Is religion a benefit to society?

The recent election of Justin Trudeau has once again elicited a landslide of vitriolic tirades against our soon to be prime-minister. This aggressive anger at the man who as yet has no power to produce legislation is not strange. It seems this is the initiation that each new leader must face. What has been growing in popular discourse has been the way this anger has been justified against the impending threat that our new leader will have on religious values. This was certainly the case when Obama rose to power. At times these religiously infused rants are quite frankly silly and as such can easily be dismissed. In another way these comments seem to point to a dumbing-down of religious adherents. While I hold specific political views my questions here are not about whether anger towards the impending Trudeau is merited. Instead, it leads me to the broader question about whether religious communities have indeed reduced the intellectual capacity of adherents. If it has: is there something valuable in a less rational discourse on politics? Or do less rationally argued positions harm society?

I think it is clear how this opens up the broader question of the social benefit of religion generally. I suppose the landscape of questions around this topic could be riddled with notions of radicalization, political and global conflict. I don't think it would be good to avoid this space but I suppose I am more interested in the questions about human social development. 

Well there you go - what do you think? 

Welcome

In my experience, questions are dangerous. Today, it seems, questions occupy a peculiar space - am I right?

In some ways we seem to have less and less space for questions. We seem to be able to manufacture the influences that shape our ideology. In this place where our news feeds are organized to simply reiterate the views we already have, questions seem to take on the nature of attack. That means that we spend less time contending with questions - especially those that do challenge us to consider an opposing view.

In other ways questions seem to lose the power of inquisition. Colloquial use of questions as statements have blurred the role of questions in discourse. At times I wonder if all questions have become oddly rhetorical. Beyond that even some of the best questions seem to have lost their "carbonation". I wonder if that is due to our decreased attention span or some other nuanced factor. 

The objective of this blog is to build my own ability to ask and think about better questions. To that end I welcome your input or output - as long as it is respectful of an honest inquiry.

Just a heads up - I anticipate that the topic areas that we will explore will be related generally to religion and politics. As a former cleric and political junkie - I anticipate spending most of my energy on these topics. Now does anyone know how to generate readership?