It is useful for keeping the weak minded in line, useless against people who have a enlightened view of mankind, and detrimental to most everyone.

Is “X” useful? You have to define “X” first, and nobody has been able to do that yet. Lots of people have their own personal definition, but one has not emerged that everyone can agree on, or even just all major religious scholars, or all anthropologists, etc.

So is “X” useful? I don’t know. Tell me what “X” is.

People tend to make things too complicated.
It’s useful for those who find it useful.
It’s not useful to the rest.

Yes, different people seek out different kinds of religion or non-religion. It depends on what is beneficial for them and should concern no one else.

There’s lots of evidence that religion can be beneficial:

Pew study on benefits of religion
[pewforum.org]

Scholarly article on religion and crime
[researchgate.net]

Read the abstract:
[academic.oup.com]

American Psychological Assn:
[psycnet.apa.org]

You can point toward examples where certain religions have fostered undesirable behaviors or where religious people have committed egregious acts, but to make those negative judgments and then point to atheists as paragons of virtue—that is nothing but moral grandstanding and hypocrisy. We are all the same at heart.

In my opinion, organized religion is a way to control the masses, so the upper echelon retains power. It's about greed and control.

The simple answer is...no there is not an easy answer to the old question “Is religion useful, useless or detrimental”. It is far too complex a subject to be dismissed as just any one of these three choices. The other three factors you mention..the aspects or situations, are multifarious in combination, and cannot just be put into three single categories...overlapping with each other and some other factors not mentioned. There are cases where it would most definitely not be kind to try to wrench a person who has believed fervently away from that belief. It would be cruel to show them that the foundations they built their whole life around was false ..it would destroy them and make their life seem to have been pointless. That is taking it right down to a personal level, but in more general terms, I believe on balance religion is not harmless, although it can also be a force for good. The answer is to get children educated in secular schools where science is taught from an early age, with creationism given no place or credence. Religion should only be studied as a subject...along with other philosophies, and only in a comparative context, never from a particular viewpoint.

Religion has definitely been useful to the powerful, as it has kept the masses under control, and allied to politics, even more so. It has been useful as a cohesive force for communities, a social club where members mix and can identify with each other. That of course also means that those not belonging to that religion or church are considered outsiders, so it also creates division, which is useful for those wishing to exploit that difference...which also makes it detrimental to the common good. I don’t think it’s been useless, that would contradict my argument that it has been useful, and it has definitely served a purpose, so can’t be defined as useless. We are left with detrimental then, and I’ve already outlined that it has caused division which is detrimental to social cohesion. It has also been detrimental in keeping people ignorant of scientific facts and suppressed critical thinking in children by indoctrination from birth. Because most religions are, and always have been Patriarchal, this has led to the subjugation of women and has encouraged misogyny, incredibly this still continues even today in the 21st century. Despite our scientific advances and discoveries, landing on the moon, DNA, Internet etc., there are still millions of people in the present day, especially women who are forced to live by rules written by men over two thousand years ago. That is pretty overwhelmingly detrimental I would say. There are of course, some good points in religion, such as bringing comfort to those who believe that there is a heaven and by following the rules they will spend eternity there, that is harmless deception, but it’s still selling a lie and stopping people making their lives here on Earth better for both themselves and their fellow human beings. So in the main it is, and always has been detrimental.

On balance then I can summarise Religion as generally being useful to the few and detrimental to the many...but never could it be called useless.

I say it depends on the person and what they are willing to Beileve. I've almost always had a bad Attitude towards Religions . To much BS that goes with all of it. ! I see it as nothing but mind Control

I"m glad you posted this and I really like the way you examined it. I tend to parrot whatever my last boyfriend would say. Overall he said, religious has been more detrimental to humanity, citing wars, injustices, violence, child abuse etc. He convinced me that it was and he said he had read the books of Richard Dawkins and others. However as I observe the world around me and as I was raised catholic. For my own personal upbringing and my mother and our home, I would say mostly that religion benefited us and our family and friends. It was the framework of doing good and living well. We are not politicians nor are we preachers. I think when people are put into leadership positions and use religion to try to control the masses, this is when the abuse, violence injustice happens. So in summary, great in theory, shitty in practice. this is the realization I just had watching the season 3 finale of the handmaids tale. Confrontation with the designers of the new world order is happening and we ask why? We know Gilead is a horrendous place. What made them all do what they did?

I think it's been proven throughout history that the answer is all 3. It can have a positive effect on believers in terms of peace of mind or hope etc., but it can also have a negative effect of the religious being held down to the restrictive beliefs of religion. It can even be indirectly useful to atheists and agnostics in that they aren't held down to the restrictive beliefs of religion. It can be useless to atheists and agnostics for obvious reasons, and maybe even negative in terms of the stress of arguing or thinking against religion. It has also been detrimental to people because of the discrimination towards both religious people and discrimination towards people that the religious deem as "unholy" etc.

I have noticed that most of the outer benefits (within communities of people) of religion can be had just as easily by pretending to believe.

The inner benefits--to the extend there are any--can be accomplished better through literature, music, art, etc., which can also encompass religious texts, but with far more emotional and intellectual connections.

So I see religion as useful within that much larger context, which includes not taking it seriously AS religion...in the same way the power of literature and myth is not taken seriously as literal fact, but is still useful as a larger symbolic and metaphoric tool for understanding our individual and collective experiences of life.

(The one critique of what I've just written might be that if you are in a community that requires you to "pretend" to believe science is a conspiracy, education is useless, gays should be ostracized, etc., then "pretending" is often tantamount to actions that perpetuate the worst elements.)

Check out time stamp 28:00 to end of this interview of a woman who escaped the worst of religion through education. She wrote the book "Educated", which I'm putting on my reading list. Very fascinating interview. I tried to embed the time stamp, but if it didn't work, it's at 28:00.

