After reading Martha Stout's Inside the Mind of a Sociopath, I couldn't help thinking of enthusiastic churchies I have known (people with no internal moral compass whatsoever) and how much trouble we'd all be in if these folks were let loose. And then it hit me: we are paying dearly for this service, and our reliance on it guarantees that the cost will continue to grow.
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Religion Yields a Measurable Benefit to Society
I understand how a religious education can be seem like an incontrovertibly good thing: institutionalized religion provides a comprehensive, well-documented, widely-accepted framework of belief and conduct that young persons can effortlessly absorb, allowing a community to harness the production of individuals who might otherwise end up in jail after years of causing harm covertly and impenitently.
A Religious Upbringing Is a Boon to Sociopaths
But this is all predicated on the assumption that behavior can be reformed and, subsequently, enforced lightly but effectively. What if there were individuals to whom this did not apply? For them, membership in a church provides an ideal environment for honing the skills of game-playing and deception. In other words, a religious education is the fast-track option for discerning sociopaths.
Institutionalized Religion Is a Subprime Mortgage
Actually, the ensuing episodes of accounting fraud and sexual predation with which any large church or business must regularly cope are the least of our troubles. Because, ultimately, institutionalized religion is a social engineering technology that mitigates selection against individuals whose moral behavior needs to be externally enforced. And, if that doesn't scare the bejesus out of you, we are in a lot more trouble than I thought.
This article was originally published as a review on my StumbleUpon blog.