Hi Rhi,
Posting on my phone so thus will be scratty, but here goes.
I’m assuming that you believe that all those things in the first paragraph are ‘better’ in societies that aren’t religious?
In general, yes. I‘d go further I think and suggest that there’s a linear relationship between the degree of fundamentalism and the scores for those indicators. Education for girls for example in Taliban-controlled areas is catastrophically bad; in (still pretty strict religiously) Pakistan it’s pretty bad but not as bad (“According to the 2011 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program, approximately twice as many males as females receive a secondary education in Pakistan” - Wiki) and in secular countries it’s pretty much even-stevens.
You’d need to show that religion causes illiteracy, high infant mortality rates etc. Could it be that poverty causes these things and poor countries also tend to be religious? And then could you demonstrate that poverty is caused by religion and isn’t a hangover from colonialism, say, or not the result of government corruption?
Yes you would, but unsustainably large numbers of children mandated by the prevailing religion for example is clearly a direct contributor to poverty. That’s why various of the UN agencies for example spend so much effort trying to reduce poverty by running birth control programmes (
http://www.un.org/en/sections/about-un/funds-programmes-specialized-agencies-and-others/).
Let’s say we eradicated religion from the UK. Would that make it ‘better’? Would it change our literacy rates, for example? Ok, so we’d have marriage equality, one hopes, although we couldn’t be sure that liberalism will fill the void left by religion. Maybe there’d be a lower risk of terrorism, but only if you’d actually eradicated belief as well as religious practice, and history shows that we aren’t successful at that. Besides, religion is only one excuse for murderous barbarism; animal rights activists don’t like the humanist value that experiments on animals are ok.
But you’ve picked a country where religious influence is relatively marginal, and probably declining. The job’s already been done! Would our society nonetheless be “better” if the church was disestablished and treated as a private members’ club? In my view probably yes – consider the abortion issue in Northern Ireland just now for example and the role of the church.
So what other consqequences could there be? Well, after Grenfell it seems it was the religious organisations that provided food, shelter and emergency supplies. This is born out by my own experience of being a party of a religious organisation. With something like Grenfell we’d know where to go to offer help - the local religious building. Most suffering happens behind closed doors and we never know about it. When I was a part of a church community we’d get to hear of sudden crises and step in - providing for a homeless family who turned up, doing runs to the hospital so a disabled lady could visit her sick son, cooking meals for a bereaved family. The thing is, if you aren’t a part of a network you don’t know when there’s a need. Similar networks exist among parents and in the workplace, but for people with nowhere to turn the local church or other religion is where they go to. I know I could approach my local CofE church and the Baptist minister for support. I might not want to, but I could.
Which is something I acknowledged. Clearly some people are motivated by their communities (in this case religious ones) to do good things they might not otherwise have been motivated to do. And a good thing too. Would such good works be done by communities that didn’t have religious beliefs, would new communities of people wanting to do good emerge if churches were abolished tomorrow, is the negative effect of religious teaching a price worth paying for the positive effects your describe?
There’s no way to know for sure, but my sense is that most people are mostly good for most of the time. They want to do the right thing, and church communities are a convenient focal point for these feelings to be harnessed and deployed. Do they behave that way because “holy” books tell them too (as well as tell them some pretty grim stuff too)? Not in my experience no – our altruism is innate, and I see no reason for it to disappear if churches did.
So in this great experiment of yours…
What experiment?
… who fills that void?
The same people who fill it now, and maybe more if they saw some gaps and were no longer put off by the religious affiliations of the effort. Our kids’ primary school for example had a plan a while back to send presents to African children. All went well until it was revealed that the effort was associated with Billy Graham (or his son from memory) and the packages would be sent with various evangelical messages enclosed. Maybe half the parents pulled out at that point, and only came back when the religious bit was dropped.
…And his would you measure ‘better’ in those circumstances?
Using the indicators I listed. If they’re good enough for the UN…
As an aside, I’ve alwsys been interested in mysticism and find my life enriched by it. Is that a religious thing we’d be better off without too?
Dunno. How does it affect the way you treat other people? My guess is that it makes no difference, so it’s no-one’s business but your own. Other religious adherents (and their clerics) however are often not nearly so harmless.
