"comfort is, I believe, the primary benefit religion gives to believers" I think that much of the 'comfort' believers feel stems from a reduced fear that they might end up in hell - a fear that religion put there in the first place!

1) There is little evidence that I am aware of to suggest that believers are happier than normals. So I agree with you. 2) Of course you would have to find some way of stranding a morally untrained colony on the island; perhaps by stranding newborn babies there and using morally neutral robots to feed them. It would be pretty difficult to invent a robot that was totally morally neutral, though. Perhaps it should, at random intervals, do something naughty for no reason, like punching one of the other robots in the motherfucking face. Even if the experiment could be performed and the colony didn't slaughter or do anything too untoward, it wouldn't be conclusive. My instincts say people have an innate sense of guilt at doing certain lewds; this also seems to be the case in the animal kingdom, and perhaps it would be best to do the experiment on monkey colonies or something. Anyway my view could be utterly distorted by the fact that my upbringing as a Scholar and a Gentleman has been so austere, so fundamental to my being, that to me it seems like second nature. 3) There seems to be very little correlation between high church-going levels and low murder rate. Britain, Canada, the rest of Europe all have much lower murder rates than the USA, but the USA has a much higher rate of church going. I think religion has very little to do with making people not murder-prone. I don't think most religions say murder is wrong because God told someone it was wrong and they wrote it down, or some madman heard a voice that said it was wrong so he wrote it down; it says murder is wrong because that's what most people instinctively feel is wrong. By and large, most religions share similar basic morals, and they aren't very different from those followed by normals. Is this just coincidence? Or are such religions more likely to survive because people feel more comfortable following morals that they already believe in anyway? Of course some wallyish morals slip through... A friend of mine is a lapsed Jewish, but he has relatives who are ultra-non-lapsed-jewishes. On a particular day of the week (Holy Saturday?) they aren't allowed to work, cook, drive a car, etc. One of the most wallyish aspects of this is that they can't turn on a light. They actually have a special device on their fridge which prevents the light from turning on when they open the door. There is clearly no practical basis for this moral, other than God told them to do it. Other, more serious wallyishnesses exist, like condemning homo lords. Now I actually think there is an inbuilt disgust towards gayness among many people, but normals can overcome this quite easily. Religious people can't because the prejudice, which was present in the elderlies who wrote their holy books, is now ingrained in their religion. So they can't tolerate gayness, lest they be deemed gay.

PS-If you envy (or whatever) the comfort of believers because you struggle with all these problems surrounding religion while they don't - well, that's kind of backwards isn't it? If you're going to be a nonbeliever, why don't you try just not worrying about God (or whomever) and whatever he or it is or isn't doing, since right now you just seem like a regular believer with commitment problems? You might as well be one of those Existentialist Frenches or Stephen Daedalus. PPS-If the "unanswered questions" you struggle with are Why is there so much suffering in the world or something such, you're still a believer! QED.

Bart Simpson

Everyone, including myself my first weeks here, kind of expects Islams to be some kind of monomaniacal robots. The first times we all saw Islams drinking liquors or associating with women or some other vaguely or specifically haram thing, we all screamed bloody murder at them. Then we realized Islam in most of the Middle East is pretty much just like Christianity in America with two important exceptions: 1) they occassionally blow themselves up, and 2) they pray about 5 times a day. Anyway, the short of it is that these two things - which incidentally, nearly every Islam doesn't do - are so anathema to Western thinking that we have to assume anyone who would consider doing them is an android or some freakishly orthodox fundamentalist. They're not. Really. If you must know, it's insanely easy to contemplate blowing yourself up, for political as well as financial reasons, and then give it some thin coating of religion. Especially here, where pretty much everyone just sits around contemplating all kinds of illogical actions and theories in ridiculously angry-sounding voices (hint: it's the language!) anyway. And the majority of people who blow themselves up don't know the Qu'ran from my ass, seriously. So anyway, talking about the Iraqi resistance or Al Quaeda as anything really connected to Islam is kind of bunk. It's probably, in fact, as much bunk as talking about the Crusades in terms of Christianity. And just look at the number of mostly-Christian Westerners who've self-righteously marched to their deaths in Iraq this year. Or nonbelievers, for that matter. Oh God, I'm afraid I've gotten you frightfully confused now.....

Sure, but I would avoid any of the following typical assumptions: 1) People with religion are as a whole more content than people without. Sure it sounds nice and believable, but how can you tell? I would guess they aren't, for the reason above and because I think believers are more likely than nonbelievers to be stupid and hurt themselves. Besides, believers can't, like, bang any chick they want whenever they want or do a fatty bag of smack, while nonbelievers can; and believers seem more likely than nonbelievers to be somewhat desperate and unhappy people to begin with. 2) If people were somehow utterly isolated, they would still, kind of instinctively, have a moral code, conscience, and sense of guilt. If you were to somehow strand an extremely young child on an island, he would probably smear himself in his own feces, pleasure himself whenever, and basically kill whatever thing he felt like for a pretty long time without any sense of shame. I imagine he'd eventually break out in a nasty rash or otherwise logically come to the conclusion that feces-smearing, self-gratification, and wanton killing aren't healthy, at which point he'd grow some kind of morality and shame. But there's nothing that's convinced me he'd just have it instinctively, like an animal or Aboriginal would. If there were a bunch of people stranded on the island, they'd probably get it faster, since, say, killing or stealing would be more likely to lead to a quick consequence. This is, I think, the only original basis for morality. But there's no way to tell, is there, since you couldn't strand a 4-year-old Irish on an island without him bringing some kind of moral training with him? 3) Religion has caused more slaughter or murder or et cetera than any other thing. Bunk. And how do you know? And it's probably also prevented more by making the majority of people not murder-prone. As far as "wallyish morals" go, I can't think of any. I think the wallyish part is just that most believers (like nonbelievers) have forgotten whatever practical purposes they had in the beginning and have likely added all kinds of garbage onto them, like genuflecting or, for Islams, entering a lavatory right-foot-first. Can you think of any which are purely wallyish?

And you shall become Prince of Voided Bushes.

zodiac, In answer to your first paragraph, comfort is, I believe, the primary benefit religion gives to believers. If they truly believe, they have more comfort in times of bereavement and sickness than I do while contending with my unanswered questions. In your second paragraph, I think you miss the meaning of “Discrepancies are expunged for them by faith.” When I mention to a religious person some discrepancy about heaven or about God’s personal caring for their condition, the usual response is that God is greater than our feeble understanding of these things, and they will trust Him even while not understanding. Your third paragraph introduces the restraint people have on killing each other, a topic not much related to the above. DA’s “innate sense of guilt” argument makes sense here. Religion can go either way on this. It might, as you say, restrain those who would otherwise kill you or take your wife. But it could in other times and conditions encourage killing, such as in the Crusades or recently in the Iraqi resistance, or within Al Kaida. You and I abstain from “lewds” as DA calls them, “for perfectly sensible reasons” most of the time. I wonder how well those reasons would have held up in some of the historical settings where religion has held groups of believers together in winning good causes against enemies who claimed to be reasonable.

nentwined, i appreciate your existence.