DOES IT MATTER IF RELIGION MAKES
BAD PEOPLE VERY GOOD
OR VERY GOOD PEOPLE VERY BAD?
"The disengagement of moral self-sanctions from inhumane conduct is a growing
human problem at both individual and collective levels" Albert Bandura, Stanford
University, https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/Bandura1999PSPR.pdf
A religion has to be an organisation to some degree to justify
labelling people as its own. Religions have overlaps.
Take warmongering politicians. They may be of different
religions but their hate that they may direct at a common religious
or social can reflect on their religions. If a religion can
cause trouble, religions can come together to provoke it too.
It has been said that the only way to get good people to do terrible evils is to use religion to do it. What the normal ordinary person will get up to when emboldened by faith and prayer and spells and the feeling that God protects is alarming.
Does it matter if religion makes bad people very good or good people very bad?
If religion can go either way and often does then it is nothing
special. It makes it a liar for saying it exists to raise us
to our best selves. That is the best it can be in theory but the
situation is much worse in the real world.
Back to the question.
The natural response is that as good as it is to see bad people convert and
reform, anything
that makes good people bad is inherently dangerous. Something dangerous making
bad people good makes us suspicious and there is no other possible way to look
at it. The good cannot be as strong as it looks or stay strong. The evil person
might think they turn good for the right reasons but how can that be certain?
If the notion that evil happens for good needs it to happen and
uses it to make good is underneath all that thinking then it is like
saying, "There is no love without hate." That is telling you
to welcome the hate you find in your religion so that you can use it
to be "good." That may help you act good but you are corrupt
inside.
A religion should be judged on whether or not if it makes good people do bad
things. That is the prime thing to check. If you want to minimise judging and attacking the person you will want
to blame the religion not just the person.
But some good people do even better things than just good things. What about
that? We have to trust them to be as good if they didn't have a religious bone
in their body.
So we are sure that if a religion gets good people to do bad things then it is a
bad religion regardless of any good it seems to do.
Objections (or should we say gaslighter distractions?):
Religion will say, "It takes religion to make bad people good."
If that is correct, then religion is not the only thing that does that. Secular
therapists help religious believers meaning you never know if the religion had
much to do with it.
If that is correct, then we do not know if a religion is really that special or
not.
If a religion makes bad people good, what about the good people it makes bad?
The good people are at risk by staying in the religion. So if it makes good
people bad then the people allegedly who become good through the religion do not
count much. And are they really to be trusted?
Another objection, "Religion has no inherent power to make good people do evil
things or to open the door to them doing evil."
Most religions do believe that some religion if not all has this power.
Catholicism does not regard paganism as a good thing.
The objection is only a dismissal of the argument. It is not dealing with it the
argument. To dismiss in a matter so important means, “I don’t care if it is
inherently dangerous. I don’t want to know.” What does that say about you then?
Violent humankind will leave their mark on the faiths or religions they invent.
Christians who show you the nice bits of the Bible and who ignore the bad or
give them insufficient attention are honouring violent man. They are covering up
for him.
If religion has an inherent power to make good people bad, we will never see it
with an argument like that.
Another objection, "It is religious faith not religion that is intrinsically
evil."
To suggest that religious faith is the evil entity is an interesting
proposition. Why can’t both be? If religious faith is evil so is religion for
you cannot have a religion that doesn’t ask for religious faith.
Also, there are more religious faiths than religions. Within each religion
people believe different things even if they are not supposed to. That is the
reality and religion knows that within its fold there will be believers who
decide that violence is part of God's will.
A little faith can be dangerous and sometimes even more dangerous for some
rather than others. Even thinking you believe would be as bad as faith. Jesus
Christ praised the mustard seed of faith as long as the person could not do any
better. It has been noticed that believers with weak faith might resort to wars
and hate and violence to compensate for their lack of faith. A Catholic for
example who thinks everybody should be Catholic but who suspects God is not
going to help much towards that end (lack of faith) will be tempted to condone
violent programmes to force Catholicism on others.
Another objection, "The good people who do evil things are not really good."
