Religion does nothing good for morality because, all good rational, logical morals can be achieved with one's own consideration and critical thinking, Morality is plenty easy enough without a god there to force people to be more considerate of their actions. Religion only makes it easier to justify any type of morality out there, it doesn't improve it but makes it easier to clear your conscious, and justify any actions good or bad. People need to figure out good or bad without connecting it some god, otherwise no-one will critically think about their own morals.

All religion does (specfically the three Abrahamic religions) is establish a morality that condones (and even supports and encourages) discrimination, predjudice, and hatred. In other words, it's terrible.

More bad at this point. Grudgingly I accept 10 or so thousand years ago our wild ancestors needed some scary imaginary shit to get them in line.

I argue generally that all of the good god is credited for was a human desire born of our natural empathy and pack instinct. If god were not there to take the credit it would be either seen as the human state we live in, or some other thing would be made up to take the credit.

Which in itself is harmless. What matter if some imaginary thing is there to collect the credit?

There are a couple of places where I truly believe religion is self-destructive for us:

1. It encourages ignorance as a form of self-preservation. Look at any evolution debate to see precisely what I mean. We are on top of our food chain thanks to our brain, and long-term our only hope of survival is our brain. Anything encouraging its atrophy in any capacity is an enemy of humanity.

2. It can develop a "blame the victim" mentality in which if anything bad happens to one it is because an all powerful god deemed that thing necessarily happened. Who are we to save starving kids in Africa if god's letting them starve? Extreme example sure, but it exists to plenty of lesser degrees and you often see the most religious the least concerned with overall social good. Religion is not the only enemy here. Spiritualism does this often, and so did Oprah when she was pushing that "pray hard enough and you'll get it" bs book that basically said if you don't have everything you want you're horrible, and oh yeah, working for stuff is bullshit.

I've noticed that some posters on the other side of this argument have legitimized religion as being good for morality simply because it influenced ancient peoples to act morally. That to me doesn't justify religion. One reason why is in monotheistic religions there is a clear incentive for potential followers to do the things that that dogma dictates...LIFE AFTER DEATH. The world's human population has always been egoist rather than altruistic. If there is incentive enough to follow a certain moral code, then of course it wil be followed. It wasn't necessarily followed by everyone because all or most of the "teachings" resonated with the people involved with it. Another reason is that morality is subjective no matter what certain religions say. "God" is an IDEA created by mortal men, not the source of morality. Not everyone believes that murder is always wrong, as shocking as that may be to some people. Particularly theists.

Religions decided the frame of morality they wanted... and wrote it down. Thus we have people following rules with a cultural bias from 2/3000 years ago.

I think it's as bad as government for hegemony.

Government basically sets the rules and over time the rules just become second nature.

Now, what government has over religion is how it can be edited. Edited for good? Well, rarely, but edited none-the-less. it CAN be adaptable. Not that the adaptation will do us any better (i.e. drug laws, minimum wage, social security, war on terror, etc.) but we can still have a sense of change.

Religion is not changeable, but where it becomes better over government is that it's supposedly voluntary. now, the voluntarism in religion is just as laughable as the fluidity of legislation, it's there, but not really.

I say we're mostly better off without government and religion. Sure, little bits of it aren't so bad, and maybe, in some ways, beneficial, but as a whole it's just a big example of how people are just a mindless herd that like to be told what to do.

Both. Religion is incidental to morality--sometimes it coincides with good morals, sometimes it coincides with bad ones, and sometimes it coincides with moral neutrality.

Morality has nothing to do with religion, it's evolutionary.