I think people use religion to stay ignorant most of the time. They don't know if what's in the book is true and are afraid to find out. That type of religion is useless because you understand nothing more than what the book has outlined for you and cannot peek at any of the machinery without offending some guru.
You aren't suggesting that ignorant people are useless, are you? Just a joke.
That aside, I'm not exactly disagreeing with the sentiment here. Religion has often been used to foster ignorance for the express purpose of controlling information and the people who receive it. I believe wholeheartedly in the exposition of people who exploit religion in this way.
But, as it has been said already many times this is certainly not an exclusively religious trait. People prey on ignorance to sell cars on the daily, for example. That's a human trait. The strong prey on the weak. In this case, the strong minded prey on the weak minded. I'm not saying its right, I'm saying its going to keep happening forever, because it works. Religion is just being used to mask basic human greed. It would be nice if we could get rid of that, but I don't think that's possible without murdering ambition at the same time. That sort of cuts us off at the knees as a species.
Of course, there is also the sort of ignorance that people impose on themselves. The thing about this is that they are literally deciding to consider the question answered and moving on. This demonstrates that they are not interested in thinking about the answer. This sort of behavior doesn't exist in a vacuum, though. In truth, many people who accept religious direction in this way are not really accepting it all. They are just paying lip-service to check a box. That's sort of shortcut isn't going to go away with religion either. Its a psychological defense mechanism. People use totally true scientific facts for the same exact reason. People will have little if any study let alone experiential, or empirical information regarding this scientific principle or that one, but they will answer question after question with principles nomenclature as if that says it all! With just basic questioning its easy to tell when someone really doesn't have the first clue what the Big Bang or Evolution is. They just know how and when to say those terms to 'win' an argument. They profess to strict empirical scientific worldview but could never be bothered to research or study a scrap of it. I would admit this is much less common than the religious version, but its not rare.
All I'm saying is humans be humans and we'll keep being humans with or without religion. Some of us just don't give so much attention to any of the topics we discuss here. That's not really their fault in many cases, and it certainly doesn't make them useless or even less than myself or anyone else. They just don't give as much of a crap as I or you might. I have a core group of friends that I see and speak to daily. Do you know what they think about religion? Neither do I, because they groan and change the subject anytime I bring it up. It just doesn't matter to them that much. But I know two are self-proclaimed Christians, though I've never seen them with a Bible, at Church or ever thinking, speaking or acting like they have an idea what 'being Christian' means (to themselves I mean, not in the general sense, I don't know what that means, either). Its not even a box they make let alone check. Removing religion wouldn't change a thing about them.
As you say, religion from this perspective of ignorance is mostly useless. Ignorance is a terrible plan no matter what side of it you're on or what is being ignored.
It can become an indirect force of good even in that case if you get enough apes together eventually they figure something out and come up with tools regardless of what they believe. But, it's not the belief system that should be given credit as it is merely incidental in this case.
Fair enough. I suppose I don't always expose the exploiters so long as they bend the sheep towards something positive. But as you say, that's incidental and shouldn't be considered a 'benefit' of religion, or at least I won't consider it a benefit. Its a pretty thin silver lining at best.
One true way and monopoly of religion is also rather amusing because if anything is the case is that through time religions die off. People aren't married to the old thing for long and even religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have been reinvented several times over history they are the same in name only.
I would agree with this, also. This is why I view religion as expression on a cultural level. The 'artist' in this case is society (or more appropriately a society). The artist's works change with time. Religion has a way of resisting change, but it does change all the same. The artist grows and its work grows with it. And since it is from a societal level, societies merge. Big changes then, yeah? The Roman adoption of Christianity comes to mind. We're even now discussing the topic on a forum that is meant to consider every angle. Simply by allowing the consumption of other ideas inspires and modifies the thinking of everyone who participates. We're changing it all right now, essentially. Without many views and many religions we are deprived of that.
I wanted to be sure about this, but I'm pretty sure that 'many religions' includes atheism despite atheism not being a religion. I'm not sure if the OP intended that, but I certainly consider the atheist perspective to be as important to the 'diversity of religion' as any religious perspective.
