War is harmful all by itself; aggression and the urge to dominate causes problem all by itself; predation is destructive all by itself.
Those are tautologies equivalent to saying harm is harmful all by itself. The issue is about causal factors of harm, not things that are the definition of harm. The many varied factors that cause war are each not harmful "all by themselves", whether its fear of the unknown, a desire to have more resources, guns, our cognitive ability to create guns.
But spirituality and faith have both positive and negative effects, and do not - to respond to the question as posed - cause negative social behaviours by their nature.
Something can occassionally enable a positive outcome yet have inherent properties that naturally lend itself to harm, that includes nuclear bombs and the most poisonous substances on earth. Faith is the very definition of irrationality, believing ideas without using ones reasoning mind and applying one's knowledge. That will almost always produce false ideas and how often is being wrong about reality better for society than being correct about it? In addition, religious faith is virtually always rooted in fear of uncertainty and the unknown, seeking to impose an artificial order to quell that uncertainty, which naturally lends itself to intolerance of deviants, a simple authoritarian structure of power, and a suppression of healthy, knowledge-seeking doubts. Close minded certain belief is not just a by product of faith and fear, it fuels and enables these things because beliefs have a causal role in altering perceptions and information processing and motivating actions.
None of the above requires organizes political power structures to abuse religion. These things naturally emerge when people follow religious impulses (which again are mostly fear) and create faith based beliefs about what the world is in order to satisfy those emotional desires.
Religion being a cause of social ills (and of irrationality) doesn't require causal necessity nor sufficiency.
Oh. I thought it did.
Clearly you do think it does or you wouldn't be trying to argue against the negative impact of faith by making the irrelevant argument that social ills can exist without it, because that is only relevant if causal influence is limited to necessary and sufficient causes.
Faith didn't predispose anyone to fear, suspicion, envy and irrationality:
Yes it does. Faith is, by definition, belief rooted in such emotions and ignoring rational thought. Beliefs are not passive outputs of the psychological system. Once formed, they have causal impact upon emotion, information processing , reasoning, and action. Thus faith becomes a emotional lens that distorts our information processing and reasoning and selects our actions based upon the false premises that the defining irrationality of faith inherently leads to.
we already had those inclinations, long before we had sufficient imagination to conceive of the supernatural.
First, it isn't very imaginative to assume that nature is governed by a human-like minds, which is what nearly every supernatural, "spiritual", and religious belief comes down to. It is just narcissistic projection rooted in fear of uncertainty that imposes the known and familiar (ourselves) onto the unknown instead of waiting to acquire knowledge about what the unknown actually is. It is rational inquiry that requires imagining that the unknown might be unlike what you already know and what your self-serving narcissism biases you to believe (aka faith). Second, it is a rather baseless and implausible assumption that our capacity to narcissistic project ourselves onto an ambiguous reality (what you call "imagination") came after our tendency to allow fear and other emotions to undercut our sensory-based learning mechanisms and form irrational beliefs that contradict our own empirical experiences.
Secular rulers harness them to nationalism as religious rulers harness them to the church, as economic rulers harness them production and consumption - and when the three are working together, we are well and truly yoked!
Sure, those seeking authoritarian power nearly always steer religion in their favor, either by controlling which religion is dominant or in a few cases by suppressing religion altogether. Both strategies are critical to authoritarian power for the same reason, religion and theism is authoritarian thus it must be conquered in some fashion in order to hold authoritarian control. IOW, religion's natural tendency toward authoritarianism makes it a natural weapon and/or a natural competition to people seeking authoritarian power. Its natural utility as a weapon against reason and liberty is why 99% of the time rulers seek to use it rather than replace it with a political faith that is unlikely to be a naturally suited to the ends of authoritarian power.
Any religion that derives morality from a God is inherently authoritarian,
But that's just a few of the more recent, highly sophisticated religions. These are the ones we're most familiar with, of course, so we tend to judge all religious feeling by the dictates of these religious institutions of the last 2000 years.
We forget that these are
state religions, designed for control of large, disparate populations, militarily imposed and politically enforced. I'm quite aware of the destructiveness of state religions. I'm arguing that those are a manufactured political (imperial) product.
Those religions have come to dominate not merely because of imperialism, but because their contents resonate with people's psychological "spiritual" tendencies. Fear and desire for a self-centered "purpose" to the universe are the psychological roots of spirituality and faith. Monotheism and its personal human-like creator god (and infallible authority) is the ultimate elixir to soothe those existential desires.
These religions a very long way from the authentic - one might say organic - spiritual impulses of our ancestors.
No, modern religions feed on the natural psychological impulses at the heart of religion. There is no way they could be so successful and dominant even in the absence of gun-point coercion unless they did resonate with personal religious impulses. Modern religion is destructive because those impulses are destructive when allowed to have any kind of real impact on social, moral, political, or technological development. State religion is not required for that influence to occur. People determine those things more than the state, and people'e natural religious impulses impact those aspects of society.
Religion doesn't need to be used as a weapon by social authorities to be dangerous. If leaders merely listened to democratic will and each individual (with no help from organized religion) just acted and voted upon their personal religious impulses, this would still be harmful to society and its moral, political, and scientific progress.
