Change My View: Incumbent religions still get too much leeway

This post references Jordan Peterson (Christian), the Bible (Christian), Mormanism (Christian), Judaism (Abrahamic), Catholocism (Christian) and "standard Christianity". It claims to critique "religion" while mostly addressing a peculiar Monotheistic religion.

Most religious people are Monotheistic. But "Monotheism" describes a minority of religious diversity. To criticize "religion" and then draw all your data from Monotheism is like discussing "life" and then drawing all your data from hominids.

Monotheism (including Christianity and Judaism) is anomalous among religions because it is predicated on a singular truth. I suspect Monotheism's requirement for a global religious truth is foundational to weird Christian behaviors like the Arian debates at the Council of Nicea. From my understanding of history, no equally abstract-and-esoteric religious debate ever rose to comparable political importance in a polytheistic civilization. It could be that "Monotheistic religion"—not "religion"—is what causes the particular religious anti-epistemologies we are familiar with in the West.

Related to Monotheistic singular truth is its emphasis on cosmology (including physics). In polytheistic religions, cosmology is often as unimportant as it is flexible. Such a theology is hardly an obstacle to science. To criticize all of polytheistic religions by their cosmology is like judging science by the fashion sense of grad students, or grading runway models according to their skills at calculus.

In my experience, the word "religion" is often used by Western intellectuals to describe Monotheism instead of reflecting the true diversity of an anthology that includes Zen mysticism, !Kung polytheism and Daoism.

However much humble respect you have for some Abrahamic religion like Judaism, you should have even more for the primitive spiritualism of hunter gatherer tribes. Such superstitions survive in harsher environments, they have less margin for error, they have tighter feedback loops, their anti-epistemologies are less developed, and all their practitioners have major skin in the game.

I think this is the right direction to go.

I think I find this plausible. An alternative to MichaelBowbly's take is that religion may crowd out other community organization efforts which could plausibly be better.

I'm thinking of unions, boys and girls clubs, community centers, active citizenship groups, meetup groups, and other types of groups that have never yet existed.

It could be that in practice introducing people to religious practices shows them examples of ways to organize their communities, but it could also be that religious community efforts are artificially propped up by government subsidies via being tax exempt.

The normative implication in this case, which I think is probably a good idea in general, is that you should focus on building intimate (not professionalized and distant) community groups to connect with people and exchange services.

One thing I struggle with in your post is the concept of religion. I don't see that you offer a clear definition of what you are getting at so I have to fill in a lot of area and then try to apply your thought to that and see if any conclusions follow. I'm failing miserably I think.

Adding, perhaps to clarify my own thinking on what is really driving my comment. The post seems to take a highly complex subject area that touches on a number of largely separate (separable?) aspects of life and invited discussion on all as if they are a rather simple subject area.

Perhaps an example to illustrate. If we consider religion as a social institution related to beliefs and faiths that cannot be empirically validated we get a good separation between religion and science. However we also know that religions historically have played a rather large role in scientific inquiry historically (though admittedly the reverse is true). Similarly, we can cast religion in a social structure of governance/government.  I don't think we can discuss religion at the level of the OP without clearly delineating which aspect of religion we're talking about.

I think more people being religious is good on the margin and basically don't think that religion is a signifiant  barrier to spread and advance of good ideas and practices.

I think your mistake is your crux not including the broader social benefits that religion brings. Religion is maybe the only, or at least one of very few, forces that can bring large numbers of different people from within a community together on a regular basis and, in Europe and probably the US this has enormous benefits. What research on happiness and well-being tell us is that, assuming you have your base material needs met, your social realations become the most important factor in your happiness. This I am very confident about.

 What I am less confident about but I think is still important is that having good institutions for working and middle class people to organise around has historically been very important for them achieving good politcal outcomes, and socially desirable outcomes in the form of inclusive economic instituions to use Acemoglu and Robinson's framework. I think the success of Christian democratic parties in building the social democractic state in Northern and Western Europe and their taking the place of the aristocratic conservative parties is an example of this being relevent in the context of high income democratic political economy. The other very prominant example is the importance of black churches in the African-American political movement.This is very important if you think that technology is endogenous to political and economic institutions. 

The other piece I am less confident about is that religion is in general a positive socialising force and a good way of making young men who would otherwise have poor life outcomes and cause social harm, to be turned into better citizens. Examples of this are the pretty robust evidence that students at Catholic Schools have better exam results, the success in intellectual fields of the European and American Jewry, and the importance of the Catholic Church in the rehabilitation of latin Americans involved gang crime. 

The other key part I disagree about is the degree to which religion stops people from adopting Good ideas and Good practices. My argument for this is that religion is a major force in very few peoples lives in rich democracies. Very few people are observant of the religion that they say that they belive in. Church attendances are very low in all Christian countries except the US, and even there it's quite low. I have much less evidence for this applying today, but historically individuals who've wanted to adopt ideas that their religion would seem to prohibit have been able to find ways of making it work. For the great Enlightenment thinkers of Laplace, Paine, Lagrange, Locke this was a belief in a God that existed but had no impact on Earth, for the Slave owners of the US South it was that God was fine with slavery, for the emerging middle classes of Europe in the long 19th century it was Calvinism, for Democratic polticians representing 2nd and 3rd genneration of  immigrants in the North East it was the switch from pro-life to pro-choice. 

The bit of your argument that I buy, is that it seems very plausible that a very smart Hindu devotes his life to the study of Sanskrit rather than something you and I would consider more useful (as Aymrata Sen nearly did), and there's a lower probability that Ben Shapiro is a conservative and potentially that more Americans belive in climate change. 

I've purposefully restcrited this to thinking about rich democracies because I think that's what your post was about. Hinduism in Indian is a different ball game and Islam in low income unstable countries again seems outside the scope of your post.