Quote:
Originally Posted by chillrob
OK, well if you want to lump them in with all Christians, I think Christianity overall encourages child molestation, bombing of abortion clinics, and other heinous acts. You can't have it both ways. I believe that at least the major western religions (Christianity and Islam) encourage much more bad behavior than good. I don't know enough about eastern religions to make a judgement.
So, more to your point, I do not believe that supporting these religions would be likely to encourage my preferred morality in future generations.
Beyond OrP's observation that this appears to be a logical fallacy, it's worth thinking about this from a perspective that includes the inherent randomness of human behaviors. Nobody is attempting to make a strong claim that if religion then bad-things-don't-happen. Similarly, I don't think anyone is (should be) trying to argue that if no-religion then bad-things-don't-happen.
You're going to get bad things with or without religion. You're going to get good things with or without religion. The types of social structures that impact human behavior happen with and without religious influences. We're watching in real time the impact of a charismatic leadership that is obstensibly secular.
So there is a sense in which you *can* have it both ways, in that you can (must?) truthfully acknowledge that some religions may go in a bad way while others go in a good way. And that possibility of the failure of values is on the table as part of the reality of it.
To the deeper point of OrP's actual position, the structure of the passing along of values comes from a type of social cohesion. People who get together and do things together, and find ways to reinforce what they do together. Religion is a built-in mechanism that accomplishes these things.
In the absence of religion, it's not as clear that one can find the same type of cohesive force. One can speculate that something like politics could suffice, but we clearly see that politics is as prone (if not more prone?) to the types of corruption that lead to the abuses that have happened in the church. There are tons of examples of overt abuses on human lives propagated by political power.
We also see a form of secular social cohesion that's doing similar sorts of things, such as the anti-vaxxer movement and unhealthy diet fads, but also within the structure of business (age/gender discrimination and wage inequities). All of these can rightly be seen as negatives on society being propagated through secular channels.
At the core, I might pose that religion, at least as an aspirational claim, seeks to make the world better for reasons that are somehow transcendent to human whims. Granted, the implementation of this value varies wildly. I do not know whether a secular society, in the absence of some sense of transcendent value, can hold that together in quite the same way.