It might pose obstacles, but scientific progress was not exactly
halted between 15 and 1900, even though the Christian churches were very powerful and owned all the secular rulers. Most of the great discoverers also had religious faith and it didn't even slow them down. In the past century, technology has galloped ahead, though those same authoritarian religious institutions are still very much in evidence.
Yes, strongly correlated with a rise in secularism and decline in religiosity (not just state controlled, but levels of personal religious belief), there has been an exponential boon in scientific advancement. This is in large part due to the harmful societal constraints of religious belief on intellectual progress. The same goes for moral progress and an increase in tolerance and appreciation for individual liberty and disdain for authoritarian power. Enlightenment thinking was an integration of appreciation for liberty and for reason, and a need to keep religious faith out of societal governance. This is no coincidence. It is because liberty and reason are co-enabling, as are faith and anti-liberty. Under most conditions, one flourishes when the other does because they are natural bedfellows.
Religious practice declines in prosperous times, when people are freer to express individual choice, and belief declines when education becomes more readily available to more of the population.
Agreed, religious belief is negatively related to intellectual progress and moral progress in tolerance and valuing of liberty. This relation is bi-directional because faith is inherently threatened by reasoned thought and open mindedness, thus it withers when people are free to apply reason while progress increases due to that reason. Also, in defense of itself it reacts by promoting anti-reason and anti-liberty values and power structures. IT can only survive if an oppressive authoritarian system (whether government or many other forms of social coercion) is in place to shield it from honest open inquiry.
It serves as a pseudo-explanation for anything that stunts and inhibits seeking of legit knowledge and answers, plus an authority whose mere arbitrary will is the sole determinant of what is moral and just. Thus, God is a concept that does cause social problems due to the inherent properties of the concept.
.....because they were never intended to
explain Nature but to
describe man's relationship to Nature.
That is absurd. The facts of history and of human psychology make it clear that religious and supernatural belief are inherently tied to explanations of the world around us (i.e., nature). In fact, it is impossible for anything to even try to "describe man's relationship to Nature, without it also making claims about what nature and man are and how that got that way. It is true that religion doesn't seek accurate explanations of nature or of man, but rather seeks to invent explanations that enable and support particular emotional and social goals. That is the very inherent danger of religion to both the person and society, that it inherently presumes truths about the world and human being without regard for accuracy or for cohering with what we empirically know (or being logically consistent). Its presumed truths about nature and man are determined by inventing whatever truths feel good, reduce fear and anxiety, satisfy desire for simplistic order, make human life seem "meaningful", and justify whatever actions the person or society wants to take against others (e.g., women and outgroup members with shit they want to take).
People, all the way back to apedom, have been perfectly comfortable putting food on the ancestral shrine and then inventing a better arrowhead and then making a sand-painting or a song. We have compartmentalized mental functions. We can be poetic, scientific, pragmatic, sentimental and fanciful, all at the same time.
No, we do not have compartmentalized mental functions. We have a brain that is fully interconnected and each idea has some impact on all others. If a theistic worldview cannot stand up to reason (and none of them can), then it must undermine reason to maintain itself. Thus all faiths do this by a combination of promoting emotion-based unreason about issues of fact (including claims about nature and man) and/or authoritarian suppression of any application of reason to anything related to those beliefs. Since those beliefs are about nature, man, and life, that means suppression in all areas of life, not some single imaginary "compartment".
Also, I notice your list of art, pragmatic science, and behavioral ritual doesn't actually include any religious beliefs. That's because in an effort to argue for the neutrality of religion you have had to neuter it and cut out a huge % of what religion and faith are all about. Like most liberal apologists for religion you seek to reduce it to mere artistic expression and behavioral custom devoid of any actual belief about anything issues of import to society and human cognition. I realize that many people who retain a religious label have no real religious belief and it is just a form of art and social ritual. These are the people for whom religion isn't harmful to the rest of us because they are not actually religious and have no faith in any belief sense. If that is "religion" then it is meaninglessly vague word, so of course like all other nothings it is consequentially neutral. But religious and supernatural belief and it epistemology of faith is not neutral.
Also, if you think that the religions of people 5000 years ago and in tribal cultures were not oppressive and authoritarian then your are sadly mistaken and have fallen for the classic anti-modernist romanticism.
As long as spirituality is divorced from political power, it's harmless.
IF by "political power" you mean any kind of social influence whatever, then I might agree. But it need not at all involve the state. The fear of uncertainty and blind unreasoned belief that defines faith and personal religion is harmful to society even when it just alters the interaction between two citizens, like a parent on a child who is now less likely to understand the world or allow the morality to develop with our expanding knowledge because their parent encouraged them to have faith (i.e. close mindedness) in false notions of how the world came to be and that moral truths come from the will of a creator.
Only modern liberals who don't actually believe but who romanticize "spirituality" think there is such a thing as religious belief that is divorced from political power. Religion is inherently about the ideas and values and morals that define all political issues. The only way a peoples personal religious and spiritual ideas don't massive determine their political actions is if they don't actually have any real religious beliefs (its all just superficial lip service) or they never do anything to impact the society around them (which never happens).
