Religion
In reply to the discussion: OR couple whose daughter died untreated wants faith-healing beliefs kept from jury [View all]el_bryanto
(11,804 posts)And I don't know that you and cleanhippie have the same attitude about continuing the practice of religion.
If I understand him correctly, his position is that since all the benefits of religion can be duplicated through secular means, and since religion causes so much terrible stuff, there's something at best selfish and at worse monstrous about believers continuing to cling to their religions.
Responding to that argument one has to come up with a benefit of religion that can't be duplicated by secular means - the problem is that those benefits are, in my opinion, spiritual in nature (i.e. they involve belief in God or Gods or a supernatural world (there's more to say here as there are religions that may not require the belief in the supernatural, but as the faith we are mostly concerned in the US is the various branches of Christianity, it seems like splitting hairs)).
And it is unlikely that cleanhippie or any atheist will be willing to acknowledge spiritual benefits as real or valuable.
Bryant