The people who do good in the name of religion, by and large, don't need religion to do good. They may (or may not) use religion as an excuse to explain why they do good, but that's just it, an excuse, and without religion they'd almost certainly still do good.
On the other hand, there is a tremendous amount of evil done in the name of religion that wouldn't be done at all if it weren't for religion. An incredible amount of hate and bigotry and oppression and violence all rooted in dogma.
People don't need to be taught how to love. But they do need to be taught how to hate.
I have known people who made a radical conversion to Christianity and stopped drinking, doing drugs, whatever. Plenty of people do need to be taught how to love, having never really had any in their life.
There are plenty of Christians giving Christianity a bad name. That doesn't mean it is Christianity's fault that they are like that. Over the years, it has splintered into endless sects because you give the same book to different people and they come away with different interpretations of what it means, in part because it is filtered through the lens of whatever mental models life experience has given them.
Also, it's not the same book. There are literally hundreds of lineages of the Bible, having traveled to us through multiple languages, very different cultural perspectives, rewritten and re translated adding in their current perspectives and removing one's they don't agree with. Not to mention just plain old misunderstanding.
I dunno about the whole Christians giving Christians a bad name. For example the Catholic Church doesn't support gay marriage or even condom use in AIDS torn Africa. Is the Pope giving Catholics a bad name? It would seem to me the opposite, Catholics who support gay rights and condom use are just bad Catholics.
21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’
23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
So, the Bible itself suggests that Christ himself foresaw that many evil things would be done in his name and he would disavow such people and deny them entry into heaven.
My personal opinion based on stories like the one below is that, yes, the Catholic Church has lost its way and is giving Christianity a bad name.
I'm not Christian. I did attend church for a time in my twenties. I have plenty of criticisms of Christianity myself. It isn't really my cup of tea. I imagine it would have been 2000 years ago when it was being studied in secret in small groups. Now that it is a major religion, it strikes me as more a means to publicly identify as A Good Person.
There are inherent problems with publicly identifying as A Good Person. One of them is that there comes a point past which looking good and doing good part ways. If public identification as one of the good guys matters to you enough, you may well choke when it comes time to stand your ground against the tide of public opinion.
But my personal criticisms of religion do not in any way make me think it is reasonable to claim that religion is purely a source of evil and no good comes of it.
You seem to have dodged the point entirely. You don't get to just arbitrarily claim the good parts of Christianity are the only ones that matter. And Catholicism is certainly not the only sect that has regressive dangerous policies which cause wide spread harm, it's just the simplest example because it's one most people are likely to be familiar with. The top five Christian denominations in the US are: Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Pentacostal, and Lutheran. There are sub-sects of each of those families which allow gay marriage, but the main-line official doctrine is opposition to gay rights for all of them.
So what, the vast majority of Christian sects are giving Christianity a bad name? But you personally somehow know what real Christianity is? I feel like that really stretches credulity at some point.
Christianity began as belief in one guy, Jesus Christ, as the only begotten son of god. He himself predicted that much would be done in his name that he would disavow.
That's not my judgement. That's in the Bible. (It's also a blatantly obvious social observation that intent gets bastardized by others with some incompatible agenda on a routine basis.)
Gay rights continue to be fought for across the globe. There are many countries where it is illegal to be gay. Would you say this makes the existence of countries inherently evil?
I hope we will someday see a world where neither countries nor religions persecute homosexuals. But I am not saying that only the good parts count here. I am merely rebutting the assertion that has been made that religion is all downside with no upside.
The operative phrase there is "knew you", not "evildoers". In Christian theology, Christians themselves aren't anything to write home about. They're just favored due to their relationship with God.
People can go out, find "good people", and emulate them. Though that's missing the point according to Christian theology. In fact, part of the sacrament of baptism involves admitting you're not a "good person". These aren't secret rituals or something. On the contrary, they're supposed to be public statements.
I'm aware that the Bible says we are all sinners, we should value humility etc. I also grew up in The Bible Belt and have met plenty of Christians. Regardless of what the Bible asks of people, the reality is that attending church has de facto become a means to signal goodness and many Christians don't really accept other people who do not themselves identify as Christian.
Public identification as Christian is a means to open certain doors socially. There are plenty of people who follow that script for the social benefit it entails. As just an obvious example that comes to mind, my understanding is most mobsters are Catholic.
>For example the Catholic Church doesn't support gay marriage or even condom use in AIDS torn Africa.
It seems like your criticism is something along the lines of "I don't like the choices they make" which when it comes to morality isn't a very strong argument. Below is an explanation of why they make those choices. Perhaps you can make a deeper criticism.
