Religion Case

There are about 7 billion people on earth and most of us are religious but half the planet identifies various forms of Christianity and Islam and many of the rest adhere to other religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism,and Jainism. This fact about humanity are persistent religiosity is fascinating this is because religious activities and religious beliefs are so hard to explain a lot of what we do outside of religion makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. So people engage in activities like having sex, raising kids, building shelters and a lot of beliefs we have outside of religion theater experience are relevant to our lives.Such as the weather, what's the food is best to eat almost all it's going on the heads of other members of the community.In contrast religion involves seemingly nonadaptive activities, activities that seem downright odd such as when people sacrifice valuable objects or choose not to eat perfectly healthy foods or scarring themselves or chopping off parts of the children's genitals.

Religion involves beliefs that aren't in any obvious way around everyday experience such as beliefs in supernatural beings, life after death define creation virgin birth and so on. So a lot of questions are for psychologists ask about the origin of religion or how it develops in children, how its encoded in the brain how it varies from culture to culture and many other things. I'm interested in most of these questions. What I want to focus on here is the question of the effects of religion particularly religions moral facts to put it crudely does religion make us good or does it make us bad. A lot of people think you know the answer to this question many people think religion makes you good and because of this they distrust and dislike atheists.

Pulling the data for instance find that Americans don't want atheist as a president they would rather vote for a Mormon, Jew, Muslim or a homosexual. They also don't want their children to marry an atheist,and if you ask them why they would say that atheist lack moral core, they can't be trusted a lot of people could quote Dostoevsky on this whether there is no God all is permitted.Some scholars believe many academics who see religion a force for evil.So Christopher Hitchens sums this us with typical clarity when he says religions are "violent irrational intolerant allied to racisim and tribalism bigotry invest in ignorance and hostile contemptuous of women and cohesive towards children”. So whose right, the obvious way to look at the effects of something is to compare what happens when it’s present versus when it's absent.

The problem you run into here is that religion is everywhere even atheist and living religious societies and even those few atheistic societies used to be religious societies. Not long ago and often still contained religious beliefs and practices. So instead you have to look at more subtle