5 Responses to “The Better to Hear Your Comments With”

1. 1 1 dave
   May 19, 2010 at 3:57 am

   religion is just another form of collectivism. like nationalism, collectivisms can be shown to reduce the free trade of goods and ideas through simple math, no?

   are we better off segregated and sub-divided along religious lines?

   nice pic. what if her religion allowed her to only marry short-eared men. would you be better off?

2. 2 2 David Youngberg
   May 19, 2010 at 10:04 am

   Frankly I don’t envy your task. It really seems like an empirical question: do the gains from inspiration and comfort outweigh the risks of abuse? Since most people are aware of these risks of abuse but few advocate getting rid of religion, an answer of yes seems most likely.

   Your best bet is calling religions (especially before the rise of nationalism) a form of centralized power: a government. (Because of the strength of institutional norms, you could argue even a largely decentralized religion is de facto centralized.) Then it’s rational irrationality and externalized costs, same as the public choice argument (and a similar question: does the happiness associated with government “protection” out weigh the loss of efficiency–in this case my answer is no so maybe there’s an argument that the answer to the aforementioned question is no as well…).

3. 3 3 Neil
   May 19, 2010 at 12:59 pm

   Live long, and prosper.

4. 4 4 Manfred
   May 19, 2010 at 1:49 pm

   Steve, you used to have beard [like ten years ago or so…]..:-)

5. 5 5 Matthew
   May 20, 2010 at 3:00 am

   David

   One of the things that you are forgetting is that, in a modern society such as the United States, people choose their religions on their own free will. Given that the priesthood would want to maximise their total number of believers, they would have an incentive to minimise the abuses that you speak of.

   I suspect that the cause of the abuses that you speak of is not religion itself, rather the state support of it.