Religion

Three propositions:

1. In one of my earliest posts on this blog I argued that religions have positive placebo value. They may be the ‘opiate of the masses’ that acts on the brain as an endogenous opioid but religion makes people less ill, suffer less mental illness and provides a convenient social glue. Praying for someone will not help that person but it might help you. So, while I am an atheist, I don’t resent or dislike the fact that friends and colleagues have religious beliefs. Good luck to them – they’ll probably outlive me, have more friends and almost certainly be more sane.

2. Religious belief is so widespread in different societies that it is presumably hard-wired – the Supernatural Enforcer guides most people in most societies. Some have asked whether there is a God gene.

3. Although religious conversions seem fairly common in western societies (I could not dig up confirmatory data) my guess is that most people adopt a religion that is reasonably close to the religion of at least one of their parents. It is not an adopted as an act of choice.

Point 3 by itself makes the choice of religious belief seem arbitrary to me but, in conjunction with points 1. and 2., suggests that disputing people’s religious beliefs is unlikely to be a productive communication. It also suggests that while war is presumably a generally a quite irrational response to dealing with conflict generally in terms of its harmful consequences (John Quiggin has reminded us of this recently) that it is particularly pointless when it is derives from differences in religious belief.

I am motivated to make these remarks by the recent horrific suicide bomb attack in Iraq where one sect of Islam attacked another in a marketplace killing 125 people. The street became a river of blood. The input was hatred and the outputs generated were death and hatred.