A comment to someone feeling awful (understandably) about the violence certain religions have perpetrated throughout history. In this comment, I also wanted to address some other comments that were trying to make a general attack on religion in the comment thread. Note that the conversation was nominally tied to discussion of Edelgard’s character in Fire Emblem Three Houses, which is why there are some tangential references to her. Knowledge of the character is not required. The main virtue of this writing, I think, is the last paragraph, which, if you don’t care to read the rest, I’d recommend you read at least that. Take care, stay safe y’all.

I would note Edelgard isn’t really anti-religion, so much as anti-Church of Seiros (and even then, not opposed to the Church per se but the Church as a purveyor of political and social corruption).

And to kindly point to some reasons to appreciate religion in the world, it’s important to understand how diverse religion is (both in terms of ideology and administration). A lot, not all, but a lot of moral learning and revolution and idealism has been religiously motivated, eg, Thoreau followed by MLK and Gandhi, a lot of antipoverty philosophy and advocacy (bringing up MLK again, imo the most important part of his legacy that has been forgotten was his antipoverty advocacy), how many philosophies at least started out as explicitly religious movements (humanism, human rights, for example) or important thinkers who were deeply religious (Locke, Newton, Mr Rogers, Confucius, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and Maria Gaetana Agnesi for some examples; Newton actually wrote more about theology than any other subject). Religious believers and institutions are just as diverse and complicated as everyone else and especially when religion is exploited to justify some evil, the first to decry it are often people within the religion, possibly from a different school of thought, sometimes from the very same school that’s causing the problems.

And to push back at another comment, while it is true that some religions are antiscience, they are hardly the standard (many such religions emerge from impoverished areas where government, medicine, and education have failed the people to such a degree that the ppl are likely to be antiscience whether or not they are religious). My own religion operates 3 universities-at a loss because of how heavily or subsidizes tuition-founded several more that have been integrated into the state education system, and whose leadership includes former educators, judges, doctors, and deans, and is headed by a heart surgeon/medical researcher. Even some of the most famous stories of antiscientific religion are exaggerated. For instance, Galileo’s feud with the Catholic Church is well-known, but people tend to be unaware that the Catholic Church sponsored and approved of Copernicus’ research into heliocentrism a generation earlier (as a non Catholic, my read of the Galilean feud is more that Galileo’s personality as a provocateur was the real issue).

Turning to the overall issue, there are a lot of people fighting to make the world a better place. There are different understandings of what that is, but remember that the reason we have cohesive societies, the reason things function at all, why we haven’t descended into anarchy or general warfare are people fighting to do what’s right. Good people don’t attract or demand attention the way people who cause damage do. A good person will spend hours intimately discussing and healing a wound that was formed by a bad person in seconds. And as fast as bad things happen, i would say less people are actually willing to do bad things; most of it is accidental or driven by stress and duress).

There’s a lot of power in seeking out people who are doing good and aligning yourself with them. In learning in such a fashion that your capacity to help expands the longer you live. Edelgard’s a particular person who was in the right place with the right talents to do a lot of good in her society. But as long as you make yourself a person who can help people, you’ll find yourself in such positions naturally. Not to reform a nation (I assume you’re not secretly in line to some throne haha), but to help people around you to hold on and give them a chance to see the beauty in life. An example of incredibly kind advocacy that hopefully can help a little (it always touches me): https://youtu.be/fKy7ljRr0AA