Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?

I looked at recent debate held in Canada that looked at this issue under a slightly different title where the result was that Christopher Hitchings won the argument that religion was NOT a force for good. In many ways it's not a new debate even though today's Christianists who market hate and divisiveness sometimes may make it seem so. Yes, some good things are done in the name of religion and some denominations in their present incarnations seem to have put aside some aspects of their more violent and unsavory pasts. But in the overall scheme of things, in my view, the scales tip against religion and some of religions more disingenuous current leaders - e.g., Pope Benedict XVI, who I will get to later in this post. Blogger friend Bob Felton of Civil Commotion always takes an intellect/logic approach to religion and in the process spotlights its atrocities and hypocrisy. In a recent post he quoted Bertrand Russell's analysis of the answer to the title of this post written 80 years ago. Some things do not change. Here are some brief highlights:
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My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
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To take the case that is of most interest to members of Western civilization: the teaching of Christ, as it appears in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of Christians. The most important thing about Christianity, from a social and historical point of view, is not Christ but the church, and if we are to judge of Christianity as a social force we must not go to the Gospels for our material. Christ taught that you should give your goods to the poor, that you should not fight, that you should not go to church, and that you should not punish adultery. Neither Catholics nor Protestants have shown any strong desire to follow His teaching in any of these respects.
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It would seem, therefore, that the three human impulses embodied in religion are fear, conceit, and hatred. The purpose of religion, one may say, is to give an air of respectability to these passions, provided they run in certain channels. It is because these passions make, on the whole, for human misery that religion is a force for evil, since it permits men to indulge these passions without restraint, where but for its sanction they might, at least to a certain degree, control them.
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There is nothing accidental about this difference between a church and its founder. As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage. They are, however, in one respect worse than any other privileged caste, since it is their business to expound an unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, so that they become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral progress.
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The worst feature of the Christian religion, however, is its attitude toward sex — an attitude so morbid and so unnatural that it can be understood only when taken in relation to the sickness of the civilized world at the time the Roman Empire was decaying. . . . . The conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian ethics is one that does an extraordinary amount of harm, since it affords people an outlet for their sadism which they believe to be legitimate, and even noble. . . . Almost every adult in a Christian community is more or less diseased nervously as a result of the taboo on sex knowledge when he or she was young. And the sense of sin which is thus artificially implanted is one of the causes of cruelty, timidity, and stupidity in later life.
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The knowledge exists by which universal happiness can be secured; the chief obstacle to its utilization for that purpose is the teaching of religion. Religion prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific co-operation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment.
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In my view, the Roman Catholic Church and Christian fundamentalists (I include Mormons in this later category for convenience) continue all of the evils that Russell outlines. During his recent trip to Spain, Benedict XVI, the Nazi Pope, whined about the progressive reforms in that country which include - of the horror - gay marriage and more liberalized abortion policies. In the process, Benedict said "in Spain, a strong aggressive lay mentality, an anti-clericalism and secularization has been born as we experienced in the 1930s." What God's Rottweiler omitted, of course, was any description of why much of the Spanish populace was anti-clerical: the Church was an active enforcer of an unjust and brutal ruling class. People's World has a good description of what the 1930's Spanish Church did - and it wasn't anything in keeping with Christ's Gospel message - in piece entitled "Spring Time for Franco and Pope Benedict." Here are highlights:
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He [Benedict] went on to say that Spain was a major center for a return to faith because Spain had played such a central role in "reviving" Christianity in past centuries. He didn't say what he meant specifically. Was it the Spanish Inquisition, Spanish colonialism's destruction of tens of millions of native peoples in the Western Hemisphere, the maintenance of a feudal social order that made Spain by the 19th century a weak backward nation, an example of what no one wanted to be?
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In the 1920s and '30s Spain was at its core a feudal society without effective civil rights and liberties, a society in which the higher orders of the Catholic Church controlled vast amounts of land and other resources, making the Church a key component rather than a mere servant of the Spanish ruling class.
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After five years of political struggle, in which the church supported reactionary forces and parties in Spain, a people's front coalition of liberals, socialists and communists defeated conservative and reactionary forces in a national election.
In its 1931 constitution the Spanish Republic established religious freedom, which had never existed in Spain, as well as the separation of church and state and an end to the Catholic Church's control of education, and most importantly, placed restrictions upon church property. It also sought to institute land reforms which would have returned poor church-controlled lands to the poor.
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The most reactionary sectors of Spanish capital then supported General Francisco Franco's coup against the government. When the coup faltered in the face of worker and peasant resistance, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy entered the conflict to provide troops, weapons, planes and funds to Franco's forces.
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The global Catholic Church supported Franco's armies . . . often countering the accounts of the atrocities committed by Franco's forces against workers and peasants with stories of attacks on monasteries and church-controlled feudal estates and the killing of clergy by the poor and other supporters of the Republic.
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Following Franco's victory in 1939, a single party fascist state was established, property was returned to the upper classes and the church, and civil liberties and religious freedom were abolished (the latter for all non- Catholics, including Protestant Christians). Hundreds of thousands of anti-fascist supporters of the Republic were murdered in the years which immediately followed Franco's victory, when Pope Benedict as a German teenager was a member of the Hitler Youth and then a draftee in the German Army.
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The Pope's statements in Spain should be seen as an insult not only to the Spanish people but to secular and religious people everywhere who seek knowledge which will help them fight social injustice rather than use ideology to preserve and protect wealth and power.