Practical Benefits of Religion

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I have come to see religion in a different light recently and wanted to discuss it here. I have been antireligious for most of my life and am not religious now. My biggest problems with religion are that I do not believe it to be based on facts and for many of them there are many moral issues.
I have come to realize though that there can be many practical benefits from non-offensive religious practices.
First, many religions can encourage you to behave better and be more moral (as well as the opposite depending on the religion). I think all humans have very nasty tendencies. If we are not mindful of them they can get out of hand and we can be cruel without giving it much thought. Many religions encourage their adherents to be charitable and understanding. Furthermore, this is constantly reinforced during their religious practices (prayer, mass, contemplation). It is extremely difficult to maintain that level of conscientiousness without such practices. How many non-religious people think at the end of every day what they did wrong and what they could have done better.
Believing in a powerful deity that wants you to act in a certain way makes you far more likely to follow that path. If that path is morally better then you are more likely to be moral if you believe in such a deity.
Religions also tend to have practical benefits such as encouraging participation in society (e.g. creating a family and staying socially active.)
I feel like many of the negative aspects of my personality would be kept in check much better if I were religious. Also, there have been many cases in my life where I have received a great deal of kindness from religious people, that they likely would not have given if they were not religious.
This is not to say that I overlook the negative aspects of religion but it seems like there are many practical benefits.

You could have named yourself after a much more significant figure who also died aged around 33

An interesting set of observations.

One thing my Mum said recently was something along these lines... "If we are now saying we are not a Christian country, then what morals are we pushing and where exactly are we getting these new morals from?"

Callisthenes is the last rebel I heard of Mirembrema

I would say that morals are tied to our emotions. I think we can certainly have morals as non-religious individuals but it seems that religious people are far more motivated to act them out and always keep them in mind. I.e. they are less likely to slip up. They can also be more forgiving...

It's long been argued that the rise of Protestantism was one of the key factors in the enormous growth in freedom and prosperity in the West over the last 500 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

I'm a Christian, but I also like the Objectivist view of morality. Although Objectivism was originally an atheist philosophy, I find many of its axioms to be in harmony with Christianity.

On the topic of morality, morals are tied to objective reality. Life is the highest value we have. However, unlike other animals, we aren't driven by instinct to protect it. We may choose to value life or even the individual self. It is also our capacity for reason by which we can choose not to live purely on instinct or emotion, but rather understand that living for raw pleasure alone doesn't always work out for the best. There is no one more important than the individual. Yet reason tells us our chances at survival are best when we work together. Self-sacrifice, when taken to its logical extreme, leads straight to death. Selfishness, together with reason, causes the individual to work for the benefit of others as a means of achieving his own well-being.

In simplest terms, consider what makes people happy. Sex makes many people happy. So if sex feels good and makes you happy, is it not logical that everyone should have sex as much as possible? No. Because frequent sex with multiple partners puts someone at great risk for disease or unwanted pregnancy. Monogamy sharply reduces the risk of infection. Plus, when two people value each other more than anyone else, they can be assured their partner will care for them. An intimate act such as sex also represents the second greatest possible value anyone can exchange--the human body. Sharing one's body openly and freely reduces the demand for it and destroys its worth. Why would you devalue your own body unless you hate yourself? And by that I don't mean to suggest sex is dirty and immoral by default. I mean "devalue" in the same sense market saturation of a product (surplus) lowers its price. An overabundance of something results in an inability to even give it away for free. If each individual is special and unique, why throw away its value and rarity for the sake of a few minutes of mindless pleasure? Therefore, given the risk of promiscuity for infections and pregnancy plus what giving away your most valuable asset for free does for your own value, it is immoral to sleep with someone you don't love. Not only is it immoral, but it is OBJECTIVELY immoral.

I'm a big believer in the Bible. But rather than hold up the Bible for its own sake as an objective standard, I ask "Is Biblical morality rooted in physical, objective reality?" Yes, it always is. Jesus digested the second greatest commandment as "love your neighbor as yourself" and explained these commandments are "the law and the prophets." Next to loving God above all else, "love your neighbor as yourself" isn't a call to altruism, but rather a call to individualism. The focus isn't on your neighbor. It's yourself. If you have no love for yourself, you can't possibly love your neighbor. If you cannot see value in yourself, what use are other people? You can love others anyway, but you're loving them outside of logic and inviting harm to yourself. But if you have a REASON to love others, such as within the context of how others enhance your own life as an individual, you are prepared to perform acts of love that benefit them. How does loving others benefit the individual? Acts of love reflect the value others have in the eyes of the one performing those acts. Those people immediately reap the benefit of having someone close by who loves them. If they wish to continue to reap those benefits in the form of further acts of love, they will return greater value for all the good that was done for them. This is referred to as reciprocity: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," or the Golden Rule. It's not something that exists simply because "the Bible says so." It is something that exists in nature. And as someone who believes in God, I recognize that reciprocity was written into the "DNA" of material existence. Even if you choose not to believe in God, the fact remains that Biblical morality is written into nature and is inescapable. You don't need the Bible to discover them for yourself. Like it or not, morality is objective.

I do happen to believe that the morality inasmuch as it is true, objective morality is borrowed from Christian morality, but that's another discussion entirely.

I have heard of that, and am inclined to believe it.