When you think about how uncomfortable humans are with ignorance and our over-capacity for pattern recognition, it’s pretty easy to see religion as a by-product. As for it’s utility in society today, I’d solidly say it’s detrimental unless people can answer the late Hitchens’s challenge: name a moral act that can only be taken by a religious person that cannot be taken by a nonbeliever. Subsequently, most people take mere seconds to think of an immoral action that can only be taken by a religious person that cannot be taken by a nonbeliever

I think your list of factors is incomplete because it only focuses on the aspect on religion when taken in the context of an individual. The rest of your post makes references to religion as a social construct for the emotional needs of people, but never mentioned what is traded for religious fulfilment.

Those individuals who follow religion must give up some of their autonomy. This may be a net gain or loss for the individual depending on the circumstance as in your list, but you also must look at the community as a whole. A fundamentalist society that shuns LGBTQ members belliving they are evil can not gain the inherent emotional support for which we theorise they evolved as a means to augment the community.

Opiate of the masses.

It has brought us some nice architecture.

Religion, to my mind, is a component of the immortality project ideas of Sarte, Freud, Becker et al. especially noted in Becker’s Denial of Death.

In which case very useful!

Religion is not totally useless nor detrimental.

All of the above.

I think that in every instance it depends on who is using the religion.

I would apply these same questions to "killing", and I believe come to the same conclusion.

I just do not find religion useful at all. It was created by man, to control the masses, to make money, and so on. it was also created because the masses fear death. they fear the unknown. when i look at all the religions in the world, past and present they are all full of abuse and so on.

I agree that religion has been 'useful' (for some) and perhaps drove a sort of peace among tribal members. I also feel it is a universal tendency and has more than proven it's disastrous consequences. A previous, and scary, article in "The Humanist" magazine shows how religion can become an impediment to future human existence [thehumanist.com] makes lots of sense to me. I have posted this before so my apologies if you have seen it before.

It used to be useful and then became useless and is now mostly detrimental but only in reference to the major monotheist religions. The Abrahamic religions have long since outlived their usefulness, what usefulness there was in them, and now serve only to hold society back in an attempt to keep us in the dark so that people keep believing those ancient mythologies.
And it is not so much the religions itself that is the problem, but the industrialized way they are practiced, it it not the religion but the organization that is the real detriment to society and indeed life on earth. Be fruitful and multiply was not a curse on man, it was a curse on the rest of life on this planet.

Of course it would be simplistic to make assumptions about the usefulness of religion if religion is defined as encompassing only some, but not other, answers to the three questions, What practice, What environment, and What practitioner. But those three branches do, I believe, stem from a common trunk, if we trace back through time, such that the “common ancestor” of these three aspects can be identified.

The question then becomes, what do karma, heaven and hell, and monotheism have in common? What do San Francisco, Lagos, and Russia have in common? What do wealthy architects, Spanish shut-ins, and Indian peasants have in common? And then where do these three questions find a common root?

Root indeed. In a word... agriculture. The human invention of agriculture twelve thousand years ago turned nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribes of 150 people who all knew each other intimately and were prepared to kill any strangers they encountered, into great hoards of nearly solitary individuals who depend for their survival on the multitudes of strangers they live among and must interact peacefully with daily, in spite of their evolved instinct to just murder them instead.

This was too rapid a shift in environment to be accommodated by biological evolution, so in order to survive, we had to invent a cultural corrective that could enable us to reign in some of our animal nature, and resist some our instinctual urges. We needed an “upper management” to co-ordinate our movements and curb our erratic impulses, in order to function successfully in the new environment. We needed a boss, so we invented one.

That new environment, our dependence on agriculture and the self-restraint it requires, is still, two millennia later, shared by peasants and stock-brokers alike, in virtually all locations, and every major religious tradition still has in its holy scriptures some kind of admonishment against acting out our most base instincts. That’s the common root of “religion”. All else is local color or corruption.

Religion is the precursor to law. If you are a law-abiding citizen, you are religious.

Want to abolish religion? No problem; just stop eating anything that was grown on a farm. Are rules that restrict our animal impulses useful? Only if you’re not prepared to go feral.

Since man saw lightening from his cave there have been God’s and “worship” of those Gods. I feel the word religion is actually quite new when the complete evolution of mankind is taken into account. Worship however began with that first sighted lightening strike. To study that evolution from worship and fear of the unexplainable and fearsomely unexplainable for every tribe of human across the globe.
Worship rather than a particular religion has been with man since the dawning. Personally my belief did not move from simple worship into unified religions until politics and control were felt necessary to shall we say enslave the multitudes into believing one way or another and forced translation and practice of these Religions. To simplify it you only need to look back on European history when one Monarch proclaimed a Protestant law so Catholics were killed simply to have the next Dynasty say they must be Christian and kill the Protestants. This holds true for ever country from the beginning of established faith to rule over and encompass what was simply worship. From the clan worshipping the first strength of lightning to Billions worshipping “under organized rule” a man on a cross. As the Old Testament and Ten Commandments state Thou shalt not worship False Idols then by that respect the symbol of Mary and crucifixes are false idols. Christianity cannot meld the Old Testament to the Bible as they are completely different belief systems yet they do anyway. China, India, South America, The Middle East. All began with worship derived of fear in something greater and in-explainable. Now we have a melting pot that spews, possession hatred and fear in the name of one God against another. We have evolved from sharing our beliefs to being tethered by them. There will always be the unexplainable but the one new idol will be technology for to take earthly religion into colonies on Mars would simply continue the wars in the name of different perception of God.

Religion use to be the social community, now we have social media. Religions usefulness is going away as people question it. Religion is detrimental with all of the children raped by priest and the cover up by bishops.