Dovina31 Aug 2004

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.