I would agree that Christianity has many practical benefits. I think of morality as avoiding things that cause harm to someone. You are more likely to follow principles if you constantly consider your actions. This constant contemplation seems to be built into many religions, whether or not the underlying theology is true.
Since protected consensual sex is a victimless crime I would not consider it immoral.
I would agree that many of our values stem from Christianity. That is even for non-religious people.

I'll leave my own voyage with Christianity out for now because it's a long story, suffice to say that a lot of time spent with the bible spun me off toward the regional beliefs and philosophies that were proximate to it.

Addressing this question now I really have to nest religion in the context of Darwinian game theory and our desires to have some kind of system that functioned for us better than nature itself. I have gotten a sense that a lot of the byproducts that were able to function in its presence but often vehemently competed with it, like secular humanism, are running a bit thin these days and our current state of affairs, ie. culture run by economics and market, throws us right back out to the brutality of nature.

It seems like religion was an attempt to organize people around transcendent objects, a bit like kicking a corporation or bureaucracy mission statement up to the ethers to prevent it's tampering, and from there you had an attempt to filter back down to handle varying degrees of intelligence and organize people who had very little else in common other than that religion into a kind of confederation around it. In Ferdinand Tönnies model of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft it actually seems like it's somewhere between the two - ie. social contract or gesellschaft mimicking the benefits of gameinshaft, ie. family/blood. Game-theorhetically it seems like religion was a brilliant innovation, just that the mythological substrate that it was pinned to was depleted by the scientific revolution and from there a lot of Friedrich Nietzsche's concerns about our attempt to find our own meaning ensued.

One thing that's really telling about which religions survive and which don't, aside from imperialism, has less to do with it's depth of assessing truth and more to do with it's ability to apply to and gratify the masses. I used to listen to Manly P Hall a fair amount on the topic of antiquity and how various belief sets formed, and a lot of what he was saying about Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, etc. is that while these might have actually been a fair amount more advanced in technical aspects and better approximated nature than the Abrhamic faiths they really couldn't make contact with the common person who at the time was illiterate and couldn't be bothered to learn about complex geometric theorems and their relationships to the metaphysics of the cosmos. It seems like the druids could have had this problem but they ruled their respective regions in a synarchal fashion, ie. something of a dictatorship of the wise/educated.

I think of Catholicism and the Orthodox traditions really coming into prominence toward the end of the Roman Empire and the shape they took on seems to start off with a lot of intense intellectual debates and declared heresies but as things progressed into the dark ages the Roman Catholic church went more into conservation mode, had to occasionally put out fires like various gnostic sects rising to challenge the dogmas in some areas. I often hear that medieval scholasticism was an intensely rich period of literature, admittedly I never really tuned in on that a whole lot other than to catch that Aquinas and Bonaventure were something like dueling intellects in that.

Where I pick back up with it is the Di Medici's having Marsilio Ficino translating the classics, a lot of late antiquity Greco-Egyptian ideas were repopularized, and although the reformation and counterreformation cleaned a lot of this out there was also a fair amount of the same sort of nose-bleed philosophy that I mentioned earlier with the Neoplatonists, Gnostics, etc. coming back as the intelligensia got really interested in Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, and a lot of ideas where blending them with Christianity gave it a much more pantheistic framing. There was a book called Magic and Eros in the Renaissance by Ioan Culiano (RIP) who explained toward the end how the reformation, counterreformation, and later Puritanism sort of titrated things down toward what we have today in terms of how the beliefs in most denominations shook out as well as how a lot of the stuff that fired off the renaissance never got baked into the end product.

I wanted to be a good, loving and moral person, but the rules and lessons of various religions had too many obvious fallacies and contradictions. It felt like thrashing and muddling through life as I tried to find some kind of sense or consistency to my own decisions in my own life. I could write mental paragraphs arguing the various options, comparing them with previous decisions I had made.

What I have now, and more to your point, is a religious practice that provides me with a framework for making these decisions. And in this sense, it is useful from a practical point of view.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing! Just curious, are you a historian?

The topic of sex is interesting in the context of Christianity. Historically there were few sexual misdemeanors worthy of death, and Torah did allow for unmarried sex as long as it was with a view towards a permanent, legal union. A woman wouldn’t necessarily be put to death for failing to be a virgin. It was mainly a problem if she misrepresented herself as a virgin and risked having a children that didn’t belong to her would-be husband.

This isn’t a problem for present-day society. But sexual purity is an issue when it concerns the value of a human body. It is as much a victimless crime as suicide—the victim being the self. Promiscuity devalues the act of sex as well as the person, which is objectively immoral. To act without self-control is to act without reason. To forsake the quintessential human attribute of logical thinking is also objectively immoral. Non-exclusive mutual sexual gratification is certainly not a victimless crime. I don’t dispute that in a free society what happens in your bedroom is your business and not mine. It’s just that simply being free to do what you want doesn’t necessarily make doing what you want a good idea, objectively-speaking.

It isn’t the crime against the willing but unloved sexual partner that is the problem, but rather the harm one does to the self both mentally and emotionally.

I'm sure the wealth stolen through colonialism had nothing to do with it.

I would suggest if that really was the case, were those people Christian? Where in the Bible did Jesus teach disciples to create colonies and steal wealth? And what stolen wealth? Wealth must be created in order to be stolen. In what way was wealth created in North America prior to the arrival of the colonists? If anything, the primitives of North America benefited greatly from Europeans.

Indeed. I believe it began with Protestant independent thought. Catholicism at times succeeded not as the religion of the worker, but rather of the sufferer and the victim.