Social Perspective

Older religions (including gnostic atheism) use their influence to advantage their adherents and disadvantage the adherents of other religions. 

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In fact, we plan to do the same.  It's zero sum.  I'm just saying.   That said, let's look at what Mozi calls "partialism."  This is favoring people on the basis of some factor other than the general welfare.    Getting  your dim witted kid into the best college by cheating rather than be getting him less dim witted.  Fighting to increase  your department's share of the budget even though that will hurt the organization as a whole.  Supporting your nation even in its perpetration of atrocities.  This comes down to an upside down or inside out way of thinking about priorities.  What is closer, in this way of thinking, is more important.  Me before my family.  My family before my congregation.  My congregation before the denomination.  The denomination before other denominations.  My faith before other faiths.  Or my family before my town, my town before the state, my state before the nation, my nation before the world.    The reverse of this Mozi calls universalism.  God and all worlds before this world.  The world before my nation.  The nation before my province.  My province before my village.  My village before my family.  My family before myself.  Naturally, all religions prefer their own.  It makes sense in either system.  If  your faith is what is good for the world, then preferring those of your faith also benefits the world.  If your faith is what is good for practitioners, pushing your faith on friends and family is doing right by them.   Theconsequentialists believe the larger cause is the more important one and the proper one for us to always favor.  So, whether religious favoritism is justifiable depends on whether it actually serves the higher good.  You can't always generalize.  Ask yourself, "is mine better because it's better, or because it's mine?"  But how do we know what's better?  God tells us.  How do we know the will of God?  Through the determination of people.  Does this mean we only do what tradition and the existing majority dictate?  No, we can innovate speculatively, as individually inspired.  If that were not an option there would never be growth, and existing faiths could not have been founded rightly either.  But in doing so, we must respect tradition and the majority.  Therefore, we can believe the prevailing faiths can be improved upon, even as we promote our own in a positive manner, provided we aren't destructive or harmful.  We can give our kid the best tutors because that's positive.  We can't relatively advantage our kid unfairly with bribes because that pushes down more deserving kids, which is negative.  

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This disadvantages many worthy people who are rejecting theological conformity rather than virtue, partly by leading them to reduced virtue and its disadvantaging consequences (often on the basis that since this world only has secondary importance, virtue here has no value of its own, it only serves as evidence of orthodoxy and spiritual purity--which do not reliably serve the claimed purpose). 

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The effects of traditional religion are what?  In determining this we can't compare a hypothetical to a reality, we have to compare realities or compare hypotheticals.  Can we isolate the effects of religion from other effects?  I think we can compare relatively secular areas to religion dominated areas.   I propose that creativity and, arguably, authentic decency (as opposed to mere tribal favor) are less common in the religious than in secular areas.  Modernism is better than traditionalism.  Is this correlation?  Is it just that suffering areas are both less creative and compassionate and yet also more religious?    If so I can imagine cynical religionists saying, "What a good reason to create despair: it makes souls cry out for salvation in the real (next) world?"  But to answer the rhetorical,   I think not. It's not mere correlation.  Religion has a bad effect nowadays.  Conditions after the introduction of a religion can be better than before (Christianity better than Roman paganism), but later that same religion can make conditions worse relative to newer alternatives.   Does this mean atheism is good?  No it means secularism is better than religious culture under some circumstances.   Religions tend to envision an ideal world that's a little better than the world they are born in.  Ever after that world is what they try to produce.   A bronze age religion is better than a stone age religion during the stone age, but it's worse than an iron age religion during the iron age.  

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Traditional religion has a negative effect compared to advanced secularism, despite taking credit for the sun coming up.  Secularism isn't atheism.  It's freedom.  You'll find those most creative decent people aren't either atheists or traditionally religious on average.    People shine when they are free of wolves, given permission by that liberty; it's as simple as that, and traditional religion is no protection from wolves: it increasingly becomes cover for them.   But there's a lot of messing with the evidence:  a lot of stuff in society is intentionally shaped to present false impressions.  I'm generalizing a lot, but religious societies often purposely create a dichotomy which presents the illusion that doctrinal conformity improves people, and that doctrinal submission is necessary for morality.   "If you don't accept Jesus you can't possibly be moral and all you do will be evil no matter what because you don't have divine guidance."   