You have to understand that Christians in general and Catholic's in specific reason about morality differently. Something is moral if God has declared it so. Something is immoral if God has declared it so. The Bible isn't detailed enough to answer every question in life so theologians have thought up answers to questions like "Should gays marry" or "Should people in Africa use condoms." The general process is, do we have something specific God has said that applies? Do we have a principal that we have derived from God's words that we can apply?
For the gay marriage question, the Catholic Church has said that passages that talk about homosexuality interpret those that God says gay sex is immoral. Thus since gay marriage increase gay sex, it is also immoral. Thus it should not happen.
For the condom's in Africa question. Does God talk about using condom's? No. But, the Catholic Church has long held that the procreative aspect of sex is so central that you should not intentionally keep procreation from happening. Condoms keep you from procreating thus using them is immoral. Yes, the spread of AIDS is bad but the Catholic Church holds that you should never do something immoral. So even though using condoms would help the AIDS epidemic, that help isn't worth doing something immoral.
There's a few problems with your premise...
First, evil has been done without religion. For examples look at the millions of deaths in the ex-Soviet Union, China, North Korea...atheism can be just as dogmatic and evil as religion can be, and the horrors that are done in the name of idealism happen with or without religion. I suppose this depends on your definition of religion and if atheism can be a form of religion, but I would argue that at the very least, every person has a list of presuppositions that make up their worldview, and in some ways every person is ideological (though not every person is violent, both from those that are religious and those that are not).
Secondly, it doesn't take a spiritual belief to be dogmatic. Look at politics, or baseball fans, or some vegans. People generally are dogmatic over their belief systems, whatever they're composed of, religion or not. I imagine that evil stems from the intensity and nature of the belief systems, but also the person and the circumstances.
Finally, people are taught to both love and hate at a VERY early age, regardless of the influence of religion. Society does a fine job of this, my 1 1/2 year old is just as capable of being a kind and loving son as he is being selfish and mean. Now perhaps you mean more developmentally, but every human is just as capable of love as they are of hate, I would say regardless of religion. Some religions may encourage one or the other more than others, just as some teachers do in the classrooms or in certain subject areas. I imagine what you're referring to are the studies that showed that racism is taught (and it is), but racism is not a necessary component of evil. Selfishness or greed can be just as effective as a root cause of evil as racism. How much evil has been done in the name of money, separated from beliefs?
Religion is just the scapegoat in your argument, when the things you're stating are more general to human nature.
The most intelligent Christians I know regard communism as a Christian heresy. As a minimum, communists had sacred beliefs, which sounded more like those of a Western religion than an Eastern one. The trumpet shall sound, and we shall be changed etc.
> The people who do good in the name of religion, by and large, don't need religion to do good.
I doubt Fred Rogers would agree with you.
I also think "religion" is a loaded word. Depending on what you mean by it, Jesus was anti-religion.
And finally, I think people people don't need theism to create a dogma of hate, bigotry, and oppression. History is full of stories of evil men who commit atrocities in the name of dogmas with absent or incidental theism.
How do you know that same evil wouldn’t be done without religion? Hate and evil finds justification for itself wherever it can. Often it is religion but it can also be in culture, tradition, racism, otherness etc. I’m not convinced a lack of religion would correspond to a net reduction in that kind of evil. It might just shift somewhere else as humans try to justify their terrible actions.
This is likely true for the large scale evils, where religion is used to coerce people into terrible acts. It's less clear for smaller evils that religion is to blame for. Having a discussion on the ethics of something like homosexuality becomes much harder when a significant portion of crowd thinks a vengeful god has forbidden it.
Further, I find the long running system of a tithe to be rather evil, and can't see an equivalent without religion. A tax for the general well being of your afterlife is rather unique.
That doesn’t make sense to me - rationalizing your actions is a very necessary coping skill for living every day life. You have to make sub optimal decisions at times and you need a way to move on. That a person can rationalize evil decisions is unfortunate, but it doesn’t take away the necessity of it.
The point is that religion taught them to hate in the first place.
There is an incredible amount of hatred and discrimination in this world that can be traced back to the text in some book said that some particular group of people were bad and other people accepted that as the word of God. The only reason these people have to hate that group is because an authority figure (the authority figure) told them to.
It seems like some kind of fallacy to insist that good done in the name of religion is never actually about religion, while evil done in the name of religion is 100% only about religion.
If nothing else, I don't know how you could even begin to prove that. It sounds like something people believe without evidence because they find it comforting, which is pretty ironic given the context.
On the other hand, there is a tremendous amount of evil done in the name of religion that wouldn't be done at all if it weren't for religion. An incredible amount of hate and bigotry and oppression and violence all rooted in dogma.
People don't need to be taught how to love. But they do need to be taught how to hate.