Religion and Behaviour

[AlphaZero]

So, I decided to rewatch the first of four discussions/debates between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson that was held in Vancouver last year. If you haven't seen it, please give it a watch! I thought the talk was very productive and I certainly learned a few things from both Sam and Jordan.

Link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jey_CzIOfYE

Anyhow, the discussion reminded me of something Steven Weinberg said, and I've decided to make it the topic of this thread.

Friendly Reminders:
I'm not sure if many people will participate in this thread, but if you do want to participate, please keep things civil and do not use any low forms of disagreement (ad hominem, name-calling, response to tone, etc). Anyone and everyone is welcome to participate.

"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil \(-\) that takes religion."  \(-\) Steven Weinberg

To what extent do you agree?

[turinturambar]

"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil \(-\) that takes religion."  \(-\) Steven Weinberg

To what extent do you agree?

I don't think this is true unless religion is defined very broadly.  Might be much closer if it were "ideology" (including religious ideology).  I'm thinking for example what Solzhenitsyn wrote about ideology (in the context of the Soviet Gulags.  My emphasis):

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.... Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago. (The Gulag Archipelago)

Doing bad things with good intentions or for the "greater good" is I think a risk, no matter what you think particularly important.  Even in a more "everyday" context, some of what came out of the banking royal commission last year showed how what can happen when ordinary workers are under enough pressure, and how morals can shift when surrounded by people in the same pressure situation and when you don't see the consequences to those who are actually affected.  Which brings up some of the classic experiments, like Milgram and Stanford Prison.  It's easy to say "I wouldn't do that" when not in the actual situation.

So back to the original point: I'm no friend to organised religion, but it doesn't have a monopoly on turning good people evil (or on persuading them to do things that appear evil to outsiders but not to them).

[Jimmmy]

The differentiation between 'good' and 'bad' people seems to get really convoluted in discussions like these. If we think about prejudices developing too, I'd say that they would come more greatly from the 'uneducated' crowd than the 'religious' crowd, and often it is that prejudice that causes people to do evil things.

So, I'd probably look for a more common denominator than religion when looking for cause of evil, because I just don't think religion is a consistent enough cause if we avoid looking purely at the media jumping onto 'certain examples' of eg. terror and crime, that allow them to spin a story off it to their preference.