Irrelevant. The question is if religion helped make them evil. If they are
hypocrites who turn evil then religion could be blame for making them hypocrites
who end up becoming so smug that they hurt people viciously.
The No True Scotsman fallacy is lurking. "If people are
good and join my religion and become bad and blame the religion then
they are not true followers and never were." That is just a
trick and it is for ignoring and dismissing instead of looking at
the thing fairly. It is as insane as saying that a Scots who
hates haggis is not a real Scots.
Another - "Religious people who do evil are making a mistake. It is not a
reflection on their religion."
Calling people who do evil good if stupid or unthinking seems to mean they are
not acting from a vindictive motive. Perhaps they are weak in some areas.
The argument is disgusting for it tries to trivialise evil when religious people
do it. The implication is that the atheist doing similar things is automatically
evil.
Good people may do evil by mistake for we live in a nasty world where
disagreements about moral issues appear and sometimes we have to make the right
choice and others cannot see that it is.
A lot of the time we ignore the argument. We class people who hit their children
as evil and not as weak or mistaken. We use the argument only when it suits our prejudices and agenda.
Good people need to tell themselves that evil is somehow for the best. Both
religious and non-religious people can do that.
You can be extremist in outlook all the time but rarely extremist in action.
The person who obeys too much without question enables evil more than any other.
Only religion can give a rationale for such obedience. Atheists may obey blindly too
but they cannot give a plausible reason why they should. Religion can say that
it has unusual or unnatural ways of knowing things - perhaps divine revelation
or psychic powers. Once you say that you are asking people to take things on
trust alone. You are asking for a leap of faith to be undertaken.
Few people classed as evil are really evil - very few do evil just to see others
suffer. We need to realise that religious believers can rationalise evil better
than any atheist can. They can believe that God wants them to do evil for its
his plan.
If most evil is done out of misguided belief that it is going to result in great
good then religion encourages it.
Consider how the lamb turns into a lion overnight
Some belief systems religious and secular get members and ruin them
by osmosis. It is like a bad apple spreads a toxin that is
hardly detectable to every other one in the crate and even apples
that think they are in the crate but are not and laying alongside
it.
When religion can generate extreme good and/or extreme evil then it seems we are
better off with a moderate religion that inspires neither. But in that case it
is not religion for it is clear that religion makes at least some good people to
turn them bad. So it makes them good to destroy it meaning it is evil. And some
religions will inspire extreme good and extreme evil while others will be better
at inspiring extreme evil.
You cannot count on extreme evil to be balanced by extreme good. Evil by
definition can go out of control.
If anything has a dark side at all, there is a risk of it going off the
rails.
Good people do not usually decide overnight to murder heretics or
whatever. Some do and that is important as well. Religion or ideology can cause
such a fast change. Religion does it best for if there is a God then it is
unsurprising if that God asks you to do maybe scary things just because he says
so for he cannot tell you the reasons. So good religious people can suddenly or
gradually do evil things and faith is to blame. A religious system that leads to
sudden transformations from good doing to evil doing is necessarily bad. It is
as bad as poison in the water that does not kill all drinkers but one or two.
There are other ways in which religion is evil.
Religion sees sin as a crime against God. It states such a crime is more vile
than any crime against man's law. So much for innocent until proven guilty!
Religious humility is fake.
Believers think God makes people suffer so that they can help them! How much God
values their works!
They are judgemental: not to judge is to judge. When we decide not to take a
position on an issue, we are in fact taking a position: if we don't disapprove,
we are offering our tacit approval.
Some suggest a modification of the argument that it takes religion to make the
good person do evil.
Here it is. “With or without it you would have good people doing good things and
evil people doing evil things. But for SOME good people to do evil things, that
takes religion.”
This still tells us that religion has no justified existence. It tells us the
risk is lower than it is with the original argument but the risk is still there
and it is not an acceptable risk.
Religion in this view is inherently evil for some members. It is inherently
risky for all.
What is said could be modified by many. They might say, “But for good people to
be lazy and pray for others instead of helping them properly, that takes
religion.” That is true.
We conclude that if you are a mix of bad and good as a secularist that is much better than being a religious person when that somehow can have you going to one extreme or the other.