 

Even people outside the tribe are prone to goodness, which blooms in the absence of being misled.  Those claiming conformity is necessary for goodness seem to believe their ideas must be right because they would be good if universal, so their ideas must be imposed--as if the same were not true of all other ideas.  Even a world purely full of demons would be righteous because it would be demons being rightfully punished.   But the only idea standing out above a crowd of such "wouldn't it be great if it were universal" ideas is the idea of coexisting with a diversity of ideas.  That achieves universality as a reality rather than justifying based on a hypothetical.   Wishing for diversity comes true immediately, on some scale.  Wishing for any particular standard to become universal never comes true and is thus never justified by its supposedly justifying end results.  When there is only one religion in a society it gives up on developing character and just tests for conformity, which actually blocks access to natural good character and God's inspiration alike.  We don't live in a natural environment, so relying on natural responsiveness to an arbitrary but totalizing standard doesn't detect our natural character it just reflects our environmental position.  The powerful are responsible for what happens and they should be competing to do a better job of developing character rather than blaming subjects for lacking it (as they do when monopolies).  

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Ignorance breeds ignorance in this environment so, despite exhortations to benevolence, older religions actually tend to limit improvement beyond the level of the environment which produced them. 

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What traditional religions do is try to bring things to a certain level.  In the case of Christianity it tries to make things more like a reformed version of the Roman Empire.  If conditions are worse than that, they make things better.  If conditions are better than that, they actually drag excellence up to mediocrity.  At best.  Sometimes they don't even operate as designed.   Conquistadors torture natives to death and then take mass with no problem.  

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My hypothetical is far superior.  Those Conquistadors would never have been like that because they would have participated in group moral therapy regularly all their lives rather than being given a free pass for saying, "Yes please, someone else take responsibility for my sins."  I hear pawning off  your sins is popular, though.   It must be what God has promoted.  I propose that more people in the future will want something different and it's time to start moving that way.  We will see, won't we?  

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We suspect that other religions, in their elevation of doctrine promotion over the real world, actively produce bad conditions in order to take advantage of them, and we reject and condemn this practice. 

 

Most people know they are small fish in a big pond so they go along to get along.  People are sheep.  Even in the absence of good leadership, they tend to be compassionate.  People figure out how to be moral despite religion, not because of it.  As often as not religion just comes along and takes credit at the end of the day.  More often people are moral first and then religion incorporates morality in order to appeal to them.  

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My theory is that when a religion has a monopoly in a society it has the power to equate itself to morality.  In that case, it enhances the effect by actually limiting moral cultivation to religious sources.  This involves suppressing other sources of moral influence or weakening them or their effects,  The result is a situation in which only the religious are morally cultivated which makes the religion look like the only path to morality.  It works even better if you can then set up "morality" tests and use them as a basis of life success.  With the right people getting crib notes.  This is harder to pull off in a religiously pluralistic society.  In such societies religion is shown to be merely the path to cultural purity, rather than to goodness.  And the world is increasingly a single religiously pluralistic society (especially if you count secularism).   Sure, multiple religions coexisting can either be at war or in harmony, but one religion without competition can also be either at war with itself or  tyrannical.  Cultural homogeneity looks pleasant but it's static and oppressive and yet also unstable and weak.

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One thing you encounter in a society where religion and morality are confounded is "just testing you" entrapment exercises.  People are led to evil supposedly in the guise of testing their tendency to evil.  You're just testing their tendency to go where they're led.  Young people are looking for what environment they're in and what they are going to have to do to adapt to it.  Evolution equips us with a mixed bag of survival tools and maturing consist of finding out which tools to take out of the bag.  Supposedly you're evil if you can be led to evil  and you deserve to become evil because you failed to get made proof against being misled again because you've already been misled.  You failed to be religious (presumably because of some supernatural quality that's neither nature or nurture but usually it has to do with having a smart family that knows the game).  You failed to be led right more than wrong.    True righteousness consists in free informed choice of the right and almost everyone will make that choice once mature.  The job of religion is to cultivate that maturity.    Not to play "I gotcha."  

 

Let me tell ya.  You're the devil if you're doing that.  The devil is the tester, even if he says "just testing you" when called on it and then goes back to report to his church.  I'm not going to pass  your test.  I know it's a test and a bad one.  It doesn't detect what it's supposed to because people lie because they know about it.   I disregard your moral authority furthermore.  If you can test me then you can fix real problems so why don't you do that?  Because your real concern is not atrocities it's people using the wrong fork.   

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