re: #30 LudwigVanQuixote

The one about Clergy? Yes it is very good. His critiques are even brilliant.

Just please be clear that there is a difference between people having their faith abused and faith itself.

What Condell forgets to mention are all of those who spend years of their lives in the service of others, making the world a genuinely better place because of faith.

While there are many kinds of harm that seem to be pretty much the unique gift to the world of religion, it has never been established that you need faith to be good to others. Religion is NOT the reason why people are good. People find motives to be good or bad, whether they are religious or not. Often it is those who preach religious morality the loudest who turn out to be the real snakes and desperados. Just as it is often true that it is the godless ones who actually stick to moral principles, even though they don’t go around shouting about them down everyone else throats for piety points.

I think that any society, to be successful , has to uphold certain moral principles, or they will fail in competition with other societies. Religion just happened to be the framework on which that system was usually hung, historically, but it doesn’t have to be any more.