It's better in the sense of "more clearly analogous", but it's worse because 1) it's harder to analyze and 2) the results are *MUCH* more equivocal. I'd argue that religion has caused more general suffering than it has ameliorated. Probably by several orders of magnitude.
I agree. Why do you think that my "religion" has a "you can't argue by using what you think God would want you to do" clause?
I've been doing some work on an article tentatively titled "The Scientific Basis and Logical Correctness of Belief and Religion". I believe that I have a pretty good argument for why Belief In The Face of Rational Uncertainty is a logical, rational behavior and why the God Meme is the simplest meme that enforces ethics (aka Friendliness). The problem is that the God meme does *not* allow for human error in the anticipation of what God wants -- and fighting over this point continues to plague us massively to this day.
But the "results" are so messy and hard to separate from other simultaneous causes that this can't be conclusively proven. (And, also, with sufficient desire to disbelieve, the law of gravity itself could be thrown into doubt. [That's a paraphrase of somebody else talking about commercial interests, but the more general statement is correct.])
Obviously. The biggest problem with the current implementation of the God meme is that it is carried over boundary of Rational Uncertainty. When your religion requires you to ignore truths in the face of compelling evidence, then believing in it is no longer rational. Up until that point, however, belief can be and most frequently *IS* a logical, rational behavior.
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