other people six days a week and then go to church on
Sunday and confess (and receive absolution).
Not only does religion, it seems to me, not lessen the net
sum of human evil in the world; but religion sometimes even adds to it. There
is evil committed in the name of religion. It is not only Islam (let me hasten
to add, "as some people interpret it") that gives us terror attacks,
with people being killed, almost daily, these days; but Christianity (if we
look at the record) is far from blameless. The Crusades, for example, were very
brutal: the aim, as incited by the Pope, to recapture the Holy Land from the
Muslims not only resulted in many Muslims being brutally killed, but the
Crusaders, on their way to the Holy Land, would pass through many towns in
Europe and massacre any Jews they happened to find there.
And let us not forget about the Hundred Years War, when
Catholics and Protestants were brutally slaughtering one another.
So I am saying, if you care to take a cold and detached
look: The good that religion does is, at best over-rated. Yeah, churches
sometimes feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, etc. But I feel strongly that
these things could and maybe would be done in the absence of religion. And to
look at the large picture, as I have tried to do in the opening paragraphs, of
whether religion has had success in ameliorating some of the kinds of evil that
are prevalent in the world, I don't think it really does much